W.L. Rathje

This commentary is totally biased. It is biased against the commonly held belief that municipal garbage is "yucky" and "disgusting gunk" - most of it, after all, is stuff we brought into our homes - and that reducing it, recycling it, and safely disposing of what's leftover should not be discussed in polite society. Just the opposite, this commentary is biased toward publicly honoring the people who devote their lives to retrieving vast quantities of useful resources from garbage and safely managing the rest . . . and even honoring the messages about where our society is headed that are in the garbage itself that we throw away.

Shocking biases? No. In our day and age my attitudes are totally PC. It is only shocking that they don't seem to be shared by many of those on the outside of solid waste management who make the final decisions about garbage and its disposition as well as those who communicate such decisions to the public. I will give you two examples.

I was grandly pleased on August 27, 2001, when Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton, following a lengthy review (that began under the Clinton administration) conducted by the National Park Service, named Fresno (CA) Sanitary Landfill a National Historic Landmark. I beamed with pride for garbage people everywhere. It was about time, since this prototype of sanitary landfill operations nationwide and worldwide was initiated in 1937!

You might read that the first sanitary landfill opened in England. Wrong. As the nomination papers document, the first working sanitary landfill was opened in the real world of Fresno by Jean Vincenz, a man with vision–a vision tempered and sustained by his travels throughout the US to learn from what others tried that worked and what they tried that didn't. It wasn't rocket science, but it was extremely creative for its day–with carefully structured draglines to position refuse, techniques to compact the refuse, and at the end of the day the same draglines to spread soil as daily cover that had been dug out to make room for the next day's refuse. This was Vincenz's "sanitary landfill" system, created at the same time that virtually all of the rest of the country and the world were feeding the fires and rats in open dumps or unleashing a black rain of cinders, soot, and ash from the chimneys of refuse-burning facilities appropriately called destructors.

I was then unspeakably horrified when Secretary Norton "temporarily" rescinded her designation of the Fresno landfill the next day. At least Secretary Norton, on the advice of the deputy director of the Park Service, used rational (though inappropriate) grounds by stating that the landfill was on the dreaded list of Superfund landfills. The media, on the other hand, weighed in with unusual (even for them) refuse bigotry by intimating or outright saying that a garbage dump was a joke as a National Historic Landmark.

That is one of the most bizarre statements I have ever seen in the press. Who cries out the loudest in self-righteous indignation when landfills aren't sanitary? Where is US society supposed to find bright, hard-working applicants for garbage disposal jobs that get no respect?

But what about the Superfund designation? At least from the '50s through the '60s, petroleum products and solvents, battery acid, and–with the approval of the County Health Department–wastes from convalescent homes and the Fresno Dialysis Center were regularly deposited at Fresno Sanitary Landfill. These contaminants are strictly prohibited from today's landfills, but let the midcentury landfill that didn't regularly accept such now-illicit discards cast the first can of used motor oil.

Certainly Fresno Sanitary Landfill wasn't perfect. But do our historic monuments have to be flawless? The designation as National Historic Landmarks of "poor houses" (where debtors were incarcerated), Alcatraz and other prisons, and World War II internment camps for Japanese-Americans would suggest not. Each of these monuments, however, does provide a unique, close-up perspective on our nation's key coping strategies as we forged history.

In our past, just as today, garbage disposal was an all-pervasive activity that affected not many communities, not most communities, but absolutely every community! Our garbage heritage is one to remember. Our forefathers' and foremothers' garbage habits evolved from burying their wastes in pits in the yard and/or throwing them willy-nilly into the streets to today's systematic weekly refuse pickups, usually partnered with curbside collection of recyclables and various means to separately manage household hazardous wastes. Fresno Sanitary Landfill was a critical catalyst in this almost-180º transformation. According to a recent EPA report, in 1937 Fresno Sanitary Landfill "was a substantial improvement over the accepted methods of sanitary waste disposal at the time and a model for other landfills around the country." (Note: In 1940 there was not even a handful of such landfills. Then in World War II, the US military adopted the sanitary landfill format, and by the end of 1945, 100 cities had adopted it as well.)

But let's not forget the place on the Superfund list that Fresno Sanitary Landfill earned in 1989 through Fresno officials' own self-confessions. Fresno officials recently noted that the Superfund remediation process is virtually complete. The landmark will soon play host to a 115-ac. sports and recreation complex that includes soccer fields, a baseball diamond, and plenty of green space. How many other Superfund sites have been reintegrated into acceptable society? In my opinion, for the completion of the successful remediation process alone, Fresno Sanitary Landfill deserves National Historic Landmark recognition.

The second example of landfill despisal is at the other end of the country. Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island accepted New York City's discards from 1948 until it was closed in March 2001. To plan the future of this 2,000-ac.-plus refuse behemoth, the City of New York held a competition open to design teams around the world. Currently, in the last phases of the selection process, three teams are still standing. The team ranked number one at this stage proposes to turn the landfill into a nature preserve. The team ranked second plans three biospheres. The team ranked third will morph the landfill into Re-Park (as in Re-duce, Re-use, and Re-cycle).

I am a part of the Re-Park team, and I want to tell you why.

Fresh Kills is the largest landfill in the world. To the rest of the globe, Fresh Kills's nearly 2.6 billion ft.³ of refuse is also the most obvious symbol of America's wasteful habits.

I don't believe that we should try to sweep Fresh Kills under a "natural" rug. With the vast majority of the landfill under 30-80 ft. or more of refuse, it can never be returned to Mother Nature's bosom. What is the "natural" ecology of a closed landfill? Who are the "natural" denizens of a monster plateau built of trash?

Biospheres? Has no one read of the myriad and largely still-unresolved problems with the huge and well-funded biosphere that has languished just outside Tucson, AZ, for more than a decade? Planning the endgame afterlife of the Mother of All Landfills is enough of an experiment in itself.

I would much prefer Re-Park. That would turn the world's largest symbol of New York's and America's wastefulness into the world's largest symbol of New York's and America's new environmental ethic of reducing, reusing, and recycling waste. At the same time, it would honor the thousands of refuse workers who labored mightily to dispose of the Big Apple's rejectamenta.

At Re-Park, facilities would be constructed from recycled materials (such as picnic tables made from soda bottles and walkways made from glassphalt). To make people aware of what materials are under their feet, there would be a "refuse" walking tour that would visit the 14 wells the Garbage Project dug into the landfill and inform them of what the currently available reuse and recycling schemes could do to reduce the same materials if they were discarded today. There would be a special area for garbage rodeos (featuring colorful competitions in the artful use of dozers, compactors, scrapers, and other wondrous tools of the garbage trade) and one for a variety of extreme sports. The side of the landfill that currently abuts local businesses would sprout entrepreneurial enterprises of its own–restaurants, souvenir shops, and retail outlets for the growing cornucopia of products made from recycled refuse. There would be a garbage museum where, besides viewing the history of Fresh Kills and New York City's garbage, kids could play garbage-oriented video games and interact hands-on with the latest information on reuse and recycling and ways to measure environmental contamination. Elsewhere there would be permanent displays as well as a series of shows and competitions featuring garbage art, a form of expression whose bizarre materials and sense of humor have clearly established a following today among the haute couture and among those whose couture is not so haute. What survived of the Fresh Kills tidal marsh would be returned with human help to something close to its "natural" state.

Power for Re-Park would be produced by alternative energy schemes, including windmills, solar panels, the landfill's methane, and even wild grasses on the tops of the garbage mounds that would be mowed and converted in combination with the landfill gas. Best of all, with the proper design and appropriate business sponsorships, Re-Park might even become self-supporting. And the remains of the World Trade Center would be covered over and planted with one specially selected tree for each of the victims to establish a sacred and serene area of remembrance.

But Fresh Kills might never be Re-Park, and Fresno Sanitary Landfill languishes in landmark limbo. What have these refuse disposal sites done to make themselves outcasts hidden from sight instead of being honored as crucial players in America's solid waste management heritage?

In the brouhaha over the Fresno Sanitary Landfill, Martin Melosi, the official historian of the American Public Works Association and author of the nomination of the site as a landmark, observed that the controversy exposed the inability of many people to view the waste issue "as an integral part of the process of living, and thus to view it as culturally and historically important." Melosi certainly has correctly described our collective attitude as a nation. That attitude, I believe, results in an incredible irony.

Shortly after the torrent of media ridicule erupted, National Park Service Spokesperson David Barna noted, "The Romans would laugh if they knew that their aqueducts, which just carried water, were a part of their civilization that is most prized today." He's right, of course, but why didn't he mention the Roman's sophisticated indoor plumbing? It is not totally unreasonable to believe that he didn't because Barna might have been embarrassed to mention a system that carried away human wastes.

The irony for Americans is that we are so good at disposing of our solid wastes for the same reason we don't want to recognize that we even have solid wastes: They embarrass us. That's the same reason why we never congratulate ourselves for creating the best indoor plumbing systems in the world. If we patted ourselves on the back for our landfills and our toilets, we would have to publicly own up to our wastes. The problem is that, if nothing else, Americans are idealists, and our wastes aren't part of our pristine American Dream houses, shiny SUVs, manicured yards, and highest-tech entertainment centers. That's why we're so good at hiding our wastes and their facilities from sight!

Now, however uncomfortable it might make us, it is time to publicly recognize our discards, because until we do that, we will have neither the motivation nor the inclination to decrease those embarrassing wastes. As a first step, let's honor landfills as landfills!

Archeologist W.L. Rathje is founder and director of the Garbage Project.