W.L. Rathje

By W.L. Rathje

Whenever someone who is not a garbage professional writes a book on garbage, that person has got my complete attention. Reading about what they think is going on provides an interesting glimpse into the general public’s view of garbage.

Garbage Land, by Elizabeth Royte (Little, Brown and Co., 2005), is an example par excellence. Royte’s previous book was The Tapir’s Morning Bath: Solving the Mysteries of the Tropical Rain Forest.

The concept of the book is straightforward. Royte follows her garbage along various pathways to disposal and recycling. The writing is clear, and I especially enjoyed her description of an outing to a paper recycling mill. But what I really found fascinating was the underlying attitudes about refuse and disposal that coursed through the pages.

First and foremost on the list of what most of the public doesn’t understand about garbage is the concept of the “waste stream,” and Royte is clearly an exemplar. She writes, “There was something else I noticed, too. The plastic sack with which I’d just lined my trash can was no longer empty. I’d turned my back for five minutes, and already the waste was accumulating. Was there no relief? Did the flow ever stop? I wondered if sanitation workers ever felt a sense of futility. They cleaned one street after another after another, until the district was officially clean. But no sooner were the bins tipped than they immediately began to fill. Emptiness—cleanliness—was a condition so brief as to be nearly undetectable.”

Hey, here’s a news flash: that’s why it’s called a “waste stream,” because it keeps on rollin’ along no matter what; for two million years it has been part of the human condition. Obviously, Royte doesn’t understand that a garbage person’s job is not to end waste altogether, but, instead, to keep the waste flowing to appropriate places of reuse, recycling, or disposal. As she mentions frequently, “Zero Waste” appeals to her. As she also notes, “Zero Waste” isn’t exactly on the horizon.

Royte also doesn’t seem to understand the relationship between garbage and politics. When New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg suspended glass and plastic recycling, she lamented, “My project had barely begun and already it was complicated by politics.” Is there any garbage issue that isn’t?

The gaffes in garbage knowledge are, of course, understandable: that the earliest form of household recycling occurred “a century and a half ago.” True, the first humans millions of years ago may not have been rocket scientists, but “recycling” (reshaping a broken or dulled tool into a new tool with a whole different function) began as soon as a tool was broken or dulled beyond further use in its specific context. Actually, for those first hominids, such behavior was probably a breakthrough comparable to rocket science.

According to Royte, the air at Fresh Kills landfill “smelled lightly of methane,” which, as far as I know, is odorless. Also according to Royte, “unlined dumps leak evenly.” Then all the experts on leachate I’ve talked to are wrong about fissures and lenses within buried refuse and other especially slow or fast tracks to fluid runoff within the great diversity of materials that end up residing in landfills.

She notes that “over the past couple of years [meaning early ’90s], Diggins said as he pulled over to let a dump truck pass, engineers at Fresh Kills had installed perforated pipes in the garbage mounds that sucked landfill gas into a boxy-looking plant near the West Shore Expressway.” Before that, Royte claims, “Fresh Kills emitted more than fifteen billion cubic feet of greenhouse and carcinogenic gases a year—almost 2 percent of all the world’s methane, according to the EPA.” Interesting, since in the late 1970s Fresh Kills became the first landfill to extract methane gas to be cleaned and used as an energy source.

And worst for me, she claims that archaeologists have found that in ancient times people sometimes “left detritus on the floors of their houses, then covered the layer with dirt.” Maybe discards from the day before destruction of an old house and the building of a new one on top of it, but no archaeologists I know of believe that people lived with their garbage on their floors.

Throughout the book, there is also a big axe-grinding against waste companies and their management.

Royte writes of “the secrecy of waste managers—which was surely based on an aversion to accountability.” Thus, she “was left to imagine the worst: that the [I—Rathje—won’t mention it’s name] landfill was casually strewing the waterways and roadways with litter, or commingling municipal solid waste with leaking barrels of hazardous chemicals...”

Moreover, she “imagined that like many in the trash business, he was a guy whose career had probably started out promisingly enough in another field but had then taken a sudden turn and rolled downhill.” What does that imply about all of us in waste management? Whoa!

On interstate refuse transportation: “Dump owners adopted a ‘smoke ‘em if you got ‘em’ attitude, working to fill their sites as quickly as possible—before federal regulations could curtail interstate trade in garbage, before recycling could claim an even larger percentage of the waste stream, before environmental regulations tightened up and raised their cost of operations.” You’ve got to make a living, but most of the people I know in the business are also concerned about the environment and doing what they can to preserve it for their kids and grandkids.

Royte notes that in the present day “gleaners and scavengers, who’d once performed a useful public function, were no longer welcome” at landfills. She seems oblivious to the liability and the lawsuit mentality that has engulfed America.

On a further note, as part of her “project,” Royte sorted her refuse garbage project-style (although not in as much detail or with the same precision). “Every few days, I dumped my kitchen trash onto my daughter’s blue plastic toboggan, squatted next to it on the floor, and weighed its components on a kitchen scale that, afterward, I barely managed to wipe, let alone ‘sanitize.’ The process felt primitive, Luddite even [believe me, it was—Rathje], and I liked that,” says Royte.

Here’s an interesting irony that Royte missed as she stressed her enthusiasm for recycling throughout the book: “Why do garbage trucks have such a heavy impact [in discharging pollutants]? Because they cover twice as many miles per year as the typical heavy-duty single-unit truck.” Stopping the separate pickup of recyclables would very significantly cut the miles garbage trucks travel. Yes, Ms. Royte, pollution is a part of recycling.

Royte concludes on something of a down note by citing statistics that our personal garbage is infinitesimal compared to industrial wastes, like 32 to 50 to one. What does Royte advise? She says, “so I continued recycling and watching what I bought. It was something I could manage.” But she adds, “a rising tide of fed-up consumers might be able to chip away at the treadmill of production, demand that our government address the disparity between producer and consumer wastes, and offer manufacturers an incentive to produce efficient, reusable products and packaging, but on my own I felt helpless to do anything about the 98 percent [waste of resource extraction and production].”

Hey, with this kind of attitude toward waste reduction, whaddaya expect?

Garbage Land ... garbage bland.

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

MSW - January/February 2006