Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash

by Edward Humes

  It’s clear the BOMAG master takes pride in Puente Hills’s reputation for being a well-run Disneyland of dumps. Even the neighbors who complain about smells and dust and toxic leaks concede that much (which isn’t to say they share Big Mike’s love of the place—they can’t wait for it to shut down). But Big Mike revels in being a landfill ambassador, talking with the press, demonstrating his driving skills for a National Geographic film crew, chatting with tour groups. He has represented Puente Hills in years past at the national trash Olympics, a not-quite-yearly event sponsored by the Solid Waste Association of North America. This is a gathering of heavy equipment operators from the nation’s waste-management departments and companies, who compete in a series of Olympic-style events set up at a host landfill. At this combination rodeo and monster-truck rally, the contestants must perform various feats of “trash-tacular” skill with their big machines: pass through orange cones with only four inches of clearance on either side, navigate an obstacle course, do some precision blade drops and push a load of gravel to an exact location without spilling. Big Mike has several gold medals to his credit. His colleagues have to point this out, as he won’t; he just nods shyly in acknowledgment once the subject is disclosed.

  After the competition, the large men of the landfill fraternity—most of them seem to share Big Mike’s mountainous physique—gather to cool off over a cool drink and to swap stories about the weird things that inevitably turn up at landfills. There’s the mounted deer heads with their glassy eyes and broken antlers, the yellowed dentures scattered in the debris, the occasional bowling ball, the coffin (an empty discard), the mannequins (those always give the dump workers a start, arms or heads poking up out of the cans and Hefty bags). And there are the real bodies, too—because what better place could there be to dispose of the evidence of a serious crime? Puente Hills has had its share: the skull found in the suitcase, the body rolled up in a rug, the rumors of ritual crimes in adjacent Turnbull Canyon, the bloody Santeria shrine found nearby. Then there was Robert Glenn Bennett, who disappeared February 16, 1983, from his maintenance supervisor job at the sanitation district’s water reclamation plant next to the landfill. The fifty-one-year-old never showed up for a part-time bartending gig that Wednesday night after he finished at the plant; witnesses said he argued earlier with a gardener on his staff, who was angry at being denied a promotion. The gardener had a record of minor drug, theft and vandalism offenses, of threatening fellow employees and of exposing himself on the job. Blood matching Bennett’s type was found in the parking lot and on a dump truck, and the gardener, John Alcantara, became the immediate prime suspect. But despite an extensive and unpleasant search of mounds of garbage at the landfill, which police detectives figured to be a likely place for Alcantara to have stashed both body and murder weapon, no evidence could be found linking him to Bennett’s disappearance (or, for that matter, to prove conclusively that Bennett was dead). Twenty-five years would pass before the case would be solved and Alcantara would be convicted of the murder. A witness finally came forward and told police that Alcantara confessed to shooting Bennett in the head, dismembering his body, and then, as the police always suspected, the body had been buried at the adjacent landfill. That’s one of the darker legacies of Puente Hills: What’s left of Robert Bennett remains there to this day, hidden beneath thousands of tons of trash in the Main Canyon section of the landfill, the oldest and deepest zone of Garbage Mountain.

  These are the stories that everyone asks about, the weird, the dark and the unusual discoveries mixed in with the refuse. But that’s not what’s revelatory about any landfill’s contents, Big Mike says. The truly thought-provoking part of the business as he sees it is the endless tide of ordinary, everyday stuff streaming into the place, items that are not really trash at all: the boxes of perfectly new plastic bags, still on the roll, tossed because the logo on them was outdated. Or the cases of food that turn up from time to time, perfectly usable and brand-new, yet discarded as if they had no use. Clothes of all types, some worn and torn but others seemingly pristine, are common. There are whole cans of paint (a forbidden, toxic item in landfills, though they arrive mixed in the household trash, difficult to detect), trashed because someone didn’t like the custom color that, once mixed, could not be returned to the paint store. And there is the furniture—tons of it, much of it ratty and too far gone, but a surprising amount of it perfectly serviceable, at least until those chairs and couches and coffee tables meet Big Mike’s BOMAG, the great democratizer of trash. Finally, poignantly, there are the old letters and photo albums, the vintage costume jewelry and ancient report cards in their brown manila envelopes. They are accompanied by sagging cardboard boxes labeled “important papers,” though they aren’t important to anyone anymore. This is the material that gets thrown away after someone dies. This is the world in which Big Mike plays king of the hill, and he sees what few people see, the fate of our most precious possessions, and how quickly, how easily, they become redefined as trash, deservedly or not. Someday, they might be treasures again, when the landfill reaches a great age and the broken but often still identifiable items within it become artifacts awaiting an archaeologist’s pick and brush. But that process takes a very long time, hundreds or thousands of years to turn mundane pieces of broken crockery into valuable artifacts. The more immediate process, the one Big Mike sees every day, is the one where treasures, our treasures of today, are used to construct a trash mountain.

  Working there has changed him, he says, compelling him to think about how he and his family live, what they buy, what they waste. So many people buy so many things that they just throw away a year or two later—things that look great on a TV commercial, that promise to make life better or easier or more fun. Then those must-have products break or wear out, or simply wear out their welcome, and they enter Big Mike’s domain.

  The irony is that Big Mike’s domain, with its unrivaled ability to hide seamlessly all that waste, empowers even more wasting. The landfill solution to garbage took away the slimy stench of the old throw-it-in-the-streets disposal, the smoking pall of the old incinerators, the noisome piggeries, the noxious reduction plants spewing out garbage grease, the ugly, seeping open dumps. It took away the obvious consequences of waste and eliminated the best incentives to be less wasteful. The rise of places like Puente Hills turned garbage from an ugly canker staring everyone in the face into a nearly invisible tumor, so easy to forget even as it swelled beneath the surface.

  “It’s such a waste,” Big Mike observes. “More people should see what I see here, where everything that’s advertised on TV ends up, sooner or later, and a lot sooner than most people think.”

  THE GOLDEN age of television and mass media marketing has been alternately celebrated and condemned for the last half a century for its unprecedented impact on society and culture. Yet one of its most enduring effects—helping bring about an American trash tsunami—is rarely put on the list of mass media goods and evils.

  Not that the connection is disputed: Leaders of the industry during its earliest days admitted as much, describing their mission in life as persuading American men, women and children to throw away perfectly good things in order to buy replacements promoted as bigger, bolder and better. The senior editor of Sales Management magazine chronicled this when he wrote in 1960 that American companies and media outlets were working together to “create a brand new breed of super customers.” A popular media journal of the day, Printers Ink, went further, suggesting the mission of marketers had to be centered on the fact that “wearing things out does not produce prosperity, but buying things does … Any plan that increases consumption is justifiable.” Even President Eisenhower was caught up in the fervor, suggesting that shopping was tantamount to a patriotic act. When asked at a press conference what he thought people should buy to bolster the economy during a brief, mild recession, the president responded, “Buy anything.”

  And what a vehicle had emerged to persuade Americans to adopt this buy-
more mission. For the first time ever, visually compelling moving, talking images were being beamed directly into their homes, free of charge, though not free of commercial messages—a transformative moment that rapidly shifted American popular culture into a round-the-clock tool for selling things. A new marketing industry began speaking about television viewers as a “captive audience” in whom it could instill “artificial” and “induced” needs—those are the terms they casually tossed about—for products no one had ever before considered a necessity. Their tirelessly upbeat portrait of American prosperity, the good life and “progress” made it quite clear that the American Dream was best achieved through buying the latest and greatest cars (preferably several per household), toothpaste and gadgets of all sorts.

  This was the moment in which the Depression-era version of the American Dream—which held that hard work, diligent saving and conserving resources paved the road to the good life—began to fade, surpassed by the notion that the highest expression and measurement of the American Dream lay in material wealth itself, the acquisition of stuff. This was the moment when the perceived power to move nations and economies shifted from the ideal of the American citizen to the reality of the American consumer. The phrase “vote with your wallet” entered the public consciousness in this era, elevating the act of spending money from unfortunate necessity to civic virtue.

  This change did not happen in secret, unnoticed and unremarked upon. On the contrary, visionaries at the time saw clearly what was about to unfold and called it out—or, more often, celebrated it. The quote that best sums up the economic ethos of the day comes from J. Gordon Lippincott, who pioneered the modern fields of product design and corporate branding. An engineer by training, his marketing and design company’s creations included the iconic Campbell’s Soup label, Chrysler’s “Pentastar” emblem, Betty Crocker’s trademark spoon and the distinctive, stylized “G” of the General Mills cereal logo. Lippincott made this telling observation in 1947:

  Our willingness to part with something before it is completely worn out is a phenomenon noticeable in no other society in history … It is soundly based on our economy of abundance. It must be further nurtured even though it runs contrary to one of the oldest inbred laws of humanity, the law of thrift.

  Lippincott’s assertions would have sparked doubts about his sanity had they been uttered in Colonel Waring’s day at the turn of the last century, when waste was public enemy number one, or in 1932, as the Great Depression crushed working Americans and the amount of trash generated by families reached record lows because every scrap of wood, paper and food was precious, and every tool and product had to be used, reused and repaired many times before anyone would consider consigning it to the trash. But Lippincott’s era came in the very different boom times that followed victory in World War II, with America the last great power left standing and whole. His words became a marketer’s battle cry signaling a break with the past. He plainly acknowledged that the disposable, thriftless lifestyle he championed ran counter to the most basic human instincts and recent world history, yet he urged its embrace as part of the postwar belief that America—its resources, its wealth, its potential—had reached a state that had no real limits. What does waste matter in the America of Lippincott’s imagination, with its infinite “economy of abundance”? The more we waste, in his view, the more stuff his clients could sell, the more consumers would buy, and the more prosperous America would become. Failure to waste was the enemy. If only Americans would waste more, they would boost production, enrich businesses and create more jobs—that was Lippincott’s vision, and it was embraced by most of the nation. The only way to defeat such an economy, he argued, was for consumers to lose their desire to consume in ever greater quantities.

  His life’s work, like that of the marketing and design industries he helped create and lead, was dedicated to preventing that from happening, to erase thrift as a quintessential American virtue, and replace it with conspicuous consumption powered by a kind of magical thinking, in which the well would never go dry, the bubble would never burst, oil and all forms of energy would grow cheaper and more plentiful with time, and the landfill would never fill up.

  Lippincott is a fascinating historical figure, erudite, brilliant, seemingly easygoing. But there was nothing easygoing about his approach to reinventing the American consumer. With a team of 130 psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists and industrial designers backing him up, he mastered the art of making a product or a company or a concept appear to be something it was not. This was not the flimflam of the confidence man or the deceitful quackery of the snake oil salesman, but the art of the spinmeister—not hiding or breaking the truth so much as redefining it. He was helping to rewrite America’s mythology. Eastern Airlines’ noisy planes became “Whisperjets.” U.S. Rubber, whose tires sold poorly abroad because of anti-American sentiment, became “Uniroyal.” The gas station chain with an eye-glazing name and a reputation for poor service, Cities Service Oil Company, became the peppy “CitGo.” Lippincott was so successful at designing to redefine that he was hired by the U.S. Navy to reimagine the interior of the Nautilus nuclear submarine to make its cramped quarters appear spacious, and by the U.S. Treasury Department to make the Internal Revenue Service appear more user-friendly (his one great failure, it seems, as the IRS apparently declined to change its name to something kinder and gentler). The rebranding, design and corporate identity industry Lippincott helped create succeeded beyond his wildest expectations. He helped make short-lived, disposable products and rising amounts of consumer waste appear to be virtues. He didn’t hide the shortcomings previous generations would have identified in these products. He celebrated them.

  It’s no coincidence that the notion of saving up to buy something (and earning interest in the process) started losing ground in his era, supplanted by the then-new phenomenon of credit cards and borrowing to buy (and paying interest in the process). Political leaders who once fretted that Americans didn’t save enough compared to the citizens of other wealthy nations, a disparity that still holds true today, eventually stopped complaining as the credit industry became a major force in the rise and fall of the American economy (and a major source of political campaign donations as well, more than $32 million a year leading up to the current financial crisis). The normalization of what was once unthinkable, even shameful—large amounts of consumer debt—added decades of longevity to the Lippincott vision of throwing out and buying more at an ever-increasing rate in order to manufacture boom times. Average household credit card debt topped the landmark of $10,000 in 2006, a hundredfold increase over the average consumer debt in the 1960s. One consequence: Much of the material buried in landfills in recent years was bought with those same credit cards, leading to the quintessentially American practice of consumers continuing to pay, sometimes for years, for purchases after they become trash.

  There were others at the time of this transformation who took an opposing view, who urged the country to reject “a society built on trash and waste,” as the journalist and best-selling author Vance Packard saw it. Packard, whose first book had created a sensation in 1958 by citing examples of subliminal advertising and other manipulative imagery he accused the Lippincotts of the world of employing, wrote a prophetic follow-up in 1960 called The Waste Makers. In it, he accused his industry and marketing critics of sparking a crisis of excess and waste that would exhaust both nation and nature, until future Americans were forced by scarcity to “mine old forgotten garbage dumps” to recover squandered resources.

  “Wastefulness has become a part of the American way of life,” Packard wrote. “Some marketing experts have been announcing that the average citizen will have to step up his buying by nearly 50 per cent in the next dozen years, or the economy will sicken. In a mere decade, advertising men assert, United States citizens will have to improve their level of consumption as much as their forebears had managed to do in the two hundred years from Colonial times to 1939 … The people of the
United States are in a sense becoming a nation on a tiger. They must learn to consume more and more or, they are warned, their magnificent economic machine may turn and devour them. They must be induced to step up their individual consumption higher and higher, whether they have any pressing need for the goods or not. Their ever-expanding economy demands it.”

  Packard couldn’t foresee the details of this buy-more future, just the general momentum of the times sweeping the country in that direction. His was one of the first voices to suggest that growth, Lippincott’s economy of abundance, had limits, and that resources would eventually be used up. A prudent country, he argued a half century ago, should start planning to shift its economy away from consumption and rapidly paced planned obsolescence, and base it more on conservation, durability and elimination of waste before it was too late.

  This view was mockingly dismissed at the time as Luddite pessimism. But not even Packard imagined Americans would achieve a 102-ton waste legacy. In his world, a household had one telephone, one television, one car, and the least of them were expected to last ten years or more—and that was a prosperous household. The idea that all members of a typical family, even young children, would someday have their own phones, and that Americans could pay several hundred dollars a month for this “necessity”—for cell phones that would become high-tech trash in two years or less—would have seemed so absurdly wasteful to Packard that he would have dismissed the idea as too fanciful. Yet this is the sort of evolution he predicted would have to occur as marketers labored to transform yesterday’s waste and excess into today’s normal and necessary. He just never thought it would go that far.