Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash

by Edward Humes

  Susan Leibovitz Steinman designed a hilltop sculpture garden behind The Dump in 1992, where each artist—they were all sculptors at first—was asked to deposit at least one work. (The landscaped hilltop garden also served a practical purpose: a noise buffer between the clang and crackle of the transfer station and the Little Hollywood neighborhood next door.) Winding through the garden, Steinman placed a path of crushed gray concrete recovered from the Embarcadero Freeway that collapsed in the massive 1989 earthquake; it’s embedded with found objects and the words of students contemplating the future. She called it the River of Hope and Dreams. “It feels really good to me to rescue things. Things come with stories already in them,” Steinman said.

  Towering over one part of the garden is Marta Thomas’s striking “Earth Tear,” a curving, eight-foot-tall teardrop made of individual plastic bottles that seem to flow like liquid across their rust-flecked rebar frame. All scavenged, the common pieces of refuse have been shaped into something magical, symbolizing for Thomas sadness at environmental harm assuaged by the hope for renewal that grief can usher in. And like the plastics adrift in the ocean, Earth Tear’s plastic bottles have begun to break down, clouded, cracked and brittle from exposure to sun, mist and rain.

  In its second decade, a broader range of the arts was represented in the mix of residents—painters, videographers, graphic artists, musicians. The Dump was nothing less than a playground in 2010 for artist Ben Burke, founder of San Francisco’s Stars and Garter Theater Company and Apocalypse Puppet Theater, who put his thoughts about the program to verse:

  It rains and it shines, the world turns on a dime, and our grease is the trail that we leave. We spin yarns to the moon, for the story’s a loom, it’s the carpet we walk that we weave. So go on, act the fool, for the sea is not cruel, and the ship, it turns out, is not sunk. It’s just run aground, as the table spins round, and it’s time to build fables from junk.

  THE TWO artists of summer 2011 provide a fascinating contrast as they work in adjacent sections of their warehouse studio. The raucous sounds of the transfer station provided background music for their labors, seasoned by the occasional shout of an air horn from a passing train on the freight line across the street. The ever-changing trash storehouse of the PDA is just steps away, a tide that washes new material their way throughout the day. From their studio, they can see something interesting as it arrives, and leap into action.

  Of the two artists, Abel Rodriguez is a bundle of energy, constantly in motion. He doesn’t keep a chair in his crowded workspace. He likes to stand as he works, moving among the hundreds of items he has rescued from the piles—the finely turned legs from a cracked and broken table and chair set, the pieces of a wooden dish dryer, a pack of blank CDs still wrapped, a brand-new tea ball, silvery bent hubcaps, a photograph of Emiliano Zapata fresh from some revolutionary battle surrounded by his troops, who look all of twelve years old, not much bigger than their rifles. Rodriguez says he already has accumulated too much material, an abundance of artistic riches, but he cannot help going out every day to see what the trash tides wash his way. When he agrees with something you say, he answers in rapid fire: not “Sure!” but “Sure, sure, sure!” He’s a fast talker, a streamer, and his thoughts come in a rush. “Nothing’s ever still here, nothing’s ever fixed, everything’s in constant motion. That’s how it’s been all my life, so this environment is perfect. Perfect. I don’t put things away, I don’t like to waste. I like to repurpose. Waste is a misnomer.”

  The Yale University–trained artist certainly incorporates this ethic in his work, big collages and sculptures that resemble the sorts of amalgams of debris that wash ashore, fragile and inviting. They have a deliberately temporary quality. He likes to attach things with visible applications of tape to emphasize impermanence—as well as to let him pull things apart and reconfigure them on the fly. “Nothing is permanent,” he says, pacing his part of the studio. “Nothing, nothing, nothing.”

  Lauren DiCioccio is the perfect complement to Rodriguez, her energy contained versus his constant motion. “I sit,” she says, laughing. “I pretty much have to.”

  DiCioccio chose the extremely time-consuming fine work of embroidery, sewing and textiles for her residency. Her art depicts in fabric the common, and sometimes uncommon, objects she pulls from the trash heap—photo albums, cookbooks, a torn baseball, a dead mouse (okay, she concedes, she didn’t actually bring the real version of that back to her studio), a box of Kodacolor film, a postcard sent airmail. They are life-sized and compellingly realistic, yet whimsical cloth versions of reality. She particularly likes paper objects—newspaper pages, letters and maps, for which she painstakingly sews printing, handwriting, even the blue lines of ruled loose-leaf paper. These familiar objects, she says, are “obsolescing” right before our eyes, being replaced by digital and virtual alternatives, or simply falling from favor. Capturing them with embroidery imbues them with a kind of poignancy. She usually leaves long threads dangling from her sewn objects, as if their place in the world, their very reality, is unwinding and coming apart before our eyes. People want to touch DiCioccio’s art, which is an art-lover’s no-no, of course. But there’s something so personal, so playful yet bittersweet, about her work that visitors just can’t help themselves. She’s good-natured about it, saying that those urges show that she has succeeded in her work, and tries to channel the enthusiasm by putting several pieces in a touchable display—with gloves next to them for art fans to put on first, to avoid dirtying the objects.

  “I have had a total crush on this program ever since I heard about it,” DiCioccio says. “I had to come here. I loved the idea of being able to see a portrait of the lives of the city of San Francisco in the things that people throw away. I’m drawn to nostalgia, even when it’s other people’s.”

  She was especially drawn to one object, a pair of hand-tinted photos of a man and a woman. They’re probably husband and wife, though that’s just a guess—there were no captions or notations on the back. The pictures were joined in a double-paned leather frame hinged like a book. The hand-tinting, a technique common in the fifties and sixties, now a nearly lost art, was beautifully done, and the faces seemed to glow as if illuminated. They were smiling, he more broadly than she. Clearly, the photo display had been a beloved keepsake, until one day, it was not, and the trash heap claimed it. “I can’t stop looking at it. It has a homely quality, and yet they’re just so beautiful. Clearly this was somebody’s treasure. I can’t stop thinking, How did it end up here?” DiCioccio’s rendition with needle and thread somehow captures the sadness and mystery of that transition, its threads hanging.

  “One of the interesting things to me is when you go out there and you find these things, and you realize this person has probably died, and this was probably what was in their top bureau drawer,” DiCioccio says. “These objects are that person in a way, it’s their spirit. And I’m rooting through some very personal, bittersweet, touching things, and trying to bring new life to them—to rediscover the human qualities in these disposable things … If we can do that, it’s not trash anymore, is it?”

  WHEN ARTISTS-IN-RESIDENCE first arrive at The Dump, they invariably fret that they’ll never find the things they need for their work: that particular piece of wood, metal or plastic, that just-right shade of paint, that certain thread or cloth. But the fears are almost always unfounded. The flow and variety of materials in the trash are always far greater than any of them quite believe—until they actually start wading into the stuff, and they realize the house cliché is uncannily true: If you need it, it will come.

  One artist needed an array of nuts and bolts to assemble his 3-D collages, and thought for sure he’d have to resort to the hardware store. But then someone showed up at the PDA with the contents of a home workshop, jar after labeled jar of screws, nuts, nails and washers of every size and shape, labeled and lovingly organized, thousands of them. Those baby food, mayonnaise and pickle jars of hardware have served successive a
rtists for years. Someone else needed thread and needles, and really, how likely was it those small essential elements would turn up? How would they ever find those proverbial needles in this stack of garbage and mess? And then there they were, not one but two sewing boxes from different “donors,” crammed with old, good thread, old-school wooden spools, grandma’s sewing kit transformed into trash, and then transformed again into art and the tools for art. Sooner or later, what the artists need always shows up—cloth, glue, rubber, paint. Paint, rather shockingly, shows up by the hundreds of gallons, so much so that Recology sends truckloads of it overseas to developing countries to paint schools and clinics, as well as offering it free to any locals who want to come down and pick it up. There’s still plenty left over for the artists. Who knew so much good paint ends up as trash, oftentimes cans of it barely used or never even opened?

  Here the waste becomes another kind of abundance, and the artists become scavengers, archaeologists, miners and collectors—fascinated and horrified by useful things that somehow have been relegated to the trash pile. Recology has an entire side of a huge warehouse reserved for stuff that’s too good to throw away—furniture and appliances that are usable, sometimes even gorgeous, that people have hauled to the dump. Recology redirects thousands of such pieces a month to a network of thrift stores—unless the artists get to them first.

  The fact that galleries of art, and important milestones in the careers of professional artists, can be constructed out of ordinary trash reveals much about the artistry of the residents, Munk says.

  But it reveals even more about our wasteful ways, and how readily we attach the label “trash” to perfectly good and frequently beautiful things. How much of our trash, how much of our 102-ton legacy, is really and truly trash? At San Francisco’s artist-in-residence program, they’ll tell you: not nearly as much as you think.

  THE INFERNO performed by trash puppets was, Deborah Munk recalls, a rousing success. People were fascinated by the drama, which featured neither dialogue nor narration, but just the expressive gestures and interactions of the carved trash-marionettes. Niki Ulehla is more modest, saying only that she needs to work on the show a bit more and would like to try again in a year or two. But she allows that the audience appeared to enjoy the performance.

  Her puppets are eerily, absurdly lifelike. A twitch of the controller—that x-shaped wooden cross that lets a puppeteer direct the limbs of a puppet—and Ulehla can make Harpy walk. Not bounce along in cartoon simulation of walking, but truly walk, an evil, ominous shuffle appropriate to a tormentor from Hell. She apprenticed in the Czech Republic, where puppetry and marionettes are still a vibrant art form, and for ten years she has been honing the technique she learned there. Her puppetry gives her a special credibility with the five thousand schoolkids who troop through The Dump every year to see where the trash goes—and what the artists can do with it. This, Ulehla says, was her favorite part of the artist-in-residence experience.

  “I guess the small part that I was able to play here was to show by example that there’s an alternative to putting something in the trash. There’s an alternative to buying more materials. We can do better with our resources. We can bring new life to what we thought was disposable.”

  As she is telling me this, in an endearingly shy and reticent way, Niki Ulehla is playing with Harpy, making her creation shuffle and turn and peer up at me. With one eye wide and the other slitted in a rakish wink, the malevolent puppet does not share its creator’s shyness. “When you spend time here, it’s so obvious. So much of the trash really isn’t trash. It’s staring us in the face.”

  10

  CHICO AND THE MAN

  NOT TOO MANY PEOPLE WHO HEAD TO THE LANDFILL with a pile of weeds, deadwood and yard waste end up coming home with a new business, a new mission in life and a new super-villain alter ego. But that’s Andy Keller and ChicoBag’s story, one of those apocryphal origin tales about a regular guy’s green awakening that just happens to be true—and that also thrust him into the middle of a war between bag manufacturers and a growing list of cities that want to ban the plastic bag for good.

  Keller used to be in the software trade, selling enterprise-grade code for a company in San Francisco. His employer let him telecommute from his home in Chico, California, in the Sierra foothills north of Sacramento, where you can get a lot of house, even if it is a fixer-upper, for the price of half a condo in San Francisco. But in 2004, his company was bought out by a European conglomerate that wanted him back working in the mother ship. It was too far to drive every day, so Keller had a choice to make. Should he stay with a company that would likely be downsizing once it finished cracking down on telecommuting? Or stay in Chico and find something else to do?

  At age thirty-one, single, with no family to put at risk by being out of work, he decided to take a severance package instead of moving. Then he finally started the long-postponed fixing of the fixer-upper, beginning with the landscaping. He had to figure out what he’d do next, and thinking about it while digging in the dirt outdoors seemed a good choice after years of pounding keyboards. At the end of the day, he had a huge load of yard waste with no place to put it, which led to his first-ever trip to the local landfill.

  The first thing about the dump that hit him was the odor—nasty, he thought, but unsurprising. Then there was the sight of a mound of the day’s trash piled high. Impressive, awful even, but again, no surprise. And then he saw the plastic bags, flashes of white blowing around the landfill, catching on tractors, on gears, on fences. Birds were pecking at them. They seemed to be everywhere, in and around the trash pile, the most identifiable item in the landfill. That, for some reason, did surprise him. Prior to that moment, he had not thought of those handy-dandy filmy white grocery bags as any sort of problem. They were so thin, so light, he hadn’t really given them a thought. But their footprint seemed magnified now by their dramatic presence in the landfill.

  It struck him so hard that, by the time he was driving away from the landfill, he was thinking that he ought to start avoiding those bags in the future, maybe start using those cloth reusable bags some shoppers brought to the market. On the ride home, the trash by the side of the road he had barely noticed before now seemed much more visible. He saw quite a few plastic bags in the mix of litter.

  By the time he got home, he didn’t just want to cut plastic bags out of his life. He was thinking this impulse could translate into his new job—creating a good alternative to disposable plastic bags. Of course, there were alternatives already being used by a minority of shoppers, even in those days before communities had curtailed, taxed or banned plastic shopping bags. The problem was, Keller had never really liked those reusable shopping bags. They were bulky, they didn’t fold up well, they were so inconvenient that people were forever forgetting them at home or leaving them in the car. They had never really enticed him before, and he guessed others felt the same. A sensible product with great environmental benefits had been stymied by poor design. So what if he designed a bag that was convenient? That could fold up so small that you could keep it in your pocket or your purse and never leave it behind again? It hit him like an adrenaline rush, he would later recall: the solution to his unemployment, to his entrepreneurial yearnings and to an environmental and natural resource problem.

  He’d make a better bag.

  The next day he went to a thrift store and bought an old sewing machine, purchased the lightest, thinnest cloth he could find at a fabric shop, set up shop on his kitchen table and started making prototypes. Then he raced back to the thrift store and bought a better sewing machine—one that actually worked—and spent days sketching, cutting, sewing, then returning to sketch a different design, and starting over.

  Keller wasn’t your average software salesman (or your average thirty-something guy in any profession) in that he had a number of low-tech, traditional skills his peers tended to lack, sewing chief among them. This was a direct result of his parents declining to give him an allowanc
e. By age twelve he was a full-fledged entrepreneur, always scrambling to make money—cutting lawns for a dozen clients, taking on handyman work in the neighborhood, painting, cleaning yards and selling homemade Santa hats he figured out how to make on his mom’s sewing machine.

  The shopping bag prototype he settled on was rough and inexpertly sewn, but it was a proof of concept, a template to begin manufacturing for real: a bag that folded up into a pocket-sized sack that closed with a drawstring. He named it, and the company he formed, ChicoBag, patented his invention and financed the launch with an $80,000 line of credit on his house and a credit card that soon maxed out at $5,000.

  The business grew slowly but steadily over the next several years, with the original ChicoBag, made of woven polyethylene plastic, selling for $6 retail. Once the business was established (and competitors in the $100 million reusable bag business came out with their own pouched grocery bags), Keller began to expand the company’s product line bit by bit, moving into daypacks, duffels, messenger bags and mesh bags for produce, each offering a variety of material choices, including hemp and recycled polyethylene. The original $6 bag, for example, has a greener counterpart made with 97 percent recycled materials for $9.60. The higher price demonstrates the difficult economics of recycling, which is one big reason why there is such a big disparity between what could be recycled and what actually is recycled.

  Manufacturing is done by contractors in Vietnam and China, with some detailing work in the States, which means ChicoBag products have a carbon footprint from transoceanic travel that homegrown products would not carry (though the homegrown versions would carry an untenably larger price tag). Keller says he doesn’t try to hide this fact the way some companies do by having final assembly in Guam so a “made in America” label can be slapped on legally.