by Edward Humes
She wanted to use trash to create a cast of marionettes to reenact the Inferno. This is how she proposed to show the world that exquisitely sculpted works of art could not only be brought to life, but could be crafted from materials that had been abandoned as worthless, unworthy waste. Trash would have a use in her vision, a greatness even, waiting to be tapped.
Tapping that source by redefining waste is the purpose of San Francisco’s garbage dump artist-in-residence program. That concept’s allure persuaded Ulehla to put her jewelry design business on hold to compete against dozens of other artists for a coveted four-month residency at the dump, where the full-time artistic mission is to expose and exploit the endless uses and potential for the stuff we call garbage. This is the most visible aspect of San Francisco’s campaign to put an end to waste and become America’s most sustainable and least trashy city. If the Inferno could rise from the city dump, Ulehla figured, anything was possible.
She reached into her cart and fingered the stump, imagining how she would carve and paint it, then bring it to life. Then she sighed and renewed her search for the rest of the cast. She had a mere four months to create her art and plan her show, or there would be, quite literally, hell to pay.
THE ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE program at the San Francisco dump—insiders use the acronym AIR—started back in 1990 as a Southside San Francisco oddity planted a few miles from the airport near the old Cow Palace arena. It has evolved into an unlikely San Francisco icon, frequently copied but outlasting all imitators. Art critics and Bay Area glitterati frequent the AIR shows and receptions, while schoolkids tour “the dump with the art studios” almost daily. A hundred or more applications for the coveted residencies are always on file. There are two artists at the dump at all times, there for four-month stints, for a total of six a year. They are drawn not just from the ranks of promising no-names and up-and-comers, but also established, successful artists eager to make their mark by facing the creative challenge of painting, sculpting, carving, collaging, weaving, welding, writing, photographing, dramatizing and filming trash. Composer Nathaniel Stookey’s work Junkestra was performed by the San Francisco Symphony with instruments he constructed out of trash. Andrew Junge built a super-realistic life-sized Hummer out of the dump’s endless stream of discarded plastic foam; the sculpted car went on to tour the country. San Francisco’s central Recycle Center on the waterfront, meanwhile, made an architectural centerpiece out of artist Hector Dio Mendoza’s towering seventeen-foot-tall pine tree constructed entirely out of junk mail—a trunk made of drug ads, branches built from credit card offers, and leaves consisting of shredded catalog pages.
The only artistic discipline not yet represented in the dump oeuvre is dance, though not for lack of trying. Every year for the past decade a Bay Area dancer-choreographer has proposed staging a modern dance extravaganza at the dump’s most grotesque and busy location, The Pit, which is a warehouse-like structure behind the PDA dominated by a twenty-foot-deep, football-field-sized indoor swimming pool of garbage. An entire day of San Francisco’s non-recycled, uncompostable trash is piled there, crushed by bulldozers, then shoveled into enormous trucks to be hauled to a remote landfill, clearing the way for the next day’s incoming refuse tide. It is a loud, stinking, dangerous place, filled with an ever-shifting whirlpool of debris and heavy machinery twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No one has figured out how to bring dancers and an audience into the facility with any reasonable measure of comfort or safety.
“Not yet, anyway,” says the art program’s director, Deborah Munk. Her job description requires her to be open to even the most outlandish artistic possibilities, which she embraces with abandon, as evidenced by the gown woven out of multicolored newspaper delivery bags she wore to the premiere of Junkestra. “The Pit is closed two days a year, Christmas and New Year’s,” she muses. “Maybe we can work something out someday …”
The artist-in-residence program was the brainchild of Bay Area activist, artist and environmentalist Jo Hanson. She had bought and renovated an old Victorian in San Francisco’s Lower Haight District in the early 1970s, then became a local hero when her one-woman crusade to sweep the trash-strewn street outside her new home grew into a citywide anti-litter campaign. She started to incorporate trash into her art and installations, specializing in using “street-crushed metal” as raw material for her sculptures. Then she started organizing teach-ins and bus tours of illegal dumping sites, hoping to persuade San Franciscans to get greener. In 1990, Hanson visited the Sanitary Fill Company’s waste-transfer facility out near the Cow Palace to see where all the litter she collected ended up, and was fascinated by the variety and richness of the materials being thrown away. She felt like digging around then and there for raw materials for her art. Instead, Hanson suggested that the trash company consider sponsoring artists at the dump with stipends, studio space and pick of the litter. They could simultaneously advance the arts and educate the public about waste, while also garnering some positive publicity. If her street-sweeping campaign had taught her nothing else, it was that the news media cannot resist a quirky story about garbage.
Hanson’s timing couldn’t have been better. A year earlier, California had adopted landmark legislation requiring local governments throughout the state to divert 50 percent of their waste from landfills. Few communities were anywhere close to that goal. With the ambitious trash-to-energy plans of the eighties dead, recycling was embraced as the waste solution of the future. San Francisco, like most other cities in the state, was just beginning to respond to this mandate by ramping up curbside recycling. City officials and the waste companies they hired were desperate to get public buy-in for the concept, and for the long-unpopular chore of separating their recyclables from regular trash. A splashy, high-profile resident-artist program sounded like a great way to further the cause in a town that took pride in both its environmentalist heritage (John Muir, Sierra Club, David Brower) and its support for the avant-garde. Promoting trash art hit all the sweet spots.
More than one hundred artists later, the Sanitary Fill Company, since rebranded with a more eco-friendly name, Recology, continues to support the program with a level of enthusiasm rare in the world of corporate waste management. Director Munk thinks this may have something to do with Recology’s own unusual backstory, which dates back to the chaotic independent scavenger guilds that ruled the Bay Area trash business a century ago and that swarmed across the trashed landscape of the city after the massive San Francisco earthquake of 1906. These scrappy, battling trash haulers personified early on the ethic of reuse, repurpose and recycle that are now the rallying cries of modern urban environmentalism—not out of a desire to be green but because in those pre-plastic, pre-disposable-economy years, there was good money to be made from the wood, leather and metal scavenged from the garbage. Emphasizing that part of trash history in its company slogans and reports gives Recology the opportunity to stake a claim as one of the nation’s recycling pioneers. It’s an accurate claim, to be sure, though the company history omits some of the more unsavory practices of those same early scavengers, such as their penchant for wretched, open-air dumps and trash burning. These many small scavenger companies eventually consolidated into two main city contractors by the 1920s: the Scavenger Protective Association and the Sunset Scavenger Company, both of them employee-owned trash and landfill operations that split the city’s garbage, one taking most of the residential areas, the other focused on the business and financial districts. The two city licenses for scavenging granted back in those days are still in effect, though the companies went through several incarnations, name changes, a merger into one corporation called Norcal Waste Systems, a variety of scandals, near bankruptcy and a bribery indictment. Finally Norcal reinvented itself in the new century as a champion of green practices, recycling and the quest for zero waste. In 2009, it completed the transformation by renaming the company Recology (a blending of “recycling” and “ecology”).
As of 2011, Recology
had contracts for resource recovery and waste services for fifty communities in California, Oregon and Nevada, though San Francisco remained its biggest turf and headquarters home. With 2,100 employees and $351 million in annual revenues, it is one of the ten largest employee-owned companies in the country, and the largest by far in the U.S. waste industry. It’s also the biggest organic composter, turning yard waste and garbage from San Francisco’s five thousand restaurants (220,000 soggy tons a year) into 150,000 cubic yards of compost that’s widely used by the vineyards of Napa and Sonoma Valleys. For San Francisco, that means twenty lumbering trucks that used to haul the stinking, rotting garbage to the landfill are taking it to the composter instead, ultimately returning the food that farmers grow back to farmers in another form—a classic closed loop that brings the natural process of decay back to the human world in a way that landfills never can.
San Francisco boosted these efforts in 2009 by becoming the first major city to collect household food waste at the curb in separate bins along with green waste for composting. Recology was assigned the task to carry out this mandate with specially designed two-compartment trash trucks to keep the organic waste separate on board. It’s one of the main reasons San Francisco was able to claim the mantle of green waste leader of American cities in 2010.
City ordinances make the composting mandatory, with violations punishable by whopping fines of $1,000 for each misplaced pile of potato peels and watermelon rinds. Critics of Bay Area progressive politics raised the specter of trash cops snooping through household trash. But so far the toughest response to violations of San Francisco’s new garbage etiquette has been by Recology garbagemen, who leave behind a note on offenders’ trash cans with a reminder about properly separating waste into the correct blue (recyclables), green (organics) and black (rubbish) bins.
The company did, however, get a court injunction against a small army of independent recyclers who were sneaking at night into neighborhoods ahead of Recology’s trucks and pilfering the most high-value recyclables in the bins. This was hurting Recology’s ability to make recycling pay for itself, and driving down the percentage of trash San Francisco could claim it was diverting from landfills, despoiling its green credentials.
Recycling may seem like small change, but it’s a huge part of Recology’s business model. Recycling theft became big business, too, especially during the economic downturn, with California unemployment hovering at 12 percent since 2009. In an affluent city like San Francisco, poaching recyclables was netting the robbers—and costing Recology—an estimated $2 million to $5 million annually. The injunction authorized police to make arrests and imposed penalties of $1,000 and six months in jail for each instance of poaching; the organized gangs of trash thieves soon moved on to easier hunting grounds. (Reflecting the national scope of the trash poaching, a number of other cities, from Sacramento to New York, have adopted comparable measures against recycling thieves.)
With the advent of the injunction and the food-waste recycling, San Francisco claimed in 2010 to divert a nation-leading 77 percent of trash away from landfills through Recology’s recycling and composting operations.
Still, the city fills up The Pit with 1,500 tons of trash every day from residential “black bins”—the stuff that’s not recycled. Periodic trash audits show that two-thirds of the material in The Pit is a mix of plastics and food waste, which means it could theoretically (though not economically) be recycled, too. Instead, it gets hauled by sixty huge diesel eighteen-wheelers a day to a Waste Management, Inc., landfill in Altamont, fifty-eight miles away. The impact of these waste shipments cancels out many of the environmental gains of San Francisco’s efforts to lower the city’s trash footprint.
In 2015, the city plans to shift gears and haul that waste to a Recology landfill near Sacramento by rail, lowering transportation-related emissions considerably. By 2020, the city’s master trash plan calls for zero waste to landfills, though it’s not entirely clear yet exactly what that will look like, or whether it’s possible to achieve.
And despite these impressive efforts, an underlying reality is that keeping trash out of landfills is not the same as making less trash in the first place. Indeed, San Francisco residents tend to make slightly more waste per person than the national average. So if anything, the knowledge that most trash is being recycled or composted may be giving San Franciscans license to be more wasteful rather than less.
“In any case,” says Munk, “there’s still plenty of room to improve.”
From the application for trash artist-in-residence, Recology, San Francisco:
Program Goals
To encourage the reuse of materials
To support Bay Area artists by providing access to the wealth of materials available at the public dump
To prompt children and adults to think about their own consumption practices
To teach the public how to recycle and compost in San Francisco through classroom lessons that explain the city’s three-bin (recycling, composting, garbage) system
Recology Provides
Twenty-four-hour access to the facility
A large, well-equipped art studio
An exhibition and reception at the end of the residency (including printed invitations, refreshments, installation assistance, etc.)
Miscellaneous supplies and equipment
A monthly stipend
The presentation of artists’ work in off-site exhibitions
Expectations of the Artist
Work in the studio either forty hours per week for a full-time residency or twenty hours per week for a half-time residency
Greet and speak to tour groups during weekdays and on the third Saturday of the month
Make three pieces of art for the company’s permanent art collection
Use materials recovered from San Francisco’s waste stream
Be available to talk with the media
Leave all art created during the residency with the company for the next twelve months for exhibitions at off-site venues
FINE-TUNING THE recycling process, knocking down the flow of stuff into facilities like The Pit, keeping the poachers in check—that’s all good and sensible, Munk says. But she figures the next strides, the closing of that last big gap between taking less to the landfill and making less waste, will require something beyond changes in industrial trash collection methods and destinations. It calls for changes in mind-set, in how regular people think about what they regularly buy—or don’t buy—which governs what they do and don’t throw away. And that’s the essence of Munk’s job: Changing minds, perceptions and comfort zones, she says, is what the artist-in-residence program is supposed to be about.
Munk ought to know—it changed hers. She was a clothing buyer for a high-end San Francisco boutique. It can be a lucrative living, making your work and your personal life revolve around consumption. But she eventually decided there was only so much stuff you can cram into a closet, or a life, before it gets old. Surprising her friends, family and herself, she gave it up in a heartbeat when she bumped into one of her old college professors on the street in 2000, and he mentioned that he had just taken what he considered to be the coolest job he had ever heard of: running an art program at The Dump. Munk had never heard of the residence program before, but almost without thinking, she blurted that she needed something new to tackle, too, and she wanted to return to the arts and education studies she had pursued in college. Could she come work for him?
“You can start next week,” he replied. She did, joining the art staff at The Dump. She worked part-time at first, still supporting herself as a fashion buyer, her life an uneasy truce between opposing values. Within a year she came on full-time and eventually succeeded her professor as director in 2007.
Her shared office is filled with posters, photos of trash art, a few oddities from The Dump and the most vital objects in the room, a mass of black three-ring binders. Each represents a single artist’s application for a residency, shelves of them
dating back to 1990, containing proposals for their projects, personal statements, résumés, work samples, portfolios, recommendations, pleas. There’s also a checklist of required artists’ tools only a dump denizen could love, ranging from sewing machine to band saw to metal inert gas welder and plasma cutter. The binders are thick and detailed, and document a surprisingly intense passion to tackle trash that can’t even begin to be explained by the $1,800 monthly stipend. Munk and her two colleagues make the first cut of applicants, then a community advisory board makes the final decisions.
“I know what to expect when I heat a piece of steel ordered from a supplier,” wrote the first artist-in-residence, sculptor William Wareham, whose job included setting up the first rough-hewn studio at The Dump in 1990. His rough-edged sculptures of torn metal and old shopping carts proudly displayed their trash provenance. “But with this, it’s impossible to know with certainty. That’s one of the things that makes this an exciting project.”
A year later, Remi Rubel’s large and colorful quilt-like mosaics of bottle caps and other found objects looked like anything but trash. Yet she, too, seemed to be a natural for the program: “From the day I learned to walk,” she wrote, “I began searching the ground for treasure. Tumbled glass from the sands of Lake Michigan or coins from sidewalks later became bottle caps and flattened cans from the streets.” The Dump became her ultimate treasure hunt.