Hidden America

by Jeanne Marie Laskas

  “No doubt, we make a lot of trash in America,” Mike says. “No doubt. And this is a tiny piece of one day, in one landfill. But I don’t tend to think about that. Mostly I think about not getting run into by a dozer.”

  We sink in, climb out, sink, climb. Mike keeps moving forward, pushing trash toward the edge of the cliff formed by the day’s massive pile—a ledge so high you can’t see what, if anything, is over it.

  “You’re getting close to the edge,” I tell him.

  “I have to get these verticals down as quick as possible,” he says, and without hesitation keeps moving forward. “You worry about smoothing things out afterwards. When we’re diving over the vertical you’ll see why.”

  He chatters on about smoothing and grabbing and peeling, but the only words I take in are “diving over the vertical,” which we are about to do. We are about to free-fall over a cliff of trash three stories high. I make the point that this is scaring the shit out of me.

  “A lot of guys I train cry their first couple of weeks,” he says.

  He assures me that the Bomag is extremely agile. He says the only worry, really, is tree stumps. “One time I was coming over a vertical, and on the way down I hit a stump about the size of a car. I started sliding down the slope sideways. You just kind of hold on and gun it and try to get off of it. That one gave me a pucker butt.”

  We drive straight toward the open sky, and head as if on a suicide mission over the cliff. I expect a crash, a violent tumble, death, but the Bomag clings to the trash like a squirrel, and we begin our slow descent down, about thirty feet straight down, into more trash—where six or seven bulldozers zoom about, backward, forward, pushing trash, sculpting the cell.

  I ask Mike who’s in charge here, who has the right of way, what the pattern is, who yields to whom. He says everyone more or less figures it out as they go along. He talks about riding dirt bikes when he was five. “Experiences like that prepare you. You learn the limits of motion.” Any kid who grew up with dirt bikes and four-wheelers would obviously love a job like this, he says, adding that he considers himself blessed.

  Before he started working here in 1990, Big Mike worked as an auto mechanic. “I could not take the stress of that life,” he tells me. Like so many of the people I meet at the landfill, he tells me he enjoys nature, being outdoors, and a good deal of solitude. We climb back up the cliff of trash to square off for another dive down, and he whistles. Then he invites me to join him for lunch later. “I mean, if you want.”

  —

  BETWEEN THE LEACHATE, the methane, all the enormous equipment, the dangerous dives, the brainpower, the rotating cells, the seagull lines, the irrigation, the bougainvillea vine—all the landscaping, all the field engineers, all the chemistry—I’m thinking: This is ridiculous. This is a lot to go through so people can continue living in denial, as if our trash has some magical way of just vanishing. At one point, I confess to Joe Haworth that I have no idea where, back home, my own trash goes after it leaves the end of my driveway, gets hauled off in a green truck while my dogs stand on the porch and bark stupidly at it. I have no idea whatsoever, and I certainly have no sense of my trash having a destiny of such complexity and such bother.

  This, Joe tells me, is a preferable situation to when trash was simple. Throughout most of history, trash was a linear concern, the end of a simple four-beat pattern: you dig up raw materials, make something with them, use the something, and when the usefulness is over, you throw the thing away. One, two, three, trash. One, two, three, trash. One, two, three, trash. The piling of trash became a concern as soon as there were enough people clustered in one place to notice it. The city of Athens is said to have organized the first municipal dump in the Western world, in about 500 B.C. Citizens were required to dispose of their waste at least one mile from city walls. This was a remarkably forward-thinking plan, especially when you consider that, zooming all the way up to the eighteenth century, most Americans were simply throwing their trash out the window into the street—and this despite the fact that trash-related diseases such as bubonic plague, cholera, and typhoid fever had been known to alter the populations of Europe and influence monarchies around the world.

  Burning trash became a big deal in the late 1800s with the invention of municipal incinerators as well as the practice of putting a match to the stuff in one’s own backyard. Burning trash was wonderful, magical, because it made it seem to disappear.

  Throwing trash into the ocean had a similar effect, and for a while that practice joined burning as America’s solution. But stinky, ruined beaches and clogged harbors prompted the Supreme Court to ban trash-in-the-ocean in 1934. Even so, it’s worth noting that, thanks to lawbreakers and people in countries without regulations, a soup of plastic waste floating in the Pacific Ocean now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States. This expanse of debris, held in place by swirling underwater currents, stretches from about five hundred nautical miles off the California coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii, and almost as far as Japan. Scientists are still trying to figure out what to do about that one.

  Joe Haworth grew up in downtown Los Angeles, and he remembers burning trash as a boy. “Everybody had a backyard incinerator,” he tells me. He’s sitting on one of the gas pipes on a lower ledge of the landfill, under an oak tree, taking in the shade. “I remember looking at the wax melting off the milk carton, thinking, ‘Oh, that’s really cool.’ We put the ashes in a bucket, and the city would haul the ashes away. You’d separate the food scraps. They’d be taken to the pig farms. Then we had a mayor, Sam Yorty, saying, ‘Hey, if we throw all this stuff together, we can make it easier for the housewives, make it simpler for them; let’s put it all in one big can and haul it away.’” The story delights him, as so many stories do, and he bangs on the pipe to animate this next part. “Sam Yorty was elected, and housewives were bashing trash lids together, saying, ‘Bless you, Mayor Sam!’ Yup. Look up Sam Yorty. Y-O-R-T-Y.”

  And so, the urban landfill, which in the beginning was a dump on the edge of town. When the pile got too high, someone would light a match to it and make room for more. And more. And more. Volume became an absurdly huge problem, with the dawning of the baby boom and the quantity of trash exploding in the crazed TV-dinner consumerism following World War II. In 1955, Life magazine heralded the advent of the “throwaway society.”

  Burn all that trash in a crowded place like Los Angeles and you contribute to the most famous smog problem in the world. In 1959 the American Society of Civil Engineers published a standard guide to “sanitary landfilling.” Instead of burning trash, the idea was to bury it. To guard against rodents and odors, the guide suggested compacting trash and covering it with a new layer of soil each day.

  And so, the modern era of trash.

  Joe Haworth and his college buddies were studying civil engineering at Loyola Marymount University at the time. Joe had not yet had his trash awakening, although he and his engineering friends, infected by the idealism of the time, the dawning of the environmental movement, were getting excited about . . . sewage.

  “The whole nation’s plumbing was coming apart,” he tells me. “It was literally going to pieces. It was like the mayor’s idiot son ran the local sewage treatment.” There was no thinking. There was just expediency: Dump the crap into the river. In the big-picture tradition of the Jesuits, a professor at Loyola was urging Joe to do something with his life. The professor told him about sanitary engineering. He said there was a future, something big, bigger than anyone could imagine, and a chance to do something good.

  There was no EPA yet. There were virtually no federal laws concerning pollution. Oil tankers were regularly dumping crankcase oil into oceans, air pollution was literally killing people—ninety-six in just four days in New York City—and in Ohio the Cuyahoga River burst into flames five stories high from floating chemicals.

  And so, t
he awakening. In 1962, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, a cry of ecological radicalism meant to awaken a public lazily dependent on the chemical control of nature. The book ignited the first serious public dialogue about the dangers of pesticides and other chemicals. Ed Muskie, the famously cranky U.S. senator, championed a national environmental policy, pushing the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act—much of the work born of his disgust over the polluted rivers in his native Maine.

  In 1970, President Nixon created the EPA.

  The modern environmental movement was nothing without sharp young minds capable of inventing change. Funds became available, traineeships at places like Stanford, Caltech, MIT. The best and brightest, including Joe, got free rides to study trash. Joe went to Stanford. “A lot of us felt the obligation to go into public service,” he says. He kicks the dirt. It all seems so adorable now. Boomers changing the world. What happened to all that? “This was such exciting stuff,” he says. “We were thinking up all-new ways of helping nature play catch-up after a couple of pretty messy centuries.” It was a thrilling time to be a sanitary engineer, even as the title gradually morphed into “environmental engineer.” In fact, these guys would go on to change the paradigm, inventing systems that would begin to provide relief to a planet choking on its own debris.

  Joe never set out to be a PR guy. He was more or less called. So much was happening, so many innovations. His colleagues didn’t have the knack for putting multipart engineering concepts into the vernacular, but Joe had it in spades. He created the information office and became a mouthpiece.

  Using landfill gas to generate electrical power—that was a good example. He remembers those early days with the fondness of an old man thinking of his first kid. It happened at Palos Verdes, one of the Districts’ older landfills, which was adjacent to a handsome neighborhood where a woman was complaining about her dead roses. She blamed the landfill: surely something disgusting was emanating out of that dump. She was right. Inspectors found that methane, the explosive gas they normally simply flared to get rid of, had migrated from the landfill into the neighborhood.

  “So we said, ‘Whoa, we gotta do something,’” Joe says, standing up now, as if trying to solve the puzzle anew. “We dug a trench near her roses, put gravel in it. We figured, well, that stuff will just come up through the gravel because that’ll be the easiest road for it to travel. When that didn’t work, we put a pipe in, started to suck the gas out. Then our guys said, ‘You know what, we’re burning this stuff now just to get rid of it. That’s a pretty good-looking flame. I wonder if that would work in an engine.’ So our guys then began to run it through an internal combustion engine. And it ran the engine.”

  It was one of those eureka moments: Use landfill gas to generate electricity! To a young environmental engineer, it was the most elegant example imaginable of closing the loop, reusing everything, making something useful out of, literally, garbage.

  “One of our guys thought of putting a Christmas tree up on the landfill site,” Joe says. “Not a real big one. But running this little generator on landfill gas and lighting this Christmas tree. It got attention. Because it was such a curious thing.”

  It worked. They built an energy station, and a couple of years later, dignitaries from around the world, including Prince Charles, came to visit the Palos Verdes landfill site to see energy come out of trash.

  Currently, about 425 landfills in the United States produce landfill gas (LFG), generating about 10 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year. This is a green fuel, offsetting the use of 169 million barrels of oil per year or 356,000 railcars of coal. According to the EPA, the carbon reduction is the equivalent of removing the emissions from nearly 14 million vehicles on the road or planting nearly 20 million acres of forest.

  All those complications of trash—the methane, the leachate, all the enormous equipment, all the landscaping, all the chemistry—have really nothing to do with enabling an irresponsible public intent on ignoring trash. That’s our own deal, our own psychology. In real-world terms, the complications of trash are the human inventions and human interventions intent on closing the cycle to restore nature’s severed loop.

  “Think about it,” Joe says, squinting in the harsh glare of the noon sun. “What is pollution? Pollution’s just the wrong stuff in the wrong place at the wrong time. Any other time, it’s a resource. Okay? Think about that.”

  —

  WHEN I ENTER THE LUNCHROOM with Big Mike, he lags behind, tells me to go ahead and get started. By now I know the dynamics of “second lunch,” at noon, and I wonder where Big Mike will sit. The place is stark and temporal, a large white double-wide with tables and bulletin boards and newspapers and buzzing fluorescent lights.

  I head down to the long table where Steve, Wes, Patrick, Jamie, Tony, and the rest of the happy loudmouths of second lunch are diving into their lunch pails. Second lunch is almost all “Dirt,” the men who run the scrapers and push dirt. First lunch, at eleven thirty, is almost all “Rubbish,” the men like Big Mike who crush garbage. The Dirt crew is very gabby about the Rubbish crew. They say Rubbish is aloof, boring, and miserable. Dirt, they say, is happy, hilarious, and loving. I am trying to understand the source of these distinctions.

  Each day the guys of second lunch seem excited to have a visitor in the lunchroom and, like schoolkids, talk at me all at once. “We are the biggest landfill in the nation,” one of them declares.

  “We have awesome equipment,” says one.

  “We have eighteen D9s.”

  “We have two D8s.”

  “Compactors? We’ve got five of those.”

  “And two D10s—120,000 pounds each.”

  “We have a D11 out at our Calabasas landfill, which is even bigger than that one.”

  “I personally don’t think I’ve ever seen a D12. To be honest with you, I don’t think Caterpillar even makes them anymore.”

  “They don’t.”

  “We have the biggest machines in the world.”

  “We are number one.”

  Steve, a scraper driver, tall, gangly, with long blond curls, holds court at the corner table. If he is the leader of this group, it is because he can withstand constant jabbing and ridicule, mostly about his hair, with its history of bad cuts, bad bangs, Farrah Fawcett layers. Lately, the guys have been encouraging Steve to get a mullet. They have offered to pay him to do it. Steve emphatically refuses, but the image brings delight to Jamie, to Joe, and to Patrick, and somehow morphs into a discussion of the possibility of Steve one day making porn, mullet porn. There is no logical sequence to the evolution of this riff, but it takes on a life of its own, until soon midgets enter the story and the idea of Steve making midget mullet porn. The laughter is uproarious, and one guy spits out his Mountain Dew, and there is stomping of feet and pounding of tables until the lunchroom trailer shakes like a ship of drunken pirates.

  I feel bad for Mike up there all alone. Mike usually eats at eleven thirty, with the rest of Rubbish, but he got delayed on account of driving me around on his Bomag, so now he’s stuck here with Dirt.

  I get up to go sit with Mike, but then Jamie, the youngest here, thin, clean-cut, offers me a peach, saying he picked it himself from his mother’s tree, so I sit back down.

  “I drove on the Bomag with Big Mike today,” I tell the guys. “He dove me over verticals.”

  “Yeah, we saw you out there,” says Wes, a guy with a wide brow wearing a Budweiser T-shirt. “Big Mike will take care of you.”

  Big Mike waves from across the room. He’s an exception to the rule of second lunch, one of the few men in Rubbish whom Dirt doesn’t make fun of. This is on account of Big Mike’s win at the Road-E-O, his furthering the cause of making Puente Hills Landfill number one.

  “I also rode in a rig with Herman this morning,” I tell the guys.

  “Herman?”

 
“Miserable fucker—”

  “He’s not as bad now.”

  “It was when he drove the water truck that he was really bad.”

  “His truck was number 6601. He would hide it.”

  “He was, like, ‘That’s my water truck! You better not touch it.’”

  “He had his cowboy hat. You better not touch his hat!” They crack up over the memory of Herman’s hat. Oh, that’s a good one. They are all gossip and cackle. I tell them they sound like girls.

  Someone brings up rats.

  “I’ve only seen one rat in all the years I worked here.”

  “Coyotes eat the rats. The only rats we see are rats that other people bring in.”

  They proudly agree that there are no rats at the landfill—and if there is one, it is only because it was hiding in a dumpster that got dumped. For the most part, the rats are crushed by the compactor, or the dozers, or buried alive in the dirt.

  As for the occasional dead rats, these offer possibilities. Like the one time Patrick wrapped one in a soft tortilla shell, presented it to his supervisor, and said he was sick of people leaving their lunch around all the time.

  Oh, that’s a good one. Oh, there have been so many good times here at the dump.

  All of these men are lifers, most having worked their way up from paper pickers. Steve has been here for twenty-three years, Tony for nineteen, and Patrick for fourteen. For a heavy-equipment operator, getting a job with the Sanitation Districts is considered a ticket to paradise, given the benefits and good pay—about $80,000 a year before overtime—the steady year-round work, and the fact that trash is recession-proof. Most of the crew lives far east of the landfill, sixty, seventy, eighty miles away in the California desert, commuting more than two hours each way because this is L.A. and nothing is affordable. Because of the distance, and because they have to maintain squeaky-clean driving records in order to keep their jobs, they are not the sort of guys who leave work and hang out together in bars. They vanpool together, watch movies. They spend their days alone, speedily pushing dirt from here to there, and so, aside from their time together in the van, all they have is the lunchroom.