Hidden America

by Jeanne Marie Laskas

  They tell me that any of these operators can run any piece of equipment in the yard. All of the Dirt crew has at some point run Rubbish and vice versa, and even Dirt has to concede that Rubbish is more fun.

  “Crushing things,” says one. “The biggest thrill at this entire landfill is crushing things.”

  “Crushing boats. Just to destroy a boat. Or a trailer or something like that. That’s probably the biggest thrill that I can think of.”

  “I crushed a mobile once. What was neat about it was I didn’t know it was there, but when I came up to it, I kind of tagged onto the corner of it and I must have hit it just right, because when I hit it the whole thing just flattened.”

  “Awwww!”

  For all the joy in crushing things, the facts of the matter sometimes give these guys pause.

  “You’d be amazed at what gets thrown out,” one says. “Stuff that could be donated. We could write a book about the American way of waste.”

  “Companies throw stuff away because of taxes. Like brand-new running shoes. These companies cut all their surplus shoes up so nobody can get them. But they would be perfectly fine. They could donate them. They could do something with them.”

  “When I first started here, for, like, probably two or three weeks these big semitrailers were just dumping piles of brand-new computer typewriters. Piles! Sometimes there would be three trucks next to each other, dumping brand-new computer typewriters. Never been opened. Still in the box.”

  “Waste. Waste. Waste. Sure, it bothers you, but what can you do about it?”

  “There was a time someone dumped $2.1 million here. It’s buried in there.”

  “That is not true.”

  “It’s true!”

  “Remember when they dumped all them Susan B. Anthonys?”

  “Thought it was chocolate candy, but it was real.”

  “That is not true, either.”

  “It’s buried in there, I swear to God.”

  “How do you even know?”

  “How do you know it’s not?”

  “Remember the Sears that closed down? They had their big sale. Then whatever didn’t sell came into the landfill. Brand-new. Brand-new! Other customers would be here dumping, then run over and pick up brand-new chain saws.”

  Salvaging is strictly prohibited at the landfill. This may sound like some picky rule, but the truth is, people who are stupid enough to dive in among the dozers to grab something sometimes end up dead. Private citizens who dump here are provided a separate dumping area away from the action of the machines, but that doesn’t stop them from walking over to the working cell and trying to go for the grab.

  “We’ve had people crushed.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “You can’t see them. You literally don’t know they’re there. No one is supposed to be there.”

  “Remember that lady that got crushed?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  I make the point that with all this drama, Rubbish sounds way more exciting than Dirt. Maybe Dirt is jealous of Rubbish and that accounts for the animosity?

  This analysis brings jeers.

  “Those guys are miserable,” one says.

  “They hate each other.”

  “No, they hate themselves.”

  “It’s a body thing,” one says, and the group agrees on that one.

  Most of the Rubbish crew is in pain, or used to be in pain, or is fighting it. Typically, a man moves over to Rubbish only when his body can no longer take Dirt. Rubbish is soft. Dirt is hard. A man who spends eight or ten hours a day five days a week on a D10 pushing dirt is a man with jangled bones, achy joints, herniated disks. “Your longevity is what we’re talking about,” one says. Most of the Rubbish guys are old, nearing retirement, with a history of back and neck operations. “Going over to Rubbish is more or less being put out to pasture,” one says.

  There are exceptions. Again, Big Mike, who occupies such a hallowed place in this landfill. He drove a scraper for just two years before his back got destroyed. He had surgery, a whole year in bed, and then he returned to have a terrific career in Rubbish on his Bomag, number one in the U.S.A.

  But usually Dirt means you’re still young. Falling off visuals, straddling one, Tipper and Tipsy Toes. Dirt is the good old days.

  These days are, of course, numbered. The landfill is scheduled to close in 2013. A skeleton crew of maintenance workers and field engineers will keep the Puente Hills infrastructure working—will monitor the leachate, maintain the gas wells and the power plant that will continue to transform methane into electricity for about thirty years. But there will be no more trash, no more trucks, no more verticals to crash over, and no more radical dirt moves on a D10. Most of the Rubbish crew is old enough to retire, while the Dirt crew will get absorbed somewhere within the enormous Sanitation Districts organization, so at least they’ll have jobs.

  None of the guys in the lunchroom will admit to the possibility of ever missing this dump, this history, these good old days, and yet they scheme together about their bosses getting permits to open more space in the canyons, more space for trash, more time for Puente Hills.

  “It’s a pipe dream,” one says. “Sooner or later, you just have to face the fact that this place is about to close.”

  —

  WHEN THE LANDFILL CLOSES, a Waste-by-Rail program will take over. The trash will be put in sealed boxcars and delivered two hundred miles west along the Union Pacific Railroad to the desert, to the new Mesquite Regional Landfill in Imperial County, a super-landfill said to last a hundred years.

  And all this old trash will still be sitting here, fermenting, producing gas. In that way, the Puente Hills Landfill will stand as a kind of monument, the symbol of an era of new thought.

  The mountain of trash will be capped, sealed, covered in layers and layers of stone and clay and soil, planted, and turned over to the Los Angeles County Department of Parks and Recreation, a place for people to play. Plans have been in the works for decades: Every time a truck dumps a ton of trash here, a dollar goes into a Puente Hills Landfill Native Habitat Preservation Authority fund. The goal of the fund is to maintain a wildlife corridor more than twice as large as the fill area. Already miles of hiking and horseback-riding trails traverse this land and even the landfill itself, separated from daily operations.

  Over time, the ground will settle in odd and unpredictable ways. You can’t construct buildings on a landfill, because the trash has a life of its own, much of it slowly decomposing and, surprisingly, much of it not. Trash specialists called “garbologists” have done archeological digs in older landfills and have found that, rather than decomposing, a lot of trash, due to the lack of oxygen in a landfill, is actually mummified there. Newspapers from the 1960s have been uncovered from deep inside the earth—with headlines and news items intact.

  “Isn’t that hilarious?” Joe says. He loves the garbologist story, the mummy idea, all the crazy surprises.

  We’re in the car again, marveling at the work of the landscaping guys, and he’s got his arm out the window pointing this way and that like some grandpa showing the old neighborhood. “See those little pipes?” he says, motioning toward small irrigation pipes snaking all over the ground.

  “More pipes,” I say. “A lot of pipes.” It’s really nothing so surprising to see an arid landscape made lush with water flowing through irrigation pipes.

  “Remember I showed you the sewage-treatment plant?” he says. He’s nodding knowingly and his shirtsleeve is flapping in the breeze. It takes me a moment to make the connection he’s making, between irrigation pipes and sewage—

  “No—” I say.

  “Yeah,” he says.

  These pipes don’t just carry any water. They carry reclaimed wastewater from the Sanitation Districts’ nearby sewage treatmen
t plant.

  “Isn’t that neat?” he says.

  He parks at a fence, up at the top of the landfill, just beyond the horse trails, where there is a strawberry farm. It’s on land adjacent to the landfill, rows and rows of fat green plants ready for picking.

  “Come see the strawberries,” he says, shoving the car door with his shoulder, and it reluctantly creaks open. “Okay, now see those pipes?” he says.

  “Oh, come on,” I say. “Not the strawberries.”

  “Yeah.”

  The strawberry farm is dependent on recycled wastewater for its irrigation too.

  “Isn’t that neat?” he says. He bends at his knees and then pops up with a little clap. “You should be writing about a sewage treatment plant,” he says. “That’s where the action is.”

  There has been so much talk at this landfill about sewage, and apparently I can no longer avoid it. Joe and all the engineers here refer to it with a shrug. No big deal. This is just the way things work. Sewage water feeding flowers and strawberry plants. It has taken me a while to accept the notion that this, in fact, is the way things work.

  “Oh, just think about it,” Joe says. “What is a sewage treatment plant? It’s an apology to nature for putting too many people in one place.”

  He pauses, gives me a moment to mull that one over. He pulls his hat down to cut the sun. “Nature isn’t designed for us to live the way we do. Nature designed it more like the Native Americans had it: When the neighborhood started to smell, you picked up your tepee and went over there. There was some basic human rule that said you go thataway.” He points with both hands moving toward some imagined exit. “Primitive societies knew that nature would ultimately reclaim all that organic material so they could come back in a few years.”

  Nature gave us rain, streams, rivers, and the ocean to finish the job of digestion. “This is just a straight environmental-engineering calculation,” he says, heading back to the car, and he opens my door for me so I climb in.

  “Just about everybody in this country has one cubic foot of digester somewhere out there finishing the job that he or she couldn’t complete,” he says. “Your guts start the process and nature completes it. Now, where is that going to happen? If you let our sewage from this L.A. area with ten million people float into the ocean, you would have one really beat-up ocean.”

  With that, he throws the car into reverse, then starts driving down the mountain. He pulls over to a lookout spot where we get a good view of the sewage treatment plant in the distance, just over the I-605, tucked into the hills. I feel I should say something complimentary, but it looks like every gray, flat, giant, boring industrial building you’ve ever hated for marring the landscape.

  “We take the processes that occur in an ocean or a river and we do it in tanks,” he says. “The same bacteria that work in nature—basically a big bacterial soup that emulates what goes on in the ground or in a river—does the whole thing in a tank in a more concentrated fashion. So, instead of taking ten days in a river, we do it in eight hours inside a tank.”

  There is something vaguely utopian about all of this. A beautiful landfill blooming with pink flowers, wastewater feeding strawberries, fifty-eight megawatts of electricity out of garbage and sludge, hiking trails over trash. It would seem we were talking about an entirely different planet, not our own supposedly doomed one—where the sky is falling; where, because of our gluttony, we are in danger of making one final grand mess of the place, if not melting it or blowing it up. Those are all certainly viable outcomes. But there is more to the story: There are people on this very same planet having a rousing good time fixing the place, people motivated by the thrill of repair, the simple joy of invention, and an urge to do good.

  The more time I spend at the landfill, the more I get the sense that I’m in a different dimension, listening to more highly evolved beings that have been here all along but, somehow, nobody ever noticed.

  —

  I MEET UP WITH CAROL, the old lady who works the front gate and greets all the truckers who come in, starting with Herman each morning and then about three hundred more through the day. She is short, haggard, hunched over, with curls sprouting beneath a ball cap. The guard booth is a shack just big enough for Carol and her stool and her clip fan and her bag of birdseed. The shack has a back window opening to the landfill abutting it. This is the bottom of the landfill, the oldest layer of trash, nearly a half century of trash, and so trees and shrubs have long since taken over.

  “I started out with just doves, and now I got, like, six different kinds of birds,” she tells me. “Bright yellow, and a small one with red on its chest. In the morning I see deer, coyotes, bobcat, mountain lion, some owls, some hawks, rattlesnakes, rabbits, and squirrels. That’s the whole reason I like this place so much.”

  It is easily my biggest surprise, to hear so many people speak of enjoying nature as part of the landfill experience. What a weird and yet perfectly sensible link.

  “I hold my breath a lot when the small trucks without tops come in,” she says. “It doesn’t hit till after they pass. I’ll say, ‘Oooh, the poochie truck went by!’

  “I write poetry. I have to write the words down immediately or else I’ll lose them. I saw a wolf here once that inspired me. I wrote about his family. He kept searching for them and never found them. I called it ‘Long Lost Love.’”

  —

  IN THE END, I tour the newest building on the site, the Puente Hills Materials Recovery Facility, or MRF. I have been resisting this place. It could be because it looks so bland and sterile, like a mint-green shopping mall or a giant municipal office building, or it could simply be because I am reluctant to face my own responsibility in all of this. The MRF is to be the starting point of the Waste-by-Rail system; it’s where they’ll sort the trash, save and sell the good stuff, and then send only the unusable junk out on the expensive trip on the railways. Already the sorting has started, reclaiming some of the trash that would have ended up in the Puente Hills heap above.

  Nearly all of the engineers I meet boast about the MRF: how huge it is—large enough to house three 747s; how the design is environmentally friendly, with over five hundred skylights, and recycled materials used throughout the project, from structural and reinforcing steel to ceiling and floor tiles.

  Joe would like to highlight his own contribution: an observation deck where the public can come through and watch. “I insisted on this,” he says. “I said we have to be able to show people what’s happening to their trash.” He’s dressed today in a green flowered shirt, khaki shorts, and tennis shoes. He is excited to be here, like a man greeting a newcomer to his fancy new mansion. The observation deck is sleek and futuristic, a long glass corridor dimly lit by runway-style floor lights. Below us, the action of the MRF: Trucks pull in one end of the enormous building, dump garbage. Dozers move the garbage to the sorting floor, where bulky valuables, wood, carpet, and large chunks of cardboard are pulled out. This is commercial garbage intended for recycling—a minuscule fraction of L.A. County’s trash—but to Joe and his cronies it represents a beautiful outlook for, one day, all our trash. After the big stuff is picked out, the trash is sent via conveyor to an automated picking system and finally to the picking line, where teams of sorters—women wearing safety glasses and bandannas and surgical masks—pick, Lucille Ball style, through the trash. One grabs paper, one grabs clear plastic, one aluminum, and so on. The separated materials are baled and stacked, awaiting purchase.

  “Isn’t that impressive?” Joe says, hands on his hips, looking down.

  “Actually, I find it pretty depressing,” I say. I lean into the glass and my breath makes fog. I feel like Ebenezer Scrooge and Joe’s the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come pointing to where I’m headed: a world in which a whole lot of poor people have to pick through my garbage so the planet doesn’t suffocate. I sink, as perhaps anyone would, in
to recycle guilt.

  “I sort of feel like it shouldn’t have come to this,” I say.

  “Oh, forgodsakes, there’s no room for sentimentality,” he says, leading me to a bank of elevators.

  Americans recycle about one and a half pounds of the five pounds of trash they produce each day—a national recycling rate of 32 percent. This is actually not horrible when you figure that, in 1989, when a barge called the Mobro 4000 famously carried three thousand tons of unwanted trash up and down the East Coast. looking for a place to dump, our recycling rate was just 16 percent. That barge caught the public’s attention: We have no place to put our trash! California led the recycling charge, enacting a 1989 law that said its cities had to recycle 50 percent of their garbage by 2000. Today, San Francisco has a recycling rate of 69 percent, the best of any American city.

  The goal, in the larger and perhaps mythical sense, is 100 percent. Zero waste. The goal is to stop thinking of waste as a problem and to start thinking of it, simply, as the result of a design flaw in manufacturing: we should be reusing everything. “It’s just about closing the loop,” Joe says as we get into the elevator. “And maybe that starts with us first just getting hold of our gluttony. You know, we still have remnants of that old reptilian brain that tells us to just keep getting more, more, more in order to be happy.”