Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash (9 page)

Fifty gallons a person is the equivalent of 160 billion 12-ounce soda cans, bottles and paper cups a year to be hauled to the curb.

N
EW PRODUCTS
and trends alone did not fuel the growing mounds of trash in postwar America. There was also the fading of old methods of garbage disposal. Another factor in this same era that boosted the trash flow, leaving sanitation officials in Los Angeles and many other communities scrambling for more dumps, was the demise of the garbage piggeries.

Until about 1960, piggeries still represented a major part of some cities’ waste disposal strategies, not to mention the pork-production industry. Garbage piggeries may have been around nearly as long as the Republic itself, but they came into their own during World War I, when Washington war planners suggested that feeding garbage to pigs would conserve food. A similar boost occurred during World War II, when this was one of the forms of conservation practiced as part of the war effort, along with Victory Gardens, rubber roundups and scrap-metal drives.

Good data is hard to find on just how common it was for cities and towns to feed their garbage to swine. Perhaps the most authoritative source on the subject was Willard H. Wright, chief of zoology for the National Institutes of Health and a prolific author and public health advocate. He estimated in 1943 that there were at minimum 1.25 million garbage-fed pigs in the U.S. Based on U.S. Department of Agriculture figures, Wright believed that figure to be “very conservative,” because it only counted hog farms that sent more than one hundred pigs to market ever year. There were, according to Wright, a “very large number of persons who market less than 100 garbage-fed hogs per year.”

Wright’s own survey of municipal garbage disposal methods found that 53 percent of cities with populations of ten thousand or more fed part or all of their garbage to swine. Wright didn’t survey smaller cities, but he asserted that the practice of feeding garbage to pigs was thought to be similarly pervasive in small-town America.

Los Angeles had a network of garbage feeding ranches to handle the edible portions of its waste in those days. By far the largest was Fontana Farms, fifty miles east of the city, which billed itself as the biggest hog farm in the world. Fontana at its height had a herd of sixty thousand pigs supplying a quarter of Southern California’s ham and bacon. Feed consisted of daily shipments of 400 to 600 tons of Los Angeles garbage.

Though the war brought a resurgence in piggeries’ popularity as a means of keeping heavy, rotting, vermin-attracting organic waste out of town dumps, that popularity did not extend to the use of garbage-fed pigs as human food. First there was the taste. Garbage-fed pigs, according to Wright, were poor in quality compared to conventionally fed porkers. “Garbage produces a soft oily pork,” he wrote. “Cured pork and lard from such hogs are inferior in quality to that obtained from grain fed hogs … Most meat packers buy garbage fed hogs only at a discount.” Wright also found that the “fattening value” of garbage had declined over the years, making it less attractive financially for farmers to adopt a trash diet for their swine: A ton of Los Angeles garbage in the 1930s could generate sixty-eight pounds of pork; ten years later, the slop put only thirty-one pounds on the hogs.

After the war, Wright advocated against the practice of feeding pigs raw garbage, gathering evidence that showed the meat from garbage-fed pigs was associated with higher human infection rates of the potentially deadly parasitic disease trichinosis. Garbage feed also was linked to several epidemics of vesicular exanthema, a fatal infection in swine similar to the bovine ailment known as hoof-and-mouth disease. As a result, by 1960, most states required the garbage fed to pigs to be cooked first to sterilize it. This proved so inconvenient and expensive that the use of piggeries as landfill alternatives quickly fell from favor. In the old days, Los Angeles was paid by pig farmers for its garbage. By the end, the city was paying the piggeries to take the slop, but it still wasn’t enough, and they all but vanished nationwide by 1970.

Two trash-related inventions further contributed to this era’s rising dependence on landfills: the compacting trash truck, and the green-plastic trash bag, introduced to consumers in 1960 by Union Carbide. In the past, open trash cans and uncompacted loads of garbage were easily picked over by scavengers, who made a living scoping out trash and pulling out recyclables and other reusable materials. Scavenging had long been considered an honorable vocation, one that provided economic opportunities for newly arrived immigrants in the U.S. in particular; the trash business in San Francisco, for example, was dominated in the early decades of the twentieth century by Italian immigrants who formed a network incorporated as the Scavengers Protective Association. The advent of dark green, opaque polyethylene trash bags, billed as a convenience, and garbage trucks that ground and crushed the trash into compacted masses for ease of disposal, had the unintended consequence of making scavenging far more difficult. No more lifting up the lid for a quick assessment of a trash can’s contents—the bags hid everything. And once on the truck, everything was mixed and mashed, something that had not occurred with old-style wagons and open-bed trucks. Consequently, more material than ever ended up in the landfill instead of back in the manufacturing chain. Recyclables and food waste were hard to separate out. And the plastic bags themselves added to the waste stream as well.

The final factor driving the rise of more landfilling was the fall from favor of industrial-scale incinerators. Unlike the backyard burners, they had not been banned in many areas and there were quite a few still in use at that time, providing an alternative to landfills. But two new federal laws hastened their closure: the Solid Waste Disposal Act of 1965, and the Clean Air Act of 1970. The old incinerators were too polluting to pass muster under the new regulations, while upgrading them to cleaner technologies was often prohibitively expensive. It seemed for a time that waste-to-energy plants would provide the next and best garbage disposal solutions, but it was not to be. Only the New England states—the U.S. region with the least amount of land available for new landfills—clung to incineration as a major solution, making a substantial push toward converting trash to fuel rather than fill. But even there, landfills remained dominant. The rest of the country turned to burial rather than cremation, and the age of the modern landfill began in full force.

F
ACING FAR
more garbage than in the past, coupled with considerably fewer options for disposing of it, sanitation officials across the country began hunting for more landfill space to accommodate what was predicted to be a tidal wave of trash. In Los Angeles, a property in the Valley of the Dumps caught the attention of county sanitation engineers: a large and, at the time, well-known family dairy farm that had been operated for generations by the heirs of one of L.A.’s early land barons.

The Pellissier family’s patriarch, Germain, had immigrated from France eighty years earlier, investing in sheep, cows and real estate. The land came cheap back then but would be worth a fortune for future generations of Pellissiers, particularly a rocky stretch on the edge of the city. This would eventually become the Miracle Mile portion of Wilshire Boulevard, in its mid-twentieth-century heyday nicknamed “the Fifth Avenue of the West.” The Pellissier name became part of the fabric of burgeoning Los Angeles, plastered on streets and buildings, the family money behind such landmarks as the historic art deco Wiltern Theater. Their dairy ranch remained an L.A. institution for decades (their Hazel the Cow, record-breaking milk producer, achieved minor local fame). The dairy farm finally shut down in the early seventies, as the value of the land had grown too great to consign to Holsteins in an era of seemingly insatiable demand for suburban houses and shopping centers—and dumps. In 1971, the county sanitation district bought a large portion of the Pellissiers’ land along with the private dump that had been leasing space there. The county continued running the old dump as a small way station for garbage, while laying plans for an entirely new future for the place as the Puente Hills Landfill, the first big and thoroughly modern landfill in the region, with the new sanitation headquarters building built at its base.

Back then, three peaks dominated the property, part of the Puente Hills range on the southern border of the San Gabriel Valley. Canyons divided the hills and had been used for grazing the dairy cows. Residents in nearby Hacienda Heights could hear the cows coming home every day, a taste of country life in America’s second-biggest cityscape. But the peaks were high enough to pose an aviation hazard for L.A.’s increasingly busy skies. In 1952, a North Continent Airlines twin-engine Curtiss flying from New York to Burbank was diverted because of fog, and while approaching its alternative landing site, Los Angeles International Airport, it dipped ten feet too low. Its landing gear struck the fog-shrouded peak. The plane crashed and exploded, killing all twenty-nine passengers and crew members aboard.

A year later, the first landing of invaders from Mars took place in those same hills—in the 1953 film adaptation of the H. G. Wells classic
The
War of the Worlds
.

Cold War fears of a more earthbound invasion were soon added to the mix of bucolic pasture and suburban foothill: In 1956, the tallest of the three hills overlooking Los Angeles was chosen by the Defense Department as a strategic high point for a new Nike missile installation, America’s first missile defense program. Batteries of radar-guided missiles designed to shoot down Soviet Union bombers flying as high as fifty thousand feet were positioned on the hilltop in the fifties and sixties. Similar outposts were set up across the country, continually upgraded to match faster and higher bombers. The Nikes were all decommissioned by the mid-seventies once the main threat of nuclear attack shifted from manned aircraft to much faster and more numerous automated nuclear missiles. Today the launch silos are covered over by a community college campus. The radar station at the high point has been repurposed as an aviation radar relay accompanied by a conglomeration of cell phone towers. Only a narrow wooden guard shack remains of the old Nike outpost to mark the spot, sporting a small memorial plaque.

But this former missile site no longer stands tall above a deep canyon. The Puente Hills landfill has filled in the spaces between the three hills, absorbing them into the larger footprint of a single mound of trash. The old high point that a missile launch complex once occupied, defending Los Angles from above, is just a small bump on the big, broad plateau of Garbage Mountain.

That was not the original plan, never the bold vision—the landfill was supposed to be a minor part of a much bigger effort to remake America’s waste future while also weaning the country from foreign oil dependence.

This is, it turns out, a familiar theme in the history of trash—massive landfills as unintended consequence. Fresh Kills, which previously held the title of world’s largest active landfill, was originally presented to the public in 1947 as a brief, temporary solution to New York’s trash woes while new waste-to-energy plants were constructed. The plants did not come, and Fresh Kills continued operating until 2003. A decade later, the slow conversion of its polluted landscape into parkland is still under way. Philadelphia’s leaders likewise believed they could eliminate the city’s garbage with waste-to-energy plants, but a homeless, wandering barge of toxic ash from Philadelphia became an international pariah and scandal that killed that city’s vision, too.

Puente Hills, destined to become America’s biggest active landfill, has turned out to be as much cautionary tale as it is engineering achievement. It demonstrates once again how so many components of the modern waste-management system began as little more than a backup plan, an accident. The 102-ton legacy and the landfills that now constrain it are, bottom line, the unintended consequence of Lippincott’s magical economy of abundance, superimposed on the American Dream by brilliant marketing capable of persuading us to accept the patently unsustainable as common sense.

4

THE LAST AND FUTURE KINGDOM

D
AVID
S
TEINER LOVES LANDFILLS.
H
E IS POSITIVELY
poetic on the subject. “Landfills are amazing resources,” he says. “They’re not just holes filled with trash. They’re not the problem. They’re part of the solution.”

Okay, yes, he kind of has to say that. He is, after all, CEO of the world’s largest trash company, possessed of 22 million customers, fifty thousand employees, 273 active landfills, $12 billion in revenues and the most literal name in the garbage business: Waste Management, Inc. He is America’s king of trash. For him, trash is money, and buried trash really is buried treasure, and that’s the way he wants it to stay. When a consultant he hired a few years ago to help chart a future course for the business suggested times were changing, and maybe the company needed to start redefining itself not as a master of waste but as Materials Management, Inc., Steiner dismissed the notion as rank heresy. “There will always be waste,” he said confidently. “And we’ll always need landfills. That’s the core of our business.”

A few short years later the idea still makes him emit a reflexive, nervous laugh. But he concedes that the consultant was on to something after all, now that trash is no longer a growth business, now that these pesky green cities all over the map keep talking about “zero waste.” Some of his best customers, from the city of San Francisco to the mighty retailer Walmart, are clamoring to “recapture the value” of trash and “close the loop” on manufacturing and waste. These are code words for radically curtailing waste and, where that’s not possible, holding on to trash as a valuable resource rather than burying it in Steiner’s landfills. There is a growing sentiment that the future of waste just might mean a future freed from waste.

“Someday we might pay customers for their trash, rather than the other way around,” Steiner allows, reflecting on an everybody-wins future in which trash companies pay a bit for garbage as raw material, then make a fortune turning it into the building blocks of the consumer economy. “We’re not there yet, but it could happen. A few years ago, you’d never hear me say that.”

If trash really
is
treasure, the king of trash’s big challenge now is to figure out how to make this garbage-to-materials makeover work for his company, rather than bury it.

The irony behind this vision of sea change is that, a quarter century ago, it was Waste Management and its aggressive push to privatize the nation’s trash heaps that helped diffuse earlier attempts to move away from landfills and toward more sustainable choices. Momentum that had been gathering in the seventies and eighties for alternatives to burying the 102-ton legacy all but died then, which meant that profitable and increasingly privatized landfills remained the default choice for America’s trash strategy. Although Waste Management had no direct hand in determining the fate of such publicly operated locations as Puente Hills, the company’s success at keeping landfills center stage made the Garbage Mountain of Los Angeles all but inevitable. A shortage of suitable landfills had driven interest in alternatives, including serious discussions dating back to the seventies, of government mandates for new designs of products and packaging to reduce waste. One 1972 EPA report, entitled “Mission 5000,” took both government and the private sector to task for applying the world’s best technology to creating “an abundance of consumer goods” while failing to close the loop and reclaim the materials in those goods for new products once the old ones wore out.

“We failed to apply either modern technology or modern management to the ultimate disposition of this abundance … In the last few years, Americans have begun to recognize the enormity of the problems posed by our reckless generation and careless disposal of solid wastes. Now, at last, we are beginning to grapple with the difficult, long-range problems.”
¹

The report predicted not an end to landfills, but a greater emphasis on extracting value from materials before they ended up buried in garbage mountains as both an environmental and an economic boon. Four decades later, we’re still talking about doing that, rather than getting it done. One reason: The glut of landfill space Waste Management helped create in the last decades of the twentieth century shifted market forces back toward landfilling. Landfilling was comparatively cheap and easy, while switching to the close-the-loop system the EPA recommended so long ago would be risky and difficult, and involve unknown conversion costs. That’s why the transformation Steiner is now contemplating remains a distant possibility—although, to his credit, it is at least a subject of discussion again. For many years, it was out of the question.

Waste Management, Inc., was a very different company before Steiner took the throne. It went from a mom-and-pop operation in Chicago to the fastest-growing and hottest investment prospect in the country, only to have scandal morph it into the Enron of trash (before there was an Enron), and it almost went belly-up. Now reborn, it’s trying to achieve something that would once have been unimaginable: striking a balance between its lucrative landfill business and a new mandate from Steiner to go green.

The biggest garbage company in the world started with a Dutch immigrant named Harm Huizenga, who came to Chicago in 1893 during the busy—and trashy—time of the Chicago World’s Fair. (What is it with epic developments in the history of trash and world’s fairs?) Huizenga started hauling trash for $1.25 a wagonload. He gradually built a successful family business, Ace Scavenger Service, serving Chicago and its suburbs. In 1956, the company had fifteen trucks and revenues of $750,000 a year. When the head of the company—Harm’s son, Tom Huizenga—died, management duties passed to Tom’s son-in-law, Dean Buntrock, who began aggressively expanding the business by buying up other small trash haulers. Trouble started almost immediately, as the company’s tough tactics led to lawsuits and claims by the Wisconsin attorney general that Ace was threatening to destroy competitors’ trucks and harm family members unless they made room for Ace’s expansion. The Milwaukee courts imposed an injunction against the company for eight years.

But Buntrock, who was only twenty-four when he took over the business, was unfazed. He kept snapping up more companies, and in 1968 he merged Ace with another aggressively expanding garbage outfit based in Pompano Beach, Florida, Southern Sanitation Service. This scrappy garbage company was run by his father-in-law’s nephew, H. Wayne Huizenga, who would go on to make billions from building Blockbuster Video, Auto Nation and other business ventures. In 1971, the two men formed their companies into Waste Management, Inc., with $5.5 million in annual revenue. Buntrock was CEO and Huizenga was president. They took the company public and used the proceeds to buy ninety other garbage companies in nine months, rolling them into a rapidly growing WMI. The two budding trash magnates were banking (correctly) that new federal rules on garbage, landfills and the environment would create massive opportunities for large trash companies with expertise and resources that could take over landfills and collection for cash-strapped cities. WMI’s rapid expansion continued into toxic and hazardous wastes, trash-to-energy plants, recycling centers and international sanitation contracts with Saudi Arabia, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, Caracas, Brisbane, Australia, and several cities in Europe. By the mid-eighties (when Huizenga retired from the company), revenue reached $2 billion; by the mid-nineties, it topped $10 billion, and WMI had become the undisputed waste and landfill leader of the world, the biggest trash company in history.

But during that time of rapid expansion, Waste Management was also accused of illegal toxic dumping, cited for violations in seven states, and was peppered with accusations of influence peddling and destroying evidence. The company paid out over $20 million in fines for environmental violations, plus a $30 million settlement for hazardous waste dumping in three states, followed by a $91 million judgment for a fraudulent landfill purchase in Alabama. A 1991 Greenpeace report said of WMI: “To create an empire, the company has mixed business acumen and foresight with strong doses of deception, corruption, and monopolism.” The San Diego district attorney issued its own report after WMI courted the city’s business, finding that the trash company had a history of environmental problems, bribery and death threats. And in 1998, the company was nearly destroyed by one of the nation’s biggest accounting scandals ever, when Securities and Exchange Commission regulators indicted four top company officers, including Buntrock, for massive fraud and insider trading. The four eventually settled the charges for $25 million, most of which was paid by WMI, and without admitting guilt.

The scandal devastated the company, its stock value dropped $25 billion, and a smaller company, USA Waste Services, swept in and bought the crippled trash giant, though it retained the better-known WMI name. This was neither a smooth nor a successful transition; the company went through five CEOs in four years. Steiner joined the company as general counsel in 2001 under a new regime that set out to clean up the chaos left behind by the founders and the buyout.

By the time Steiner took over as CEO in 2004, the company’s reputation as a polluting, shady outlaw had been transformed, as the rampant environmental and safety violations of the old regime faded. And under Steiner’s reign, WMI has begun to refashion itself as the new darling of the sustainability movement, with more than one hundred power plants converting landfill gas to electricity—enough to power 1.1 million homes. That’s more output than the entire U.S. solar industry in 2011. WMI also has fielded one thousand clean garbage trucks that use landfill gas as fuel.

But those green technologies, beneficial as they are, don’t dispense with landfills—they rely on them. So they fit nicely inside WMI and Steiner’s wheelhouse. Things would get much dicier for Waste Management if the country made a serious shift away from managing waste and toward managing materials in some way that didn’t involve building garbage mountains with it. The most valuable thing Waste Management’s old leaders amassed wasn’t the fleets of trucks or the city contracts to pick up trash from the curb. It was the real estate—those 273 landfills, which can accommodate nearly 5 billion tons of future trash before they’re full. Waste Management currently is on track to bury 120 million tons of trash a year in those landfills, so there’s plenty of room for the future, which investors love, because that trash real estate will generate $1.3 billion in revenue just from letting people dump their garbage there.

So if landfills are the heart of the company’s business, how can Steiner shift that? How can the CEO of WMI say burying trash in a landfill is a big waste, that we ought to be doing something better with that material? How could he replace a business model as obsolete when that was his company’s entire business model? His question is one being repeated throughout the waste industry, just as it has been for decades. A less wasteful future in part will require successful, profitable companies such as WMI to cannibalize their own businesses, something few CEOs are willing to contemplate, much less undertake.

So Steiner is hedging his bets, gambling on evolution more than revolution. He has shifted his investment strategy from acquiring ever more landfill space to also buying up small companies that are developing new technologies and techniques for extracting valuable chemicals, minerals and products from trash. The goal is to make recycling more effective and profitable. Just finding more efficient ways to sort and separate recyclables that currently get landfilled would be a huge breakthrough for both the environment and the company’s bottom line. This may not sound all that radical, except this strategy, if it works, could make a majority of landfills obsolete over time. And remember, David Steiner really does love landfills. But he also loves the potential $10 billion in new revenues WMI could earn if it could capture the true value of the materials locked inside the trash his company collects and buries every year.

Steiner is one of the nice guys of the big-business world, a plain-talking country lawyer in his demeanor, who jokes that when he was (unexpectedly, he claims) handed the CEO job, he felt like going to the bookstore to see if someone had written
CEO-ing for Dummies
. His balancing act has turned into one of the trickiest high-wire performances in the business world, but the payoffs could be huge. Two of the companies now in the WMI stable are working on new processes that could turn trash into a gasoline substitute for cars and trucks far more efficiently and cheaply than existing methods of converting garbage to fuel. Assuming the new methods can be done on a large scale, it’s possible that WMI could pull more than $200 worth of synthetic gasoline from a ton of trash.

Steiner believes that would be a game changer for waste management. Or, he jokes, would it then be materials management? Of course, even if the fuel conversion succeeds wildly, there’s still not enough trash in the country to make the U.S. energy independent. “I see it as creating lemonade from lemons,” Steiner says.

For now, the big money remains invested in landfills, if for no other reason than the lessons of garbage history, which suggest that betting on trash revolutions doesn’t pay. Just ask the visionaries at Puente Hills, who are still smarting from their attempt three decades ago to reinvent Americans’ relationship with their garbage.

I
N 1983,
the trash agency known as the Los Angeles Sanitation Districts applied for permits under the California Environmental Quality Act to expand its small trash heap in the Valley of the Dumps into a modern waste and energy facility. It was envisioned as a new type of garbage solution that would combine a network of high-tech power plants to convert the daily flow of garbage into electricity with a sorting and recycling center and a landfill to contain what was left over once the reclamation and generation was done. The landfill was supposed to be the least of it—a hill, not a mountain. Similar plans were being considered throughout the country at the time. Had they moved forward, they would have transformed the business of trash in America, making management of materials rather than trash burial the main purpose. Public landfills like Puente Hills and private enterprises such as Waste Management would have evolved in a completely different way. Our trash—and the path to our current 102-ton legacy—would have taken a different direction as well. But it was not to be.