any donations to the landfill?

Flying home from Seattle to San Francisco on Sunday, I was asked by a jocular flight attendant if I would like to make a donation to the landfill. Yes, indeed. I did. I had an empty aluminum can I really didn’t mean to take off the plane with me, just so I could put it with the recyclables.

Cute woolly goats, stuck at SFO as a badge of green

It did make me ask what exactly happens to airline trash. As always, it’s thoroughly fascinating. To start with, SFO is proudly green. (To show us how intensely green, the airport keeps—or used to keep—a flock of goats on a strip of wetland at the very edge of the complex. Poor bastards.)  More seriously, the facilities are sustainable.  There are 50,000 square feet of solar panels on Terminal 3. And the airport diverted 55% of waste collected at the terminals from the landfill and 90% of construction debris in 2008. Everything is collected in a single stream and recyclables are pulled out off-site. A food waste composting program serves the various restaurants.

I suffered a momentary thrill thinking maybe my aluminum can was not destined for landfill after all. But it’s not that simple. The in-flight debris is none of the airport’s business. The airlines or the catering businesses that serve them are in charge of all waste coming off the planes.  And it’s the US Department of Agriculture which sets the rules for its handling.

Not quite as cute as the goats

Garbage from domestic flights may be landfilled and apparently also recycled. And, it turns out that United has a recycling program from aluminum cans and plastic cups arriving in Hawaii on domestic flights as of this writing and that it is looking into extending the program to San Francisco and LA. In other words, my hapless seltzer can came along just a little too early to be rescued for another go-round through the wringer of life.

Garbage from international flights meanwhile must be a) incinerated and reduced to .3-percent of the original volume, b) sterilized in an autoclave at 270 degrees F for 45 minutes, or c) shipped back to the country of origin. The idea is to “prevent the infiltration of foreign pests and disease.”

I wonder if anybody at the USDA worries about the pests and diseases we might be exporting to the developing world.

bad things happen to good garbage

When they started digging for the landfill I said to Sherm, “Ain’t that where we used to went skating?” “Still do,” said Sherm. “You ever seen them dig a landfill except where there’s groundwater?” Sure enough by July the Jack Wells Brook looked like swill. Sure enough by August there wasn’t a minnow left in Eagle Pond. Where was the state water folks when the brains was handed out? Sherm says they was out behind the Grange getting paid off.”

Donald Hall reports this story in his book Eagle Pond as a representative example of New Hampshire country conversation. It has a lovely local twang, but the events it describes have taken place a million times, all over the country and probably just about everywhere else. There is an intimate connection between garbage and corruption. Not so much the corruption of the garbage itself, unfortunately. The process of biodegradation, no matter how ardently hoped-for by all of us ordinary householders who put our wishful faith in it, is significantly retarded by current landfill disposal practices. Organic corruption is curbed significantly. To make up for it, there’s a lot of human resources corruption, involving the people paid to ensure proper handling of the waste and then paid again to grease the skids for a little extra profit to the people getting paid to do the proper handling.

improper garbage handling

The most high-profile stories of garbage-related corruption that have come to light include these lurid tales:

–  A mafia cartel with its origin in Yonkers controlled commercial garbage collection in New York City and outlying areas in the latter half of the twentieth century (see Rick Cowan and Doug Century, Take-Down: The Fall of the Last Mafia Empire);

– A recent garbage showdown in Naples involved the accumulation of household waste in the streets because the landfills were full (again) as well as the dumping of toxic waste all over the surrounding region of Campania (see Roberto Saviano, Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System);

– The passage of the RCRA in 1976, which controlled the dumping of toxics, sparked a wave of organized illegal disposal and stockpiling in eastern New Jersey and New York (see Alan Block and Frank Scarpitti, Poisoning for Profit: The Mafia and Toxic Waste in America).

And then there’s the story of Browning-Ferris, which gave away waste oil mixed with various toxics to southern counties, also in the 1970s, so that it could be used to lay dust on unpaved country roads. This is a minor story, comparatively speaking, but there’s something so brazen about it, so light-of-day, it deserves a spot in the pantheon.

Lest we think that this is a thing of the past, there’s James Galante, who got one conviction for tax evasion in 1999 and another one in 2008 for racketeering, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and additional tax shenanigans. Up until that last conviction, he had the controlling interest in 25 garbage-related businesses that held most of the disposal contracts for western Connecticut as well as Westchester and Putnam counties in New York.

And then there are all the international scandals—ocean tankers dumping toxic sludge of uncertain origin in poor neighborhoods in Ivory Coast and other African nations, 90 shipping containers with contaminated recyclables from Britain delivered to Latin American ports—which don’t actually look all that different from the legal movement of toxics.

Garbage is not unique as a temptation to augment one’s income by cutting corners, it appears. Neither is it unique in attracting organized crime. Robert Kelly explains in his book The Upperworld and the Underworld: Case Studies in Racketeering and Business Infiltrations in the United States that there is a range of commercial enterprises that have historically been beset by those inclined to bribery and violence in the furtherance of their material longings. This includes construction, pizza parlors, and waterfront businesses, as well as the full range of garbage-related enterprises. Industries in which many small businesses offer low-margin services are especially susceptible to racketeering, Kelly points out. It helps if there’s a labor union to bend to one’s criminal purposes.

But the most interesting contributing factor is the existence of regulation.  The consequence of regulation goes a step beyond the well-known fact that crime is created by the law that makes it so. Before the early 1970s, it was lawful to dump industrial wastes freely into air and water, although it certainly wasn’t sanitary and the dumpers would have been pretty well situated to know that. As soon as the RCRA was passed into law, dumping industrial wastes became a crime, which exposed the guilty to (relatively small) fines. Similarly, Europe has stringent regulations that say toxic wastes cannot exported out of the country in which the waste is created and they can certainly not be exported to places that don’t have the same regulations. By definition, sending a shipment of used European refrigerators to Africa is a crime. Sending a shipment of used American refrigerators to Africa is just business as usual, because the US doesn’t have the same export restrictions.

But something else happens, besides the mere change in status of the activity. Regulations make it more attractive to cheat, because they typically make it more expensive to properly treat or dispose of waste. And that means that the profit margin associated with the improper treatment or disposal of waste increases, often sufficiently to catch the attention of organized crime. In the first place, it becomes attractive to charge the going rates for proper disposal of a vast range of poisons and then just dump it in the landfill  or stockpile it in an abandoned warehouse or let it run into the nearest stream when nobody is looking or set it on fire or lay it under an overpass under cover of darkness or wait for rain and open up the spigot of your tanker truck as you drive along the interstate. And then secondly, if you lower your prices just a tiny bit under the going rate, you can undercut your honest competitor and still make a handsome profit. Block and Scarpitti’s Poisoning for Profit may be read as an indictment of widespread corruption but it’s also a tips-and-tricks sort of “Poisoning for Dummies”. The most brazen scam I have heard of was perpetrated in Italy: the Camorra would take loads of toxic waste from the north (in return for payment), dump it into the pits meant for the subsidized destruction of agricultural surpluses (and collect the subsidies), and then sell the agricultural surpluses that didn’t actually end up in the pits to grocery stores (at decent prices).

However, all of the experts on organized crime say that it exists only where there is widespread collusion by authorities and other bystanders. And I suspect that, in addition, garbage is especially attractive as merchandise because the rest of us find it so difficult to pay attention.

Garbage Hymns

Randy Ludacer, Singing about Packaging on Fresh Kills

Randy Ludacer is a package designer. He is responsible for the public face of such essential items as lemon-scented insoles, table cloths and pillow covers, furry rocker chairs and retro stools, composters, video game controllers, bath salts for jet lag relief, and Bling-it-on peel-and-stick crystals, best described as spangles for underage females. Also Randy is a singer-songwriter. Naturally, some of his songs are also about packaging, including “The Prettiest Package,” “Expiration Date,” “Pop Top Ring,” “Can Of Worms” and the immortal “This Landfill Is Your Landfill.”

Last Saturday, Randy performed his packaging songs to a select audience on top of the 150 million tons of trash contained in the Fresh Kills landfill, which is, naturally, the very best place to do so. Unfortunately, procedures kept the fans down to a modest number. The audience had to be bused in, in accordance with San protocol—after we signed release forms holding the Department of Sanitation harmless for whatever horrors might befall us during or in the wake of the concert. There were. like, 20 seats on the bus.

But there we were, in the great outdoors, with a view of the Arthur Kill and the ruins of New Jersey to the west, the Manhattan skyline to the north, and a wildlife refuge to the east. Randy sang and accompanied himself on his Tropicana box guitar, keeping an admirable balance on the garbage tightrope. It’s not easy being serious about garbage without getting heavy-handed.

Us, the Audience (and a Methane Well in the Background)

The wind was brisk and rustled steadily in the late-season grass. The baby in the audience complained now and again. We clapped very nicely after every song, while the garbage kept very quiet underfoot.

Meanwhile, as Randy pointed out in one of his songs,  “Through the layers of the landfill, through/the garbage and the rubble, every tire slowly/rises to the surface like a bubble. This landfill/is our landfill. It was made for you and me.”

Just in case you want to know more about Fresh Kills? Try love letters and cabbage leaves About the old dump and the new park forming? More interested in the cheap thrills of Fresh Kills? Then you’ll want to take a look at landscape inspirations.

The Glacier of Corinda los Trancos

Corinda los Trancos is a very romantic spot, entirely in keeping with its name. From the ridge top, you get a gorgeous view of the mountains nearby and the ocean beyond. Early on a September morning, the vista is shrouded in a few late-rising rags of fog fighting a losing battle with the sun. The haze in the eastern sky gives the light a twinklyquality and turns the range farther out into a ghostly shoal of breaching whales. In the late afternoons, when the fog rolls in again, it feels like the ocean rises up around you leaving you stranded on an archipelago of tiny tropical islands while the valleys below are lost in gloom.

The glacier hugging a cleft down the side of Ox Mountain is much less romantic, seeing as how it’s made of trash. Corinda los Trancos is the only active landfill in San Mateo County, California. Not that you can see the trash itself. What you see—if you’re lucky enough to wangle admission, that is—is a vast earthwork filling up one end of a secluded canyon and draped up against the mountain side. The trash is exposed in one little spot, where the big possum-belly trailers are tipped up high in the air to shake loose the garbage they’ve brought from the transfer processing station in San Carlos. A herd of goats roams the surface higher up. At the very top sits a generator that turns the methane produced by decomposing organics into energy.

Corinda los Trancos Range (with landfill glacier tucked out of sight)

The thing is huge, by the way, containing some 35 years worth of trash already. And it’s going to accumulate many more layers on top, since it’s permitted to keep filling until about 1932 or so. It’s awesome. I wish I could show you what it looks like, but when I got the tour I didn’t have permission to take pictures.

For now, a forlorn little hilltop rises above the scene, the remains of the real Ox Mountain. Not for much longer. It’s being dug down for material to cover our trash—my very own garbage included, I might note—to supplement the concrete and green waste that is also used for cover. So eventually, Ox Mountain the former will be gone and right next to its absence will rise Ox Mountain the latter, a layer cake of trash that at the present moment has a better life expectancy than our civilization as a whole.

almost full

the hills are alive with the sound of compactors

The Palo Alto landfill is almost full. The old dirt road leading to the active face is now being filled.There’s a new entrance and a new tollbooth, but it is manned by the same old walrus who checks your ID and takes your $10 for a trunkful or $20 for a truckload.

For a special burial, the sign at the entrance says, there is an additional fee. The gatekeeper explains that this is not a ceremony for your beloved pooch or your dearly departed hamster. It’s for such things as asbestos, which have to be double-wrapped.  Seems like a good plan.

In the 14 years that I’ve observed progress here, the mountains have grown faster than kudzu vine. In a year or so, they should finally be done. You can begin to see what the final shape of the hills is going to be—not exactly like Coyote Hills across the bay, but more similar than the breaching whale shapes that most landfills achieve.

Secure Trash

I sometimes wish I could have a user manual for urban interfaces in the Netherlands. You run into all sorts of machines all over the place, many of which appear to be designed by aliens with a poor understanding of human cognition and a very poor command of the Dutch language. One example is this garbage container, which I found in the streets of Apeldoorn.

The interface is on the left. The gates of hell are on the right. To judge by the picture on the front of the interface—which shows a rat sniffing around “loose” trash—there is some temptation to just skip the entire proceeding and leave one’s offerings at the gate instead.

How to operate the underground dumpster

Also, of course, it may fail to operate altogether, in which case you have to call someone. The instructions seem to suggest that you will then receive temporary access privileges for a different secure trash can a few streets away.

Or it could be full. For that unfortunate circumstance, I don’t see an instruction.

picking it up

On Saturday morning I sat at the bus stop peacefully practicing individual sustainability when my meditations were  interrupted by a man picking up what in Dutch is called vagrant trash from all over the sidewalk and stuffing it into the bin no more than 2 feet away from me. He set a full soft drink cup on top of the bin at one point and carefully stuffed some sandwich wrappers in.

Vagrant Trash (not picked up by me)

I don’t really mind this kind of behavior, but, for those of you who wonder, I definitely don’t do it myself. I just watch the picker-uppers and notice that they’re almost always “older” (i.e., older than me) and that they have a slightly contrarian air. “I don’t understand these people just throwing their trash on the ground,” they will tell you, or otherwise it’s evident from the formation of their brows that they’re thinking just that.

I on the other hand am always thinking that it’s a miracle that so minute a fraction of the vast mountains of trash we create in the West end up outside of designated receptacles. And that there are people properly employed and fitted out to enroll the vagrant trash into the official garbage program. So why me? And that if I have no clean facilities to wash my hands, I really, really wouldn’t want to touch the stuff myself. In fact, by my reckoning, picking up all the trash with your bare hands and then handing your Euros to the bus driver without intervening ablutions is not exactly the pinnacle of human kindness.

Anyhow, soft drink cup safely on top of the bin. And  then splat. Bad enough to get on the bus with those filthy hands, but when the trash becomes projectile I’m really not enjoying myself. I like trash in the abstract and from a safe distance much more than I like it in person.

So this morning the New York Times posted a story that takes all of that and turns it completely upside down. A young man in Lahore, Pakistan, has started a group to personally pick up vagrant trash once a week as a statement of political will and empowerment. Good for him. I hope it’s the start of a movement. And I hope he gets to wash his hands before he gets on the bus.

Stinky Vinky

stinky's heap

A little while ago I wrote about where the garbage I’m currently producing doesn’t go: the garbage dump near Barneveld, in the Netherlands. So I thought I’d go myself.

I can report it’s a beaut and large. And stinky. An oily substance seeps out of the frontal garbage declivity. Things peek up above the dirt which should be under it.

Other things lie about in the nonchalant abandon of retirement. What could they be doing, those giant rolls of something plastic. Still considering a second career? A short distance away lolls a stack of sewer pipe, also used, piled nearly up to the tops of the trees. If you can bring yourself to walk up close, you can look into the eyes of the curious horses in the meadow on the other side, like peering through a toilet roll at a primitive picture of rural delights.

astro turf? roofing material?

The whole disreputable pile is exploited, as they say in the Netherlands, by a certain Vink, who’s just lost his permit for irregularities in disposal practices. Apparently I’m not the only one who took exception. But irregularities also occurred in the investigation, and Stinky may appeal the ruling. It doesn’t seem as if he’s in a hurry to clean up his act.

All of it lies alongside a picturesque country lane with old trees only a little the worse for wear that winds its way through fields just plowed and sowed. If you turn your gaze just so,  you can enjoy the view, the peaceful evening air, the birdsong, and the rustic chorus of crickets. Just bring some nose clips.

Can Therapy

Feel good trash can

Found in Amsterdam, on Museumplein.

Try trash can therapy:
Throw your trash
in the can.
You feel better

the piles behind me

I’ve got myself into a dilemma much like Tristram Shandy’s, whose life went by much faster than he was able to record it. Only my problem is that every time I get myself up to look for my ancient garbage, I create more of it in additional places. All of which will require more research, more getting myself up to look, more creating of garbage in hitherto unsuspected places, more research, more getting up, etc., etc. Infinite regress has already reared its monstrous head even though to date I have gone to look only for the largest quantities of my own historical trash. If I tried to locate the trash I’ve left all over the world while traveling, I would be dead before I properly documented my first 10 years.

Barneveld Landfill

My current sojourn in the Netherlands is associated with a heap of trash that,  as of this writing, has no known destination. All I know is where it does not go—the dump operated by the enterprise that collects the garbage at my temporary address. I’m not sure the locals agree about many things, but they do agree that the country is too small to fill it up with rubbish.

I had expected to be able to participate in food and green waste composting, but no such luck. I live in a place with a special dispensation and a solid refusal to deal with separate collections. All the trash I currently create, including those perfectly innocent scraps and peels, is going into purgatory somewhere unidentified, to burn for my sins.

I don’t even want to begin to think about what might happen to discards produced when I visit my folks.

Dumping Garbage Prohibited - Gevudo, Dordrecht

On the other hand, the considerable quantity of tissues I unwillingly used up in consequence of a cold while traveling to Heerjansdam to look for my childhood trash (see Buitenland’s Garbage, Zwijndrecht, Preserve, Times Two, Transmigration of Matter, and Pretty Picture) does have a known destination: the Dordrecht incinerator, where the visitor is summarily forbidden to dump his “dirt,” the standard term for garbage in local parlance.  The country’s only hospital waste incinerator is located here as well.

Next to the incinerator is a working landfill, where I presume the fly ash goes. It rises like Table Mountain above the surrounding flat lands, ominous and foreboding.

A little further east, there is bound to be more garbage because I found a ski slope, a cycle track, and a golf course—sure signs of waste underfoot. The ski slope is in disrepair, as Dutch people have generally evinced a preference for the Alps over tricked-out, spiffed-up garbage dumps. The ski lift is nothing but a downed clothesline in the grass, and the squares of corrugated plastic snow are sliding off the hillside as if to make up for the lack of human visitors.

In back of the golf course is a huge park, only half tended and almost completely deserted, of breath-taking beauty. Half wetland, half terra firma, hushed in the near fog, slowly awakening from long winter sleep. Despite the immediate proximity of ovens, upland waste, electricity pylons, and railway bridge, the area seems entirely removed from time except the cycles of the seasons.  This is hands down the prettiest garbage dump I have ever visited. I don’t recommend it as a tourist attraction only because too many visitors would spoil the prospect.

Merwelanden, northern end of the Biesbosch

Yet again further east lies a gigantic garbage dike, following the banks of the river Beneden Merwede for what I guess is a length of approximately 2 kilometers. It runs right into the upper end of one of the national parks, the Biesbosch. Also gorgeous. Also completely unreal.