Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash

by Edward Humes

  Archaeologists love tells—and, particularly, the middens they usually conceal, those ancient trash dumps that, five thousand years later, provide a treasure trove of information about life and events in the distant past. Archaeologists long ago figured out that the real nature of human life isn’t that we are what we eat. They know we are best understood by what we throw away. Thousands of years from now, the Puente Hills landfill, buffered, insulated, wrapped in layers of clay and polyethylene, and more secure against earthquakes, winds and floods than any other structure in California, may serve a similar archaeological purpose, a tell for future researchers hoping to puzzle out our lifestyle, choices and beliefs. Certainly it will still be here after everything else is gone, an enduring monument holding the 102-ton legacies of millions of Angelenos. Landfills, Big Mike likes to say, are forever.

  For now, Puente Hills is a living, breathing landfill—with a deadly “breath” expelled in massive burps that must constantly be siphoned off or risk disaster, a reeking, highly explosive, climate-destroying exhalation capable of turning green grass brown in short order. This property of buried garbage proved a difficult lesson in the bad old days of trash disposal early in the twentieth century, when cities routinely used trash and ash to fill in swamps and mudflats. (Such areas were regarded as bothersome wastelands impeding progress back then; we call them irreplaceable, vital wetlands and endangered habitats now that we’ve destroyed most of them.) Housing projects, stadiums, parks and other developments that were planted atop early fills suffered from unexplained stenches, vermin infestations, swarms of roaches and, once decomposition had reached critical mass, methane fires and explosions. Long Island, San Francisco and a hundred other places in between all learned this the hard way: Trash can be deadly when you bury it. Puente Hills’s deep, aging refuse pile produces a constant flow of 31,000 cubic feet a minute of landfill gas (roughly half methane, half carbon dioxide, with traces of various pollutants mixed in). If allowed to bottle up within the landfill, it could turn Garbage Mountain into something resembling a fiery trash volcano. This is the flow that generates 50 megawatts of electricity around the clock and provides power for all landfill operations to boot. You’d have to cover 250 acres (or two and a half Disneylands) of sun-drenched Mojave Desert with parabolic mirrors to generate an equivalent output of solar power. At Puente Hills, the gas is expected to continue to flow for at least another twenty years after the landfill accepts its last piece of garbage.

  Which is another way of saying that Puente Hills is big. Really big. It covers 1,365 acres, half of that space devoted to buffer zone and (oddly enough) wildlife preserve. The other half—a plot about the size of New York City’s Central Park—is devoted strictly to trash, which by 2011 had reached heights greater than five hundred feet above the original ground level. If the trash mounds of Puente Hills were a high-rise, they would be among the twenty tallest skyscrapers in Los Angeles, beating out the MGM Tower, Fox Plaza and Los Angeles City Hall. Puente Hills is big enough to have its own microclimate and wind patterns, which the crews are constantly battling with berms and deodorizers and giant fans, trying to keep noxious odors from wafting through the surrounding bedroom communities of Whittier and Hacienda Heights.

  Landfills are usually thought of, when they are thought of at all, as out-of-the-way things. Nobody really wants to think about what they contain: Puente Hills harbors millions of tons of moldering old carpet, even more rotting food and a good 3 million tons of dirty disposable diapers—2.5 percent of the total landfill weight consists of soiled Pampers, Huggies and all the other sweet names for some very noxious refuse. The material that seeps out of it, a noxious brew called “leachate,” is so toxic that it has to be contained by multiple clay, plastic and concrete barriers, drainage systems and a network of testing wells just to keep it dammed and prevent it from poisoning groundwater supplies. The landfill workers didn’t start trying to restrain this toxic goop by putting down strata of waterproof plastic liners under incoming trash until 1988—almost no American landfill did. So there are millions of tons of garbage at the bottom, oozing downward, a closely monitored potential time bomb. Every landfill started before 1991, when tougher federal regulations finally kicked in to make liners a requirement, is the same.

  Yet this Garbage Mountain is not set in the hinterlands, neither out of sight nor out of mind. It lies smack in the middle of the most populous urban sprawl in America, the Los Angeles Basin, rising up to dominate its low-slung skyline for miles, a misshapen mound planted with thirty different species of trees and shrubs in a bold and ultimately futile attempt to mask its true nature.

  THE STATE OF GARBAGE IN AMERICA: WHERE DOES IT GO?

  THE STATE OF GARBAGE IN THE WORLD: WHERE DOES IT GO?

  PUENTE HILLS has been a trash destination for Los Angeles since the 1950s, back when it was an ordinary town dump—a rather small, scruffy one on the edge of a dairy farm. It wasn’t until 1983 that it would be christened as the future of trash in Los Angeles, a model facility and the solution to what was then declared by political leaders and press headlines to be a “garbage crisis.”

  The garbage crisis turns out to be something that has been declared with surprising regularity throughout human history. It usually involves the question: Where are we going to put all the trash? After a number of false starts and grandiose promises, Los Angeles’s leaders answered this question in 1983 by deciding (without actually saying so publicly): Let’s bury it all in a canyon on the edge of the San Gabriel Valley and slowly turn it into a garbage mountain. Among other things, this decision guaranteed that, in thirty years, when the canyon was full and the landfill’s state permit had lapsed, another crisis would erupt, involving the same exact question: Now where are we going to put all the trash?

  It would seem, then, that this is the wrong question to ask, at least if the goal is to permanently end the crisis rather than simply postpone a day of reckoning. After all, a landfill, by definition, will someday be full, and so all it does is enable the continued creation and flow of trash, rather than force a reconsideration of waste. A better question might be: Why do we have so much trash, and what might we do to make less of it? Eventually that question will have to be addressed somehow, as the cycle of crisis, finding a new place to hide trash, then returning to crisis cannot go on indefinitely. There simply are not enough affordable and convenient places for landfills left in many parts of the country to continue repeating the cycle indefinitely. Certainly there are no other spots in Los Angeles to put another Puente Hills. That’s part of the reason why the number of landfills and city dumps in America has dwindled from more than sixteen thousand authorized disposal sites in 1970 (along with ten times as many illegal dumps)2 to just over 1,200 sanitary landfills in 2011. The old sites are long since buried, capped over and, in several hundred instances, slated for extensive hazardous waste cleanup through the federal Superfund program.3 The lack of local landfill space is also why Los Angeles is stuck with a plan conceived in boom times but untenable in a recession to use very expensive trains to transport trash two hundred miles into a neighboring county’s deep desert beginning in 2013. People are, unsurprisingly, referring to this prospect as—you guessed it—a garbage crisis.

  To put this in perspective, the very first documented trash crisis dates back 2,500 years to the ancient Greek capital of Athens, where city fathers grew alarmed by citizens’ habit of hurling their refuse out of windows and doors where it clogged alleys, streets and walkways (a common practice in ancient cities and, until relatively recently, almost every modern city). The resulting hazard, filth, disease and odor led those forward-thinking Greeks (who by then had already invented democracy, geometry, the Olympics, trial by jury, atomic theory and the Oedipal complex) to legislate into existence one of their most copied innovations, the municipal dump—the first in recorded history. They accompanied it with a law forbidding the disposal of garbage within one mile of the city limits, initiating the world’s first anti-litter campaign.<
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  Like so many other ancient advances, however, the Athenians’ foray into the art of the landfill got mixed reviews (you try walking your trash a mile with only Bronze Age technology at your disposal). Soon the concept was lost and largely forgotten as the old practice of fouling the urban nest resumed from antiquity through the Middle Ages and beyond. The ancient Romans had some very advanced sewers and indoor toilets (using reclaimed bath water to provide the flush—another ancient first), which Pliny, author of the first encyclopedia, rated as ancient Rome’s “most noteworthy” accomplishment. Archaeologists have found subterranean vaults in the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum (later buried along with nearby Pompeii by volcanic eruption) filled with ossified feces and small items of trash (pottery fragments, fish bones and other detritus from a pre-plastic world), suggesting the citizens of the Roman Empire used their advanced plumbing as something of a garbage disposal as well as a human waste repository. But this was not matched by any sort of house-to-house garbage collection or town dumps, and trash, primarily food waste and broken ceramics, accumulated in alleys and streets. Eventually, the layers of refuse became the foundation for stepping-stones, then new structures built atop the rubbish, gradually raising entire cities’ elevations. (Bronze Age Troy provides a particularly dramatic ancient example of this process, as rubbish raised that city’s average elevation at a rate of four to six feet per century.)

  The town dump concept finally found official resurrection in the 1300s, when the French linked trash accumulation not to sanitation but to national security. It seems the mounds of stinking debris piled at the gates of Paris made it difficult for the city’s defenders to spot approaching invaders, leading to a sensible new mandate to dump large items of trash farther off, keeping the gateways—and sight lines for spotting advancing enemy hordes—clear of debris. Unfortunately, this change in disposal rules did not extend to the Parisians’ tout à la rue—all in the street—method of dumping everyday garbage in parts of the city well inside the city gates. The age-old practice had the unintended consequence of providing ample breeding grounds for the rats that carried the fleas that carried bubonic plague. Garbage, then, played a significant supporting role in the Black Death that decimated Europe not long after the great Parisian gate clearing.

  Since then, the Old and New World trash policies have bounced from crisis to crisis, controversy to controversy—marked by battles over the practice of letting pigs roam city centers to devour garbage strewn on the streets, over dumping city trash in the ocean (the Supreme Court had to weigh in on that one in 1934 to save New Jersey beaches from floating New York refuse), over the smog generated by thousands of backyard trash incinerators in the Los Angeles Basin, over landfills that leaked awful odors into the air and toxins into water supplies, even over asking homeowners to separate their trash by type to aid recycling, a practice first instituted more than a century ago in New York City. Los Angeles mayor Sam Yorty won office in 1960 in large part by campaigning on a one-home, one-trash-bin platform that put an end to compulsory refuse and recyclables separation by homeowners, setting the cause of recycling back decades. There was the Virginia Garbage War of 1894, when irate residents of Alexandria began sinking trash barges on the Potomac to keep other people’s refuse from entering town, and a century later, there were the Los Angeles Garbage Power Wars, in which community opposition scotched plans to replace old landfills with giant electrical generating stations that burned trash for fuel. Similar conflicts continue to brew today, as disagreements erupt over whether trash should be buried or burned; recycled at taxpayer expense or returned to manufacturers as their responsibility; shipped to distant landfills or accepted from distant countries (with Tennessee making its mark by welcoming, then incinerating, thousands of tons of radioactive waste from Germany and England). The same old question continues to animate the debate: Where are we going to put the trash now? Our entire elaborate waste collection, transportation and disposal system has for a century been built around this question, and the illusion that everyone’s 102-ton legacy can be picked up piece by piece, week by week, and made to disappear, when in reality we have been building mountains with it.

  EVERY MORNING, Monday through Saturday, a continual line of trash trucks come to Garbage Mountain to dump their loads, filing into the weighing station at the main gate, nine giant scales capable of measuring gargantuan loads (total weight minus the weight of an empty truck times $38 per ton equals the price of entry in 2011). Then there are the radiation detectors to stop the illegal dumping of radioactive waste (they’re looking for low-level medical trash and similar materials, not terrorism-grade stuff). There are also random searches of trucks to screen for other hazardous and toxic materials, which are forbidden at Puente Hills, though they invariably sneak in—the alkaline batteries and half-full paint cans and aerosol bug spray cans that get slipped into garbage bins, and sometimes bigger and worse chemicals and substances.

  Once through the gates, the scales and the screening, the trash trucks wind their way up to the foot of the new cell. Temporary roads for these garbage haulers are built of broken asphalt and other construction debris at the garbage mountain summit, where the active cell sits on a plateau of raw, naked dirt. The surface here is pounded and pulverized to a fine texture by the passing BOMAGs and dozers and other heavy vehicles. This dirt “skin” is a big part of why Puente Hills is not called a “dump” anymore, but is instead a “sanitary landfill.” This technique was pioneered in the thirties at a dump in Fresno (now a national historic site) and perfected by the Army during World War II, though it was not widely adopted throughout the U.S. until the sixties and seventies. The dirt covers the trash buried beneath, sealing it in along with its aromas. “You’re standing on top of five hundred feet of trash,” one engineer observes, gesturing at the land, the enormous equipment, pretty much everything in sight, all of it atop a Grand Canyon filled with trash. His proud smile mirrors the expression mountain climbers often display after achieving some impossible summit. “Impressive, isn’t it?”

  Tanker trucks filled with recycled waste water drive in big, lazy orbits around the gritty plateau where the new cell is being built, spraying down the dirt to keep the dust clouds at bay, so the constant churn of big equipment doesn’t send billowing brown clouds down into the neighborhoods below. Bulldozers erect a berm all around the cell to screen the sight and sounds from annoying the neighbors, too.

  As the cell is filled, trenches are dug to accommodate lengths of wide plastic pipes that will be buried with the garbage and collect the landfill gas emitted as it rots. This in-trash plumbing is then connected to the web of pipes snaking across the surface of Garbage Mountain. Back in the eighties, the Puente Hills engineers decided to break with landfill tradition and stop merely “flaring” the gas—the practice of burning it inside a giant torch to keep the raw methane from entering the atmosphere, where it becomes a potent greenhouse gas—and instead put it to use for power generation. They soon ran into the same problem others had encountered when trying to mine energy from landfill gas: Over time, as the trash in the landfill decomposed and settled under its own weight, the pipes would crack, crush and break. The ingenious, low-tech solution—adopted first at Puente Hills, now employed all over the world—was to use plastic pipes of varying diameters and fit them together loosely, with plenty of overlap, like arms in a sleeve. As the trash mound settles, the pipe sections can move up and down at different rates and angles without damage, yet stay connected. Pumping stations create a slight vacuum inside this subterranean plumbing, which sucks the landfill gas in through those same loose joints and carries it to the surface, where the bristling network of pipes crisscrosses the surface of Garbage Mountain, resembling more than anything the big overhead heating ducts in open-ceilinged warehouse stores. Not only does this system provide an admirable fuel for electrical generation, it provides the added benefit of piping away a major source of landfill stink—the sulfuric smell of rotten eggs.

  The
smell close to the newly dumped raw, exposed garbage is another matter. It speaks of the moldering, sodden and swollen perfume of early rot—the amalgam of smells characteristic of any well-used trash can opened on a hot summer day, times a million or so. But mostly, there is surprisingly little of the scent of putrescence atop Garbage Mountain. This is because, each day, once the last load of trash has been dumped, clawed, pushed and crushed, the new cell is covered over with that six- to twelve-inch skin of clean dirt mined from a nearby “natural” hill, burying the stink with the trash, along with anything that might attract vermin or seagulls. Old-style dumps were rat havens, but the modern landfill operators are confident that they offer little hospitality for scavenging rodents, thanks to the crushing force of the BOMAG coupled with the dirt cap. This confidence was put to the test a few years back, when some enterprising landfill engineers fitted four rats with radio transmitters and released them into the fill. Three were done in within an hour—presumed crushed and buried; the fourth met its doom in less than a day.

  Seagulls are another story: Their garbage-loving traits are the bane of landfill workers everywhere, as the birds amass wherever the smell and sight of human debris can be found. They are particularly despised for their habit of scooping up garbage in their beaks, flying off to get away from their fellow scavengers, then dueling in aerial battles during which some offensive piece of garbage is invariably dropped. All too often this little garbage bomb lands in a nearby residential area.

  Homeowners are quick to call and complain when some odorous hunk of rotting meat ends up festooning their hydrangea beds or rose gardens or kid’s swing set. Landfill workers must therefore take daily precautions against the marauding flocks of gulls—stringing fishing line from movable poles surrounding the cell each day, which disturbs the gulls’ flight patterns. Seagulls instinctively glide to a landing in long approaches, which the fishing line seems to impede. The gulls’ vision, more sensitive to ultraviolet light than that of humans, is believed to perceive the fine monofilament line as a disturbingly bright blue barrier, though it is almost invisible to human eyes.4 Whatever the reason, the lines do seem to stop or at least slow the seagulls’ access to the active cell and the prized garbage within. They perch nearby, though, eyeing the fresh, smelly trash balefully, squawking and flapping but for the most part foiled as Big Mike zooms by, putting the trash to rest. Sometimes, though, the gulls find a way in, and for those occasions, the landfill guardians have guns that fire noisy blanks and two remote-controlled airplanes that buzz the seagulls and drive them off (and yes, everybody wants a turn to fly the planes). But that’s just a sideshow to the action at center stage, where Big Mike and his cohorts are constructing Los Angeles’s mightiest, if unintended, monument.