by Edward Humes
Then there’s the wallet issue. Trash is such a big part of daily life that American communities spend more on waste management than on fire protection, parks and recreation, libraries or schoolbooks. If it were a product, trash would surpass everything else we manufacture. And guess what? It has become a product—America’s leading export.
That’s the secret behind the story of Zhang Yin, another sort of hoarder, one who is admired rather than pitied. In 2006, she became at age forty-nine China’s first woman billionaire. In 2011, she was both China’s top female manufacturer and America’s biggest exporter to China (of either gender). Her export: America’s garbage. In both East and West, she is the queen of trash.
Zhang is also the personification of the American Dream in the twenty-first century, a Horatio Alger for a disposable economy. Fleeing the Tiananmen Square massacre and democracy movement crackdown of 1989, she left China for the Los Angeles suburb of Pomona, where she started running a scrap-paper company out of her apartment. The entire workforce at first consisted of Zhang and her new husband, a Taiwanese immigrant trained as a dental surgeon. They would drive around the Los Angeles Basin in an old Dodge van, visiting landfills and their sorting and recycling stations, begging for scrap paper. Learning English as she built the business, Zhang cut a series of deals to secure a steady source of the waste paper at a bargain price. There was no shortage of material. Then, as now, paper waste was one of the main components of trash dumped at landfills. American businesses considered much of the material worthless.
China, on the other hand, had a chronic paper and pulp shortage, having deforested huge swaths of the country during the drive to industrialize in the late fifties and early sixties—“the Great Leap Forward,” as it was called. In the nineties, as manufacturing ramped up and China joined the global economy in earnest, there was enormous demand for cardboard to package and box the goods that China had begun to produce. The scrap paper Zhang amassed was just what the Chinese factories needed—they’d recycle all she could send them. Because cargo ships were coming to America from China full and returning mostly empty, Zhang was able to negotiate bargain-basement shipping costs to her native land.
Soon she had deals with recyclers and brokers all over Los Angeles, New York and Chicago to fill the voracious demand. “Chinese manufacturers were desperate for scrap paper,” she recalled years later. “I’m an entrepreneur … All I did was help fulfill a need.”
That’s probably a bit too modest. The daughter of a Red Army officer imprisoned during China’s Cultural Revolution, she managed to see an opportunity that American entrepreneurs had missed. She filled China’s paper needs so thoroughly that, beginning in the year 2000 and every year since, her company, America Chung Nam, has been the top U.S. exporter to China in number of cargo containers shipped—and the largest scrap-paper company in the world, an empire of trash built from scratch. She used the earnings—and America’s scrap—to launch what is now China’s largest cardboard manufacturer, Nine Dragons Paper; by 2010, she was worth $4.4 billion.
Zhang is a big part of a simple but rarely acknowledged fact about America’s place in the twenty-first-century global economy: Trash has become one of the most prized products made in the USA. Not computers. Not cars. Not planes or missiles or any other manufactured product. It’s our mountains of waste paper and soiled cardboard and crushed beer cans and junked electronics that the rest of the world covets.
In 2010, China’s number one export to the U.S. was computer equipment—about $50 billion worth.9 America’s two highest volume exports to China were paper waste and scrap metal, a little more than $8 billion worth of bundled old newspaper, crushed cardboard, rusty steel and mashed beverage cans sold at rock-bottom prices. Zhang’s America Chung Nam exported more than three hundred thousand cargo containers of scrap paper to China in 2010. Overall, the fastest-growing category of goods exported to China is “Scrap and Trash,” increasing 916 percent between 2000 and 2008.10 Chinese manufacturers promptly develop new and aggressively priced consumer products made from this waste, which they then sell back to American consumers at great profit, so we can trash it all again in a year or two and send it back once more for pennies on the dollar. Waste, it seems, is becoming one of our greatest contributions to the global economy.
Somehow, without ballot or poll or any explicit decision by presidents or legislators or voters to do so, America, a country that once built things for the rest of the world, has transformed itself into China’s trash compactor.
This sobering economic reality is mirrored by a telling observation from, of all sources, America’s astronaut corps: There are only two man-made structures large enough to be clearly visible and identifiable from earth orbit. First, there’s the mighty Great Wall of China in the East, symbol of a past power risen again. And in the West, there’s a newer thing, the grimly named Fresh Kills, recognizable above all other things American.
Fresh Kills is the world’s largest town dump, the recently shuttered repository for a half century’s accumulation of New York City garbage.
ANY ATTEMPT to understand the 102-ton legacy—and what can (or should) be done about it—has to begin with answers to three very basic (yet rarely posed) questions. As it happens, these are the same three questions extreme hoarders such as the Gastons must confront if they wish to change their trash-laden circumstances:
First there’s the most obvious of inquiries: What is the nature and cost of that 102-ton monument of waste?
Next comes the soul-searching question: How is it possible for people to create so much waste without intending to do so, or even realizing they are doing it?
Finally, there’s the “what next?” question: Is there a way back from the 102-ton legacy, and what would that do for us … or to us?
Problem, investigation, solution: It’s the classic three-act construction that the human brain has been hardwired to prefer—and as good an organizing principle as any for a book about trash. Three sections, three broad questions, each equally important, but it’s the third piece of the story, the quest for a way back, that is key. That’s the question that allows the 102-ton story to become a voyage of discovery, offering the possibility that all those tons of garbage might be a choice rather than an inevitability—and an opportunity as well as a bane. That’s the question that offers the possibility of a happy ending to the story of trash.
Oddly enough, it’s the hoarders, once again, who can help show us the way back. The Gastons understood far better than their neighbors that our prevailing definition of waste is all wrong. They saw that putting something in the trash is not really a matter of disposing of waste, of something with no value. Trash to them is the physical manifestation of wastefulness. The hoarders’ response to this essential insight—that trash is really treasure squandered—is twisted and unhealthful, but their instinct to place value on garbage is sound and sane. Of course, the more constructive response would be not to hoard, but to find ways to avoid the wasteful accumulation in the first place. That’s the great challenge, the holy grail that has so far eluded mankind, dating all the way back to the first town dump and anti-littering law in ancient Greece. The upside of this picture: There is a small but growing number of businesspeople, environmentalists, communities and families who see in our trash the biggest untapped opportunity of the century.
These trash optimists range from the city of Portland, which may be the least wasteful city in America, to TerraCycle, the business champion of “upcycling” (the reuse/repurpose opposite of recycling), to the trash artists of San Francisco and the trash czar at Harvard University who each year turns the stuff students abandon in the dorms into one of the biggest and most successful yard sales in America. And there’s the Johnson family, who proved they could live an outwardly normal year and yet produce only a mason jar full of trash.
Bea Johnson, a Marin County, California, artist who set her family of four on this quest, wonders what would have happened if the massive infrastructure Americ
a has constructed to deal with trash had been predicated all along on avoiding waste and recapturing its value, rather than transporting, burying and occasionally recycling its epic quantities. Would America still be evolving into China’s trash compactor? Would there even be a 102-ton legacy? “What would life look like then?” she muses. “What would it mean for the economy, for the entire world?”
Johnson (you’ll read more about her trash epiphany later) is the opposite of a hoarder—she’s all about avoiding the accumulation of things, particularly disposable things, and living the uncluttered life. Or as she calls it, the unwasteful life. She says people, even friends, question her sanity, but the Johnson family has discovered that generating less waste translates into more money, less debt, more leisure time, less stress. When they give gifts, they don’t give things—they give experiences. No wrapping paper required. She says they’ve never been happier.
“When you stop wasting, everything changes,” she says. “There is a way back. And if it can work for a family, it can work for a country. It could be the answer we’ve all been waiting for.”
AN AMERICAN ANNUAL WASTE SAMPLER
5.7 million tons of carpet sent to landfills—all of it could be recycled, but mostly it’s not
19 billion pounds of polystyrene peanuts (Styrofoam) dumped—never degrades, impossible to recycle
35 billion plastic bottles
40 billion plastic knives, forks and spoons
4.5 million tons of office paper
Enough aluminum to rebuild the entire commercial air fleet four times over
Enough steel to level and restore Manhattan
Enough wood to heat 50 million homes for twenty years
Enough plastic film to shrink-wrap Texas
Plastic waste is so plentiful and so carelessly treated that 92 percent of Americans have potentially harmful plastic chemicals in their urine
10 percent of the world oil supply is used to make and transport disposable plastics
Growing, shipping and selling food destined to be thrown away uses more energy than is currently produced by offshore oil drilling
No less than 28 billion pounds of food thrown away, about 25 percent of the American food supply, perhaps more by some estimates
PART
1
THE BIGGEST THING WE MAKE
Our willingness to part with something before it is completely worn out is a phenomenon noticeable in no other society in history … It must be further nurtured even though it runs contrary to one of the oldest inbred laws of humanity, the law of thrift.
—J. GORDON LIPPINCOTT, 1947
A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste, and such a society is a house built upon sand.
—DOROTHY L. SAYERS, 1947
Who steals my purse steals trash.
—IAGO, IN SHAKESPEARE’S Othello
1
AIN’T NO MOUNTAIN HIGH ENOUGH
MIKE SPEISER’S SCULPTING TECHNIQUE IS A STUDY in geometric perfection and economy of motion. Every cut, every shave, every subtle drag of his blade has a purpose, each forming a small piece of a much larger work, sprawling and unique.
His peers call him Big Mike, for he is a mountain of a man, shaved head set like an amiable boulder atop broad shoulders and a mighty belly, six-two and more than three hundred pounds. He seems designed by central casting exactly for the purpose of wielding his main artistic tool—the towering, thundering 60-ton BOMAG Compactor. With its roaring, clanking assistance, Big Mike has helped build something unprecedented: the Puente Hills landfill, largest active municipal dump in the country.
Puente Hills is so sprawling that it has evolved its own ecosystem and nature preserve, spawned multiple community organizations formed to kill it, and holds enough strata of methane-spewing decomposing garbage to power a hundred thousand homes (which is exactly what is done with the eye-watering “landfill gas” bubbling up from beneath). Puente Hills has been the final resting place for the lion’s share of Los Angeles County’s ample daily flow of garbage for more than three decades—130 million tons of it and counting.
One hundred thirty million tons: Such a number is hard to grasp. Here’s one way to picture it: If Puente Hills were an elephant burial ground, its tonnage would represent about 15 million deceased pachyderms—equivalent to every living elephant on earth, times twenty. If it were an automobile burial ground, it could hold every car produced in America for the past fifteen years.
It is, quite literally, a mountain of garbage.
Big Mike’s German-made BOMAG is the primary tool for taming this garbage nexus. The BOMAG (derived from the German-language mouthful of a company name, Bopparder Maschinenbau-Gesellschaft) is a fourteen-foot-tall, thirty-foot-long, swivel-hipped bulldozer that can turn on a dime yet push its terrain-clearing blade with 100,000 pounds of force. Its six-foot wheels are spiked with dinosaur-sized steel teeth that can crush, mold and squeeze up to 13,000 tons of garbage into a fifteen-foot-deep rectangle the length and width of a football field.
Big Mike sculpts such a mound not in a month or a week, but in one glorious day, every day, as he and his colleagues dump, push, carve and build a pinnacle of trash where once there were canyons. He is king of a mountain built of old tricycles and bent board games, yellowed newspapers and bulging plastic bags, sewage sludge and construction debris—all the detritus, discards and once valuable tokens of modern life and wealth, reduced to an amorphous, dense amalgam known as “fill.”
The football-field-sized plot at the center of activity atop Puente Hills is called a “cell,” not in the prison-block sense, but more akin to the tiny biological unit, many thousands of which are needed to create a single, whole organism. As with living creatures, this cell, titanic as it is, represents a small building block for the modern landfill—the part that grows and reproduces each day. A dozen BOMAGs, bulldozers and graders swarm over this fresh fill every day, backing and turning and mashing and shaping, their warning gongs clanging and engines roaring in a controlled chaos, mammoth bees crawling atop the hive. Their curved steel blades raise up and blot the sun, then drop into the sea of trash and push it forward, waves of debris flowing off either side as if the dozers’ blades were the prows of a schooner fleet, complete with the flap and quarrel of seagulls overhead, their cranky squawks drowned out by the diesel din. A sickly-sweet smell of decay kicks up when the cell is churned this way, and the thrum and grind of the big engines can be felt in the ground near the cell. The noise induces sympathetic vibrations in the chest of anyone nearby, creating the uncomfortable sensation of being near a marching band with too many bass drummers.
Building a garbage mountain is difficult, edgy, dangerous work. Within the new cell, the trash flow can pile up twenty to thirty feet or more during the day before it’s crushed and compacted and covered with clean dirt (that’s what makes it a sanitary landfill—the ick gets buried every day). The drivers negotiating and moving that cell-in-the-making must constantly be wary of the drop-off from their garbage pile—and the uncontrolled, possibly tumbling sled ride that tipping over the edge could bring about. Eight landfill workers nationwide died on the job in 2010.
To build a proper trash mountain, one that is a feat of engineering rather than a random aggregation of garbage, each cell must be level at the top so it can be covered and sealed with up to a foot of soil, the last task of any day at the landfill. The machine operators rely on laser-guided markers to keep their mound level, except for Big Mike, who seems to be able to do it by dead reckoning alone. His coworkers say he can visualize the final form of a field of compacted trash the way an artist can see the carving within the block of wood or the figure hiding inside the marble. A member of Puente Hills’s team of waste engineers, guys with hard hats and clipboards who plot out each day of garbage burial with the same care and planning once lavished on an Egyptian mummy’s tomb, glances one morning at a section of new fill and
says, “Oh, look at that perfect edge—that’s Big Mike’s work. That’s his style.” The other engineers nod.
Later, Mike grins sheepishly when he hears about the compliment. He’s forty-eight and has been doing this for twenty years. The little fang earrings he sports jiggle a little with his chuckle. “I do love my work,” he says. “Where else can you accomplish something every day, see the progress right in front of you, and know you’re doing something useful and good? And on top of that, it’s fun. Where else are you going to drive a hundred and twenty thousand pounds of machine around all day and get paid for doing it?”
His life’s work is the mother of all landfills, its innovations and pioneering techniques copied and studied. But in truth, calling it a landfill these days is a bit misleading, as it stopped physically “filling” a depression in the land (the original definition of landfill) long ago. For quite some time, the garbage mountain of Puente Hills has been rising above its surrounding terrain, resembling nothing more than a huge and eerily modern version of an ancient tell—those giant mounds in the Middle Eastern deserts that mark where once-mighty cities rose and fell, and that now lie buried and broken beneath the sands.