Some thoughts on a book that was garbage – and why that is a good thing. Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash by Elizabeth Royte, Jennifer Aquino, et al. [1]. An excellent survey of the world of trash and the disposal of other unmentionables.
This blog is part of my ongoing effort to remember what I have read. I have tried to write it for your enjoyment, but its primary purpose is, better recall of this worthwhile book.
Follow the Garbage…
Elizabeth Royte is a science writer who asks the question, where does her family garbage go after it leaves the curb? To find the answer, she spends a year measuring, composting, recycling and following the refuse from their New York Apartment.
What she uncovers a history of human garbage, the modern landfill and protracted battles over what to do about ever increasing waste with shrinking places to put it. She attempts to visit the final resting/recycling place over everything she was not able to divert from her waste stream. In the process, she befriends New York garbage collectors and meets a wide assortment of individuals earning a living or passionate about what is thrown out.
Start of this Garbage…
The book starts in the alarmingly named former dump site of ‘Fresh Kills’. Don’t worry, the Kills part of the name is from Dutch meaning little body of water [2] (as opposed to the numerous mob disposals made in this area).
In 1986, Fresh Kills became the largest dump in the world. It rose two hundred feet above its surrounding wetlands and formed the highest geographical point along fifteen hundred miles of eastern seaboard [2.Introduction]. In 2001, it closed despite having still 20% capacity.
Like any landfill, it (Fresh Kills) produces leachate, a noxious stew of household toxics, such as battery acid, nail polish remover, pesticides, and paint, combined with liquid versions of rotting food, pet feces, medical waste, and diapers. An analysis of free-flowing leachate sampled from landfills of the Hackensack Meadowlands turned up oil and grease, cyanide, arsenic, cadmium, chromium, copper, lead, nickel, silver, mercury, and zinc.
To capture the leachate flow at Fresh Kills, which shares this pestilential profile, engineers encircled the uncapped garbage mounds with leachate walls dug seventy feet deeper than the lowest layer of garbage. Comprising perforated pipes, the walls funnel garbage juice to the dump’s private water treatment plant, where it runs through an intensive detoxification program before being discharged into the Arthur Kill.
Chapter tWO
Define the Garbage…
Fresh Kills becomes a touchstone for the book as Royte tries to wrangle a visit to the former dump site – which proves elusive. It is only a part of what Royte is interested in as she takes a broad definition of what is garbage. It includes household waste, industrial, agriculture and of course human waste.
The US municipal waste stream has increased three-fold during the approximate lifetime of the Fresh Kills. Driven by both population growth and increased per capita garbage production. Another force is Parkison’s Law of Garbage, so named by the Garbage Project: “Garbage expands so as to fill the receptacles available for its containment.”
Less/More Garbage …
Historically, there was much less garbage because there was both less consumed and more diverted. Organic waste went to farm animals or middlemen who bought refuse to transform it into soap and other products. Other middlemen bought cloth, tin cans and the like.
At the same time, western society now produces less garbage. No longer are we threatened to be buried under horse manure, wood or coal ash. Fossil fuels have saved us from this threat although created a more global crisis in the form of climate change.
The very things we are throwing out are a method of reducing other forms of waste. For example, refrigeration and food packaging has reduce wasted food but increased their own respective wastes. But back to today and following the trash.
Follow the Money …
Royte separates out from her garbage bottles with paid-deposits for a local homeless fellow named Willy. A modern day version of the earlier refuse-men who used to ply her New York street.
Other characters Royte introduces us two are the sanitation men. They are mostly men due to the physical demands. The job is dangerous but pays reasonably well with good pensions and health benefits. Thus, these unionized workers are the first of a series of people and organizations who make their living off of the garbage we throw out.
The refuse generally flows downhill and ends up in collection stations and then land dumps. Often found in poorer areas, these facilities bring jobs, opportunities, smells and rats to these locations. Towns further afield accept trash – for a price. The result is the trucking of garbage long distances, often across state lines to privately owned land fills:
The garbage business—concentrated in the hands of a few major corporations—blossomed. By 2001, it was a $57-billion-a-year industry. The economics of megafills covering several hundred acres was irresistible. They were, in relative terms, far cheaper to build than little landfills, even when the millions paid to control pollution and fight community activists were factored in.
Chapter Two
Follow the Passion …
Where there is money to be made, in a service most people don’t want to know about, don’t be surprised that there is also organized crime involvement. One estimated is that 35% of the $1.5B New Yorkers spent to cart away their garbage is diverted to the mob [2, Chapter 3]. In the late 1990’s, active prosecution reduced mob involvement but never underestimate the tenacity of shadow organizations.
All of this trucking ignores the inherent value of what is being hauled. Metals, plastics and paper can be recycled – or burned. Royte describes one such facility which burns trash for both disposal as well as co-generation of energy. Royte is cool on incineration, perhaps for good reasons…
… pollution-control … involved scrubbers, electrostatic precipitators (to charge particles so they could be collected), flue-gas cleaning, combustion controls that minimized carbon monoxide, and injections of carbon (to absorb mercury), lime (to control sulfur dioxide and hydrochloric acid), and ammonia (to control nitrogen oxides).But somehow, it wasn’t enough.
Burning a mixed stream of natural and synthetic materials creates newfangled compounds that release dangerous gases. Plastic, for example, releases hydrochloric acid (which rapidly degrades the incinerator and contributes to acid rain), chlorine (which is then available to form dioxins), and toxic metals that have been added to the plastics to give them color, stiffness, and other desirable characteristics.
Scrubbers and screens catch much of this stuff, but even minute quantities, once airborne, are considered by scientists to be extremely dangerous. Improved technology and higher air-quality standards have taken some metals—like chromium, copper, manganese, and vanadium—out of the smokestack only to concentrate them in bottom ash, which falls through the grate on the boiler’s floor.
Chapter Three
Recycled Passion….
Passion has good sides as well. Royte introduces us to biologists remediating formerly polluted land fill sites as well as composting zealots. She also tours paper recycling plants as well as other facilities that make use of the valuable products diverted from the land fill, such as aluminum recycling.
Recycling a beer or pop can saves about 94% of the energy and the resources needed to produce one from the virgin materials [2, Chapter 7]. In theory, this metal can be recycled infinitum. Paper by contrast has limited number recycles after which it will head for the landfill as kitty litter or possibly feedstock for an incinerator. Plastic is another story.
Of all the materials we throw out, plastic is among the hardest to kill. It doesn’t biodegrade in any conventional sense; sunlight causes it to photodegrade into ever-smaller pieces of polymers. These are easily consumed by some organisms, but they’re still too large and too tough to be digested by microorganisms. …
Although plastic bags don’t take up a lot of landfill space, they persist in the environment for decades, if not centuries. Like other forms of plastic, they have high social and environmental costs—called “externalities”—that are borne by the public and by government, not by the producers of the plastics or their intended users.
Chapter Seven
… The Number Two Waste
The flush toilet and adjoining infrastructure have saved innumerable lives. Washed hands and flushed poop breaks the cycle on which intestinal worms and E. Coli depend. Royte ponders the process of adding potable-water to transport this waste and then spending sums to subsequently extract and clean the water.
This is brought home as Royte traces the route her family’s poop travels from their brownstone home New York home. The journey ends in a waste treatment plant where machines with romantic names such as ‘the scum concentrator’ operate. After co-generating methane to run the plant, the end result is sold as fertilizer.
Human effluent requires significant infrastructure (prone to leakage and contamination of ground water or fresh water supplies). Water provides a handy transport medium – until it must be extracted. This is an energy intense process with multiple processing streams. As noted above, some of the potential-energy is captured through methane but certainly not all. As a result:
More and more people, living off the grid or not, have recognized how little sense it makes, when our population is so large and our clean water supply shrinking, to dilute our solids with water and then, at great expense, separate the two.
Chapter Eleven
… Read the Book.
As a science writer, Royte has done an excellent job weaving a personal story of her family within a larger context of the waste industry. She has mostly avoided creating caricature-evil corporations, nor has she beatified the recycling or composting zealots.
Her last chapter is a poignant lament on the challenges and joys of personal responsibility for one’s own environmental footprint. Setting aside bottles for Willey and separating paper and glass may not seem like a lot – but it is what we can do to support our small part of a civil society.
Improve the Book
My observations on the book are few and as follows:
- Break out of a US centric view and include excellent work done in Europe and Canada in addition to American examples.
- PLEASE update this book. Published in 2006, it is now nearly 20 years old and there has been progress in this world.
Organizational Biology 