by Edward Humes
The other dramatic finding from the landfill excavations, one that shocked even the jaded garbage sorters from Tucson who thought they had seen it all, was the amount of food waste dumped in landfills. As much as 17 percent of the garbage by weight that they were hauling up in the late 1990s and early 2000s consisted of food waste. Some of it was truly waste—coffee grounds, eggshells, plate-scraping slop—but nearly equal portions were completely edible, from expired hamburger to potato peels (a major and completely edible weight component of food waste) to those specialty breads such as those deceptive kaiser rolls, which ended up landfilled at far greater rates than standard loaves of bread, which were practically no-shows. Indeed, that finding led to the Garbage Project’s “First Principle of Food Waste”:
The more repetitive your diet—the more you eat the same things day after day—the less food you waste.
This principle upsets quite a few people and special interests, Rathje says. Nutritionists want a healthy variety. Food companies live and die by novelty, constantly introducing new breakfast cereal variations and reformulated baked goods and new flavors of processed food. But novelty (which consumers think they want more than they actually want) breeds waste—those darn kaiser rolls, along with hot dog buns and biscuits and English muffins, end up getting thrown out anywhere from 30 to 60 percent of the time. Novelty may make for effective marketing, but in terms of waste, it’s a disaster.
America’s propensity for throwing away perfectly good food that could quite literally end hunger for millions of people has received considerable attention (if not reform) recently, but the Garbage Project was calling attention to food waste as a vital issue fifteen years ahead of the curve.
“We just thought it was appalling,” Rathje recalls. “And most people are oblivious to it. If you ask them, they’ll tell you they are careful not to waste food. But as usual, their garbage tells a different story. It was typical for the households we looked at to waste 15 percent of the food they bought.”
A number of landfill excavations were made through contracts with cities that needed better insight into their trash. Unearthing garbage in Phoenix, the researchers were able to determine the amount of recyclables that were being buried. Aluminum cans alone could net the city more than $6 million a year if captured, recycled and sold at market rates. The city public works department used Rathje’s analysis to pry $12 million from the Phoenix city council to launch a new recycling program for the Arizona capital.
After the Garbage Project informed the city of Toronto that construction waste was clogging a fifth of their available landfill space, the city invested in the infrastructure necessary to recycle concrete, bricks and other demolition and construction debris. Excavations of four landfills in Toronto also validated the city’s recycling program, one of the oldest in North America, which was under fire for costs. Rathje and his crew proved it was biting deeply into the waste stream and, if anything, had surpassed expectations. And in Mexico, the government adjusted its import taxes in favor of a bit of protectionism when the Garbage Project found that luxury goods purchased in Mexico City’s affluent neighborhoods tended to be American-made.
RATHJE RECALLS an estimate made a few years back that suggested all of the garbage produced by the United States for the next thousand years could fit inside a single landfill—as long as said landfill stretched across forty-four square miles and rose 120 feet high.
That sounds huge, but not as huge as most people think. Such a landfill (less than a quarter the height of Puente Hills) would cover all of the Bronx, or a mere one-fifth of the West Coast’s main Marine Corps base, Camp Pendleton, or just .036 percent of the land area of the state of New Mexico. More square miles of that state’s national forests have burned in a single fire season than such a landfill would cover in a thousand years. In other words, a thousand-year landfill would be big, sure, but not really all that big. No one is proposing such a mega-dump. The point is, Rathje says, we have plenty of room to keep burying our trash until we find a better plan. Space for trash, in other words, is not the problem.
Of far greater concern, as Rathje sees it, is the trash that doesn’t get into the landfill vault—the debris in the gulches, the plastics in the ocean, the waste that drifts off into rivers and streams. And the biggest system flaw of all, he argues, is the disposable, wasteful mind-set that creates the flow of trash in the first place. Rather than a problem specific to landfills or other sanitation strategies, he says, this is a flaw in how manufacturers create and consumers use disposable products.
Now in his mid-sixties, Rathje is retired from the garbology business and has turned to Buddhism and his passion for photography, illustrating Buddhist texts with his photos of nature. He sounds more than a little disappointed that the Garbage Project’s heroic efforts to clear up mysteries and misunderstandings about waste have had so little impact in terms of changing things. We still waste colossal amounts of food—the EPA pegs food waste in landfills as more than 14 percent of total landfill contents by weight, which isn’t much different from what Rathje found more than a decade ago, despite recent attempts to ramp up composting nationwide. Most recyclable materials are not, in fact, recycled. It’s frustrating, he says. The problem as he sees it is in how people define the very concept of waste, a question that is more philosophical than scientific.
In modern garbage parlance, Rathje says, “waste” has become synonymous with “trash”—that is, waste has come to mean the perceived dirty, icky, unhealthful, useless, valueless material that’s left over when we’re done with something. By this definition, waste is the foul stuff we wish would just disappear. Our entire elaborate waste collection, transportation and disposal system has for a century been built around this “just make it go away” concept, an illusion for which Americans happily (or at least regularly) pay either through taxes or monthly bills. Waste in this sort of discussion is always defined as a cost, a negative and a burden—an inevitable, unpleasant fact of life, for which the only remedy is removal.
But what happens if a different definition of the word “waste” is emphasized—the original verb form of the word, as in “to waste” something. Now the nature of the debate changes, because “to waste” implies the object being wasted has value, be it time, resources or manpower. After all, you can’t waste something devoid of value. If trash is defined not as waste but as the physical manifestation of wastefulness, the discussion stops being about disposing of the dirty or useless, and starts being about asking why we are throwing away so much hard-earned money. Why are we wasting stuff that we pay for as product or packaging, then pay for again as trash to be hauled away? Now it’s no longer the waste itself that’s negative, but the act of creating it that’s at issue. And the convenience of burying these discarded items in landfills forever, or shipping them off to China to be recycled for pennies on the dollar (or far less), stops seeming so normal, so sensible.
Rathje uses an archaeological analogy to express this distinction between waste and wastefulness. Boiled down to the most simple, broad categories, every great civilization goes through three main stages of evolution. First comes the pre-classic era, the Florescent Period, when a set of small, scrappy villages coalesces into something more powerful, a dramatically rising civilization that has learned how to make a living, be it through warfare, trade, irrigation or some other method of consolidating and capitalizing on resources. Then, having reached a pinnacle of development, the civilization enters its Classical Period, in which it enjoys prosperity, steady growth and dominance. The Classic Maya culture that Rathje studied early in his career featured enormous temples and palaces sprawling across acres of verdant land—classical displays that required enormous resources and manpower to erect. A culture at that stage can afford extravagance. It can be—or at least believes itself to be—unharmed by waste.
Eventually, either through competition from other cultures or simple exhaustion of available resources, a civilization—any civilization—enters an inevita
ble decline. This is the post-classic or Decadent Period. In ancient Maya, the temples of the decadent years became small, the palaces shrunk, the once treasure-laden tombs grew spartan and poorly constructed. Cultures entering this terminal phase begin husbanding resources, recycling and repurposing like mad. This is the moment when conservation becomes the watchword.
But the word always comes too late. Cultures replace extravagance with frugality only after the resources have dried up. Think Easter Island, the fall of Rome, and any number of empires, from Persian to Ottoman to Spanish to British. Always, the fall approaches and the wising-up comes too late.
One of the questions the Garbage Project sought to answer as it peered in the landfill mirror arose from that tragic history. What stage, Rathje asked, was American civilization in?
Back in 2001, when Rathje penned an article on this subject for the surprisingly readable MSW Management: The Journal for Municipal Solid Waste Professionals, the answer seemed obvious. The conspicuous consumption, the outrageous levels of waste, the paltry recycling rates, the popularity of sport-utility vehicles, the morbid obesity, the addiction to overpriced bottled water marked up thousands of times over its chemically identical tap water equivalent—all suggested an America in the midst of a most profligate Classical Period, embracing the culture of abundance, the illusion of the bottomless well. The headline on his column was “Decadence Now!” In it Rathje urged what seemed at the time to be a premature embrace of the values of a decadent culture. America should break the historical pattern and commit to all-out conservation and husbanding of resources before, rather than after, it was too late. Time to swap those definitions of waste and wastefulness, Rathje suggested, and hard as it might be, start thinking about what happens during a product’s end life before we even buy the damn thing. The heedless wastefulness that has been an American hallmark since the birth of the disposable economy has to come to an end. That will require an act of will, not unlike the decision by alcoholics or addicts to resist their insatiable cravings. “That doesn’t come easy, but that’s what it takes,” Rathje says. “Decadence now!”
There’s just one problem: No great civilization of the past has ever pulled this off. None.
“Can we make a conscious, unprecedented decision to embrace the frugality—the source reduction, reuse and recycling—of the Decadent Period before it’s too late, while we’re still riding high in the Classic Period?” Rathje wrote. “Will we thereby extend our golden days?”
He wrote that eight months before the 9/11 attacks. In the decade that followed, judging by the recession-induced shrinking of trash loads heading to landfills, and the burgeoning interest in sustainability, recycling and zero-waste strategies in communities across the country, it seems clear to Rathje that we are right on the cusp of our own Decadent Period. Perhaps we’ve already slipped over, perhaps we’ll pull back, he says. But that drop-off is coming up sooner or later, and probably sooner than anyone is quite ready to believe.
“Decadence now!” he says again, then adds darkly, “Now or never.”
ALTHOUGH RATHJE is retired and his Garbage Project gone, with no one in the university research world interested in assuming his place as archaeologist of trash, Rathje’s garbology legacy nevertheless continues. And it is doing so with a somewhat more hopeful note than the retired garbologist allows himself.
The renaissance comes in the person of Sheli Smith, one of the first students to take part in the Garbage Project—a Moldy Oldy, as the veteran students of trash call themselves. It had been Smith who stumped a game show panel that couldn’t guess she was a garbologist, who silk-screened the project members’ first official T-shirts (emblazoned with the image of a hand reaching inside a garbage can), who braved the derision back when Rathje’s colleagues considered him crazed and embarrassing, and when they all referred to the project as Le Projet du Garbage. Even picking through trash sounds more dignified in French, she says.
After graduating from the University of Arizona in 1976, Smith went on to specialize in underwater archaeology. This took her as far from the desert trash sorting scene in Tucson as can be imagined, as she plumbed sunken cityscapes in the Mediterranean and shipwrecks in the Caribbean. But her work at the Columbus-based Past Foundation finally brought her full circle three decades later, when the head of the local Solid Waste Authority had sought the help of foundation anthropologists. He wanted to design an educational program that could help kids understand and rethink the way society creates waste. He had no idea he had stumbled on a founding member of the Garbage Project—he had never even heard of it when he asked if anyone there knew something about waste. Smith had given him a big grin and said, “Funny you should ask …”
Smith led the ensuing effort to create a school syllabus for an interdisciplinary garbology class project. It started as a public school pilot with one hundred high school students. They studied their own trash, their cafeteria food waste, the history of garbage, and wound up the class with an insider’s tour of the local landfill. The students ended up fascinated and engaged by the hands-on excursion into a world of trash they never really considered before—it had been “in sight, out of mind,” as Rathje likes to say. The students were also horrified by this world, as when they calculated that their little school cafeteria wasted sixty-five pounds of perfectly edible food every day. Then they calculated it would take twenty household composters to handle that load.
“They were stunned. It changed their behavior,” Smith says. “They stopped wasting so much food. They demanded the school stop wasting so much.”
Based on this success, the garbology program was expanded, reaching first the entire school district, then much of the state’s schools. Now it’s gone viral. The curriculum, available as a free download, is being picked up for use in classrooms all over the country—adopted, modified, localized. The thing about garbology at that level, Smith says, is that it lets anyone—kids, teachers, parents—understand their own footprint, as well as their friends’. And once that’s understood, it’s possible to do something about it. Garbology makes it possible for a student to go beyond thinking about saving the world, and actually doing it. It’s within their power to make a difference.
High school students took it on themselves to renegotiate recycling deals, bringing in more money for their school after they studied their trash flow and calculated the value of their cans, paper and bottles. Third-graders voted to impose a twenty-minute rule of silence at mealtime—because if they concentrated on eating instead of talking, there would be less waste.
“Third-graders did that—it was their idea!” Smith says with wonder. “If I had suggested that, they’d think I was some crazy old lady. This is what Bill Rathje made possible. This started with him, and it’s still making a difference. It gives you hope for the future.”
PART
3
THE WAY BACK
If it can’t be reduced, reused, repaired, rebuilt, refurbished, refinished, resold, recycled or composted, then it should be restricted, redesigned or removed from production.
—BERKELEY ECOLOGY CENTER
What the hell was I thinking?
—BEA JOHNSON,
on her pre–zero waste lifestyle
The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.
—STEVE JOBS
9
PICK OF THE LITTER
NIKI ULEHLA LACED UP HER STEEL-TOED BOOTS, pulled on her Day-Glo yellow vest, donned her hard hat and thrust her long fingers with the short, unadorned nails into heavy-duty work gloves—the non-optional fashion statement of the San Francisco Waste Transfer and Recycling Station, aka The Dump. Properly armored, she could begin her day.
She ventures out from her workstation and into the chaotic heart of the dump, an open, drive-in-and-drop-off area known as the PDA—the Public Disposal Area. There she begins searching the piles of twisted metal, scrap wood, broken pictures, crumpled boxes, cracked knickknacks and discarde
d papers that people had hauled to the PDA from their basements, attics and garages. Something was hidden there, something she needed, lurking within this residue of modern life.
She flipped open a box here, turned over a legless chair there, scanning with a practiced eye the treasures untreasured by luck or death or poverty or time or boredom or age. All of these objects had stories to tell, or so she imagined, but not just any story would do. Ulehla was looking for something particular and unique in those mounds. She was looking for Dante’s Inferno.
And in fairly short order, she found what she needed, or a piece of it, at least. It came in the form of a stump—a twisted, smallish knob of leathery wood, more shrub than tree, pulled from someone’s yard and carted to the dump along with a pile of graying weeds, dried and thorny whips of bougainvillea and crackly brown palm fronds. The stump stood out for her, despite its gnarled condition. It looked like a bird of sorts, perched amid the old papers, the yard cuttings and the mélange of junk. It had a bulbous, beaky head-like projection with a small knot set in the middle like a squinting eye staring straight at her. Winking at her, really. “Okay,” she murmured to herself. “I need a bird.” She hefted the stump in her gloved hand and considered the possibilities. It didn’t look like just any bird, she saw. Its cracked visage hinted at the dreaded Harpy herself—half woman, half avian, the tormentor of lost souls in Dante’s second ring of Hell.
Ulehla tossed the Harpy stump into a shopping cart and moved on. There were other things to find, objects to sculpt and paint and bring to life in this loud, odorous place, filled with the roar of diesel engines and the grating beep-beep-beep of big trucks backing up with more loads of trash, more material, more stories. This place was Niki Ulehla’s supply house, her crafts store, her inspiration and her muse, for such is the life of a garbage dump artist-in-residence.