Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash

by Edward Humes

  CARD OF INSTRUCTION FOR HOUSEHOLDERS

  Put into Garbage Receptacles

  Kitchen or Table Waste, Vegetables, Meats, Fish, Bones, Fat.

  Put into Ash Receptacles

  Ashes, Sawdust, Floor and Street Sweepings, Broken Glass, Broken Crockery, *Oyster and Clam Shells, Tin Cans.

  Put into Rubbish Bundles†

  Bottles, Paper, Pasteboard, etc. Rags, Mattresses, Old Clothes, Old Shoes, Leather Scrap, Carpets, Tobacco Stems, Straw and Excelsior (from households only).

  *Note. Where there is a quantity of shells, as at a restaurant, they must be hauled to the dump by the owner.

  †All rubbish such as described in this third column must be securely bundled and tied, or it will not be removed.

  Reverse of card

  It is forbidden by city ordinance to throw any discarded scrap or article into the street, or paper, newspapers, etc., ashes, dirt, garbage, banana skins, orange peel, and the like. The Sanitary Code requires householders and occupants to provide separate receptacles for ashes and garbage, and forbids mixing these in the same receptacle. This law will be strictly enforced.

  For there was an unintended consequence of Waring’s success: New York experienced the retreat of civic outrage and, all too soon, a return in the very next turn of the election cycle of the old Tammany regime. The streets were clean and the scoundrels were voted back in.

  Waring’s appointment ended with the ouster of the mayor who had given him command over New York’s trash. He departed his White Wing militia and agreed to lead the construction of a sewer system for Havana, Cuba, where waterborne diseases were then rampant. While completing that task, he contracted a fatal case of yellow fever and died soon after returning home.

  Those who predicted the end of his tenure would mark a resumption of the bad old days turned out to be mistaken, at least in part. Even without his doleful, demanding, ramrod military presence, New York City streets never returned to their old depths of squalor. Even the most venal ward heelers had come to understand that they could not survive long in office should there be a return to the knee-deep “corporation pudding,” as New Yorkers derisively termed the muck on the streets that the White Wings had cleared away.

  So Waring’s successors stuck with the most visible of the colonel’s ideas. They even pioneered a major innovation: the first waste-by-rail project. Electric trolleys were enlisted to streamline the disposal of the massive amounts of coal and wood ash generated daily by the city’s residents and factories, a stream to which all sorts of other garbage soon were added. A growing city found a new use for this waste: Hauled to a massive ash dump on Barren Island in Jamaica Bay, the refuse was then used to fill in New York marshlands that were subsequently covered over to build houses and marinas. Once that effort was complete and no more waste could be squeezed onto Barren Island, a new ash repository opened—the Corona Dump in Queens, where the massive amounts of toxin-laden ash and assorted other trash were again used as landfill to reclaim salt marshes for development. When that was done, the black and gray waste accumulated into a smoldering mountain of ash ninety feet high, a fetid, volcanic landscape. The place was depicted by F. Scott Fitzgerald as “the Valley of Ashes” in The Great Gatsby. In one of the most celebrated literary commentaries on waste and the unintended consequences of American industrialization, Fitzgerald called the dump:

  a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the form of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.

  IN AN early demonstration of the potential value and longevity of even the most repulsive landfills, the Valley of Ashes and “ash mountain,” as the looming peak of cinders and garbage had been nicknamed, became a golf course and country club with the dump masked by the thinnest of disguises, the ash heap literally looming over the fairways. Only the politically wired Tammany Hall business kingpin who owned the dump could have managed such a juxta-position, especially given that the land was so contaminated it had to be doused daily with disinfectants for the protection of the golfers. The city eventually bought the dump property in the 1930s, and workers leveled the golf course and the entire cinder mountain. Then they covered over the wasteland and planted it as a park. In short order the dump site became the scene of the celebration of the 150th anniversary of George Washington’s presidential inauguration—a little affair better known as the World’s Fair of 1939.

  The enormous Corona Dump by then had been rebranded Flushing Meadows. Over two years, more than 44 million visitors flocked to Flushing Meadows to view “the world of tomorrow” on display at the fair where, among other things, they witnessed the burial of a time capsule holding the writings of Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann, a Mickey Mouse watch, a selection of seeds and a pack of Camel cigarettes. It was sealed for five thousand years and buried fifty feet below ground into the residue of the Corona Dump.

  The site also hosted the 1964 World’s Fair a quarter century later, with its iconic, twelve-story Unisphere statue of the earth still marking the spot. The National Tennis Center, where the U.S. Open grand slam tournament is held annually, is now located atop the former dump, as is a park, a zoo, two lakes (one for sailing), a golf course, the Queens Museum of Art, the New York Hall of Science, the now-demolished home of the Mets baseball team, Shea Stadium, and its successor, Citi Field. The Valley of Ashes may still lurk deep below—landfills really are forever—and the park’s twin artificial lakes are plagued with pollutants, but few who walk the pleasant grasses of Flushing Meadows or watch the Mets in their state-of-the-art ballpark have a clue.

  Although the ash had a place and a purpose in the aftermath of Waring’s reign, the ocean dumping he had tried to end resumed for other types of garbage for another three decades. That was the end of his early reuse-repurpose-recycle experiment. Compared to Waring’s painstaking sorting and recycling process, using the ocean as a trash bin was cheap and easy, especially when the prevailing tides made it New Jersey’s problem—at least until the U.S. Supreme Court held New York City liable for damages and forbade the practice in the 1930s. (This ruling applied only to the “public nuisance” of residential garbage dumped in the ocean. In a decision that was perfectly logical legally and yet makes absolutely no sense outside the courthouse, the Supreme Court exempted businesses and industry from its ruling, giving them a free pass on marine dumping and pollution for decades longer.)

  Still, Waring’s influence extended beyond both the boundaries of New York and his time in office, and his methods were widely copied. Within a decade, a majority of American cities had created sanitation departments modeled on New York’s, an enduring reform. Others were not so long-lasting. More than 180 incinerators were built in the belief they were the quickest fix for dealing with trash. But most were shut down within a decade because of unexpectedly high costs, overhyped yet under-performing technology and horrendous pollution. The reduction plants where garbage was stewed to produce grease and fertilizer remained in vogue a bit longer than incinerators, but they were so noxious, contaminating air and water supplies, that they, too, were soon abandoned, with nearly all of them shut down by the time of the Great Depression. In many ways, waste management returned to ground zero: It was all about finding places to put the trash.

  But not everywhere: Some of Waring’s ideas struck a potent chord in Los Angeles, which became more enamored of trash incineration than almost any other city in America. In a region where most every home had a backyard—unlike the dense streets and tenements of old New York and other East Coast cities—backyard incinerators soon were considered a veritable birthright and a necessity. Businesses and factories began burning their trash as well. What couldn’t be burned was hauled by private trash collectors and scavengers to open dumps scattered around the Los Angeles area, where burning was also used to keep the trash volume down.

  The predictable result o
f making bonfires out of trash, given the characteristic wind patterns of the Los Angeles Basin that trap and concentrate fumes and smoke of all kinds, sparked the dawn of the age of smog. It’s been largely forgotten, but L.A.’s worst-in-the-nation air quality woes long preceded California’s famous car culture. By 1903, the choking haze had gotten so bad that citizens woke up one day convinced that they were experiencing an eclipse of the sun. Decades later, the rise of the automobile multiplied the incipient smog problem. Then the air grew markedly worse during World War II, when defense plants, naval yards, the aviation industry and other heavy manufacturing expanded rapidly in the Los Angeles area as part of the war effort and the postwar boom times, contributing their own factory emissions along with greater amounts of waste to be burned. In the space of five years, Los Angles went from the ninth largest American city to third on the list, and many of the newcomers happily joined the ranks of the backyard trash burners. Yet the connection between the poor air quality and public infatuation with setting fire to garbage never seemed to sink in. It was the factories that bore the brunt of blame on July 26, 1943, Los Angeles’s infamous “Black Monday,” when noxious fumes engulfed downtown, choking pedestrians and reducing visibility to three blocks. But when a reviled chemical plant thought to be responsible halted operations, nothing changed. The smog and stench continued. For decades.

  New York City had an analogous crisis in this same era, as incineration made a big comeback there after World War II as well. At its height in the fifties and sixties, New York boasted more than seventeen thousand apartment-building incinerators and twenty-two big municipal incinerators gobbling up a third of New York’s waste—and casting a pall of smoke and soot throughout the city. The city council banned most of the residential incinerators in 1971, and public pressure soon shut down the municipal plants as well in favor of landfilling, first at Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, then out of state.

  Several studies in 1950 by Los Angeles County health officials sensibly and correctly attributed the growth of L.A. smog to multiple sources, with trash pinpointed as a major culprit: backyard incinerators, open burning of waste at dumps and incineration of sawmill waste. Following votes by county supervisors and the state legislature, delayed but ultimately undeterred by lawsuits from business interests and chambers of commerce who asserted a constitutional right to pollute air and water, the first local pollution control district in the nation opened for business in 1950. All smokestack facilities in the Los Angeles area were regulated with pollution permits and gradually tightening emission limits. The new pollution police were able to ban open burning at dumps, reduce heavy smoke plumes from factories and order oil refineries to cut noxious sulfur dioxide emissions long before federal officials acted (or had the power to act) on air quality. Next, gas pumps were refitted with the now common hose sleeves that keep damaging gasoline vapors from polluting the air. The local pollution control districts eventually evolved into the regional air quality management districts in place in California today—a system that pioneered most major advances in air pollution control that are now nationally ubiquitous, from cleaner fuels to catalytic converters to modern electric cars.

  BACKYARD TRASH BURNING FACTS

  Emits dangerous levels of dioxins, poisonous and cancer-causing compounds formed by low-temperature, smoky, inefficient combustion. Dioxins have no human uses or value, and are not made intentionally.

  Emits soot and fine particulates, which can cause emphysema and lung cancer and aggravate asthma and other lung ailments.

  Emits polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which can be highly toxic, have been linked to cancer and can cause birth defects or fetal death.

  Twenty families burning trash in their backyard put out more cancer-causing dioxins than a modern industrial facility that burns the trash of 150,000 families.

  In 1987, industry accounted for about four-fifths of total dioxin emissions in the U.S. By 2010, dioxin emissions were reduced by a factor of thirteen because of industrial pollution controls. But of the dioxin emissions that remained, home trash burning was responsible for nearly two-thirds of them.

  But when it came to the three hundred thousand to half million backyard incinerators in Los Angeles, the so-called Smokey Joes, and the estimated 500 tons of sooty, toxic air pollutants they churned out each day, the story was different. People simply did not want to give them up.

  FOR DECADES, Angelenos had been encouraged and expected to incinerate their trash. It wasn’t just convenient, they had been told, it was a civic duty, a way of avoiding costly trash collection services, taxes and bills. They did not want to give up their burn barrels and piles of smoking rubbish, and they let their elected officials know it. The thinking was that a bit of soot and smoke in the backyard couldn’t possibly be as big a problem as massive refineries, factories and freeways full of cars. Besides, where would all the trash go? What would it cost? Who would pay? Public sentiment clearly tilted in favor of letting officials address the perceived bigger smog culprits first, the smokestacks and the tailpipes, while leaving those deceptively small backyard burners alone. And so the incinerators would not go gently.

  Neither did the million filthy, soot-covered smudge pots that orange growers and other farmers employed to protect crops from freezing overnight, burning old crankcase oil, discarded tires—anything cheap and combustible, which always meant dirty and toxic. It took years to convince them to switch to cleaner devices and fuels, due to the prevailing and utterly false belief that the smoke “helped hold the heat” close to the ground. Incinerator manufacturers fought back to protect their interests, too, at one point trying to make their products appear more cuddly by marketing sheet metal incinerators shaped like little houses and featuring smiling faces painted beneath stovepipe chimney “hats.”

  It took seven years of failed attempts to finally pass the ordinances to ban incinerators countywide in 1957. The smog had grown so bad by then that it became nearly impossible to dry clothes successfully on outdoor laundry lines without them absorbing a rain of black soot. Complaints about the dirty byproducts of backyard burning finally matched the defenders, and politicians felt sufficiently safe to act: no more burn barrels, no more happy-face incinerators. Jail and a five-hundred-dollar fine awaited illicit burners, and Smokey Joe was finally toast.

  As predicted, the home incinerator ban led to greater volumes of trash in need of disposal, which meant new trash hauling services by both government and industry arose to meet that need. And the garbage had to go somewhere once it was picked up, too. A web of dumps ringing the basin soon opened to accommodate the new and rapidly growing river of trash—growing because Los Angeles was growing, with bean fields and orange groves converted on a daily basis to postwar, GI-Bill-financed suburban housing tracts. Along with the real estate boom, trash became a growth business as never before.

  One place in particular drew Los Angeles’s new mounds of garbage—the area surrounding the eastern L.A. County foothills bordering the San Gabriel Valley. Strategically located in an area with ample open land, it straddled a confluence of major highways and lay near several populous communities—the ideal mix of convenience and seclusion for trash disposal. There was not a single large repository for garbage opened then, but a profusion of small, privately owned garbage destinations. They were open dumps, like the vast majority in America at the time, where refuse was tossed and piled and, in many locations, burned. In short order this area of L.A. bore a nickname worthy of Fitzgerald: the Valley of the Dumps.

  Demand for dump space began mounting then, not only in Los Angeles, but also nationwide. Bans on incinerator and backyard burn piles were only part of the reason. Another trash multiplier had arrived right around the same time: the rise of America’s new consumer culture and the disposable economy ushered in with it. A new tidal wave of trash began to crest then, combining the old refuse that once had been burned with a new flow of disposable trash, containers and short-lived products never before seen. Cons
umption and garbage became more firmly linked than at any other time in history, with the disposal of products and their packaging displacing other categories of household waste for the first time in our trash history. That trend hasn’t changed since 1960.

  The age of the plastic bag was upon us.

  3

  FROM TRASH TV TO LANDFILL RODEOS

  NOW AND THEN WHEN THE WIND BLOWS JUST RIGHT and the day’s garbage is still baking uncovered in the Southern California sun, a flock of strange birds can be seen wheeling above the Puente Hills landfill. Upon closer inspection, however, some of these fliers turn out not to be birds, but escaped plastic grocery bags, which are woven like veins throughout every load of trash dumped in every city landfill in America. Sometimes a few break free of the piles of dirty napkins, spent kitty litter and broken glass holding them down, and they scuttle like urban tumbleweeds across the jagged top of the trash cell, then take flight. This is one of the myriad ways plastic trash makes its way into streets and rivers and oceans, and demonstrates the drawback of engineering products with useful lives that last the half hour or so it takes to bring groceries home from the market, but which possess a second life as refuse that can last a thousand years or more.

  Flocks of flying immortal bags are a signature element and a unique hallmark of the disposable age of plastic—a trash challenge Waring and his White Wings never had to deal with or imagine. And yet, despite that, and despite the noise and scale and stench (which really isn’t all that bad, except on the days the sanitation engineers “sweeten” the fill with sewage sludge to jump-start methane production), there is a weirdly beautiful aspect to this place, even to the strange plastic flock flapping and twisting above. To perceive this side of the landfill, one need go no farther than the expression on Big Mike Speiser’s face when he considers his workplace. “We accomplish something here every day,” he says. “It can be strange, it can be loud, but we’re proud of this place, proud of what we do. There is a kind of beauty here, or there will be someday.” He gestures at the oak trees planted in the distance on older sections of Garbage Mountain. “Someday all this will be a park.”