14
THROWAWAY SOCIETY
The garbage wars began in the 1990s when New York City found that it was running out of room to store its trash. At first it may have seemed like a simple problem, nothing that could not be solved by a fleet of tractor-trailers carrying garbage to open spaces further south and west. If only Virginia’s Gov. James S. Gilmore had not spoken up. “The home state of Washington, Jefferson and Madison has no intention of becoming New York’s dumping grounds,” he declared.1 New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani responded that accepting some trash was a small price to pay for the enormous cultural benefits that tourists from all across the nation experienced when they came to town on vacation.
Culture in exchange for garbage seemed like a reasonable deal, unless you found yourself living in one of the unlucky places now playing host to what the city no longer wanted. “It may be out of sight, out of mind,” for New Yorkers, remarked one resident of Old Forge, Pennsylvania, home to a landfill that receives trash originating in Brooklyn and Queens. “But in our neck of the woods, we are the ones feeling the impact, we have the hundreds of tractor trailers every day with the New York license plates and a landfill that is tearing apart the side of a mountain.” Not everyone is so negative, of course. Charles City County, Virginia, received some 3.4 million dollars in 2000 from Waste Management, Inc., for the privilege of operating a 1,000-acre landfill, the ultimate destination of waste produced in a large part of Brooklyn. “Our elementary, middle and high schools are all new and they were built from landfill dollars,” the chairman of the county’s board of supervisors recently explained. “That is a very concrete benefit.” Indeed, the trash-financed schools certainly gave the term recycling new meaning.2
Show me your trash and I’ll tell you who you are. A consumer culture eager for the newest and latest gadgets was a society destined to confront the avalanche of items it no longer needed. Indeed, the very concept of planned obsolescence, introduced by GM in the 1920s, presupposed increasing amounts of waste. Before World War II, GM made small model changes each year, with a major revision once every four to five years. After the war, significant stylistic changes—a new set of tail fins or lights—occurred more frequently. Quality also declined, to the point where, by 1956, Americans were junking their cars roughly three years earlier than in the 1940s. It is little wonder that in 1969, New York City alone faced the problem of dealing with 57,000 abandoned automobiles.3
Derelict cars made up just one small part of the solid waste stream produced by the culture of consumption, a stream that turned into more of a torrent as the baby boomers came of age during the 1960s and 1970s. Before the war, plastic played a very limited role in material life, incorporated mainly into radios and some furniture. After the war, as oil became the driving force behind the American economy, plastics, which are made from petroleum, became ubiquitous, used in everything from dry cleaning bags and disposable pens to Styrofoam and shrink-wrap. Packaging also exploded in importance. By 1964, every American consumed a staggering 2,000 packages on average per year. An array of disposable products from plastic silverware to paper cups, meanwhile, enshrined convenience as the dominant selling point of postwar consumerism. Even the advent of computers, initially hailed as a step toward the paperless office, has resulted in more wasted reams as Americans run off multiple drafts of documents formerly produced just once on a typewriter. “People said paper would shrink with the computer—just the opposite is happening,” explained the vice president of a Canadian paper mill. “Office paper is the fastest growing segment. People print out everything they see—Web sites, e-mail.”4
As New York City’s garbage woes suggest, the nation’s landfills began experiencing a space crunch starting in the early 1980s. Between 1982 and 1987, 3,000 landfills, filled to capacity, had to be shut down. In the densely populated Northeast, the space shortage became especially severe, compelling cities to ship trash out of state, where it often wound up on the doorsteps of the poor. Garbage, driven out of sight and out of mind, now circulates the country just like any other commodity, before being dumped wherever the free market system dictates.
PAPER MOUNTAIN
Of all the many products associated with the culture of consumption, from disposable diapers to fast food containers, it is paper that remains the nation’s number one solid waste, accounting since 1960 for more than a third of all the trash in landfills. How did this come to be?
The roots of the current paper profusion go back to the nineteenth century and the development of newsprint, arguably the first mass-produced throwaway product. Before the 1880s, newspapers were printed on paper made from old rags collected from households across the country and processed in mills. But with the development of a machine for grinding wood into pulp (invented in Germany in the 1840s), the production of newsprint in the United States skyrocketed from 130 tons per day in the 1870s to 1.9 million tons in 1900. Newsprint was cheap and not particularly durable, qualities that made it ideal for conveying information about ephemeral events. By the turn of the century, logging companies turned the nation’s once vast forest reserves into pulp on an unheard-of scale, as Americans consumed nearly 60 pounds of paper and paperboard per person. “Satan came walking up and down and he devised methods of making paper from wood pulp,” the famed clergyman and author Edward Everett Hale wrote in 1906. “What follows is that you enter your forest with your axes in summer as you once did in winter, and you cut down virtually everything.” The vast majority of the paper made from these trees was destined for the garbage heap. Today, a year’s subscription to the New York Times takes up roughly 1.5 cubic yards of landfill space and weighs more than 500 pounds.5
Newspapers, depending on market conditions, can be recycled, but not the omnipresent merchandise catalogue, another product presently clogging up the nation’s landfills. Montgomery Ward and Company established the first mail order company in the 1870s. In 1874, it put out a 72-page catalogue. In the 1880s, the catalogue grew to over 500 pages and, by the turn of the century, had ballooned to 1,200 pages. Like newspapers, catalogues had a very limited shelf life and eventually went into the trash to make room for another thick book advertising a new seasonal product line.6
Paper, of course, also plays a major role in packaging. We take it for granted today that purchased products come in packages. But in the nineteenth century, everything from pickles to flour to toothbrushes was sold in bulk. The move toward packaging consumer items began in the late nineteenth century. In 1899, the National Biscuit Company patented a cardboard and wax paper carton for selling crackers, once sold out of a barrel. The new In-Er-Seal carton, the company informed consumers, shielded the biscuits from moisture, keeping them fresh. Companies such as Prophylactic Tooth Brushes even went so far as to sell buyers on the very package itself—not simply what it contained. Packages, went the sales pitch, worked to protect consumers from germs, once easily picked up as buyers rummaged through piles of loose brushes.7
Cleanliness and convenience also figured prominently in the increasing sale of a long line of paper products—from napkins and cups to towels and tissues. Paper towel use, for example, boomed between 1947 and 1963, increasing from 183,000 tons to over 629,000 tons, as consumers were sold on the product’s multiple uses—from draining meat to wiping up spills. “Wastebaskets—Do You Have Enough?” read the title of a 1957 article in Better Homes and Gardens. “Trend today is to larger wastebaskets—to take care of the increasing use of paper napkins, plates, towels, place mats, tissue, wrappings.” Although accounting by the 1970s for just a small fraction of the solid waste stream, the rise of disposable paper products embodied the postwar trend toward convenience and made throwing things away into a veritable national obsession.8
Far more important in terms of the mountain of paper created have been corrugated boxes and newspapers, which by the 1960s were the number one and two solid waste items. Newspapers are especially problematic because paper and other organic materials break down very sl
owly in landfills. Mummification, not biodegradation, more aptly sums up life at the dump. This fact is especially alarming with respect to newsprint because, until recently, a good deal of lead went into the ink used.9
Between 1956 and 1967, the amount of paper disposed of as trash increased by nearly 60 percent, from 22 million tons to 35 million tons. Meanwhile, recycling trended downward. Some 27 percent of the paper consumed in the United States was recycled in 1950, declining to 23 percent in 1960 and only 18 percent in 1969. In paper recycling, everything hinges on the market. Without a demand for recycled paper—often used to make fresh newsprint, wallboard, and insulation—collection is pointless and potentially even counterproductive. By the early 1990s, a glut developed in the United States—too many old newspapers and not enough demand—leading some companies to dump it abroad. As a result, surplus paper upset recycling programs in both Asia and Europe.10
Recycling is a questionable solution to the waste problem for another reason. In principle, tying up newspapers and leaving them at the curb makes a great deal of sense, but it is, nonetheless, a retail-level solution to what is a wholesale systemic problem. Instead of confronting the trash dilemma at its source—the paper factories—recycling shifts responsibility to ordinary people who had little say or role in creating the predicament in the first place. In the 1970s, a coalition of paper, plastic, aluminum, and glass companies ran magazine and TV spots showing an American Indian crying at the sight of litter tossed onto the road (see p. 12). “People start pollution,” the advertisement declared. “People can stop it.” What the advertisement failed to mention was corporate America’s own stake in the nation’s solid waste woes. The commercial located responsibility at the individual level, drawing attention away from the major role that industry itself played—through its relentless efforts at increasing consumption—in perpetuating waste.
DOWN THE DRAIN
The postwar increase in paper and plastic packaging, especially for food items, did have some redeeming ecological value. As the market in processed products boomed, the amount of food that consumers actually threw away declined. Manufacturers removed the leaves and shells from food at the factory and thus landfills received more paper, plastic, and metal and less in the way of foul smelling organic matter. But packaging still did not liberate Americans from coping with kitchen waste.
“Waste” that had once served a useful purpose literally became garbage, something with so little value it could be safely flushed down the drain. The electric garbage disposer was invented in the 1930s, but it was only after World War II that the rage for convenience made a serious inroad into the American kitchen. Only a single company, General Electric, manufactured the appliance before the war; by 1948, however, 17 companies had jumped into the market. In the wake of a cholera outbreak at area pig farms, the town of Jasper, Indiana, required all homeowners to install disposers in 1950. “Jasper is the first town in the world to banish that unsavory, unhealthy relic of the dark ages—the garbage can,” trumpeted McCall’s magazine. Although such cities as Boston and New York prohibited them, fearing that the ground food waste would clog their antiquated sewer systems, by 1960 other urban areas (Denver, Detroit, and many places in California) required them in all new homes. In 1959, disposers could be found in four million American households.11
HOG PEN
This 1939 hog pen was located next door to the Oklahoma City dump, where its owner rented the right to allow his animals to feed on garbage. Such swine-feeding operations persisted in some places until the early 1960s. A decade later, a mere four percent of the nation’s food waste wound up as pork, with the remainder sent to landfills or flushed down the drain. (Library of Congress)
Paralleling the trend toward flushing away kitchen scraps occurred a similar devaluation of organic matter outside the house. The quest for the perfectly green lawn, as we have seen, led homeowners to substitute nitrogen-based fertilizer for grass clippings. The result was a profusion of yard waste, clippings, leaves, and other organic material that otherwise marred the velvety green carpet yearned for by suburbanites. Since at least 1960, yard waste (by weight) has constituted the second largest component of the nation’s solid waste stream, surpassed only by the king of the dump, paper. Over the last four decades, however, the quantity of yard waste has been slowly declining. In 1989, the Environmental Protection Agency, grappling with the mountain of solid waste produced nationwide, urged communities to ban it from landfills. Many communities have established municipal plants for turning it into compost, used to improve soil fertility on farms and golf courses. Still, large-scale composting—as opposed to, say, simply mulching grass clippings and leaving them on the lawn—is subject to economic constraints. Some of the earlier facilities, lacking adequate financing, ran out of money before the composting process had been completed, effectively turning the site into an exceedingly smelly landfill. In any case, Americans have had nowhere near the success with large-scale composting—nor have they demonstrated anything like the political commitment—that European countries have.12
In postwar America, food and yard waste was something to dispose of as readily as possible. Suburbanites, instead of reusing organic material, burdened the land with what was now seen as simply garbage. In this sense, the lack of landfill space, apparent by the 1980s, was at least partly a function of suburban development itself and unquestionably an avoidable disaster.
SOME THINGS ARE FOREVER
Twentieth-century consumerism has rested on convenience and disposability, but durability too has been an important ecological issue. On the one hand, modern consumer culture has broken the local recycling systems of the past and, on the other, has turned to products so durable that they threaten never to go away.
The proliferation of plastic products in the postwar years—everything from trash bags to Christmas trees—has in many ways come to symbolize the nation’s materialistic impulse. In the famous scene from the 1968 movie The Graduate, a family friend tells Dustin Hoffman: “I just want to say one word to you. Just one word … Plastics…. There’s a great future in plastics.” As far as business advice was concerned, it was reasonably sound: Americans have used more plastic with each passing year. In 1976, more plastic was manufactured, in terms of cubic volume, than all steel, copper, and aluminum combined. In part the proliferation of plastics stemmed from the idiosyncrasies of production. Relative to other products, plastics are expensive to manufacture in small quantities because of the high fixed costs involved in making the molds and production equipment. Companies must thus produce huge quantities to recoup their investment.13
Measured by weight, plastics have gone from composing a mere 0.5 percent of total solid waste in 1960 to 8.5 percent in 1990, a steady, although hardly explosive, increase. These figures, however, are by weight, which is why they are commonly cited by the plastics industry itself. In terms of volume, the impact is far greater, with the substance making up anywhere from 16 to 25 percent of the waste stream.14
In recent years, plastics have been “light-weighted,” somewhat reducing their impact. Plastic grocery bags, for example, were 40 percent thinner in the early 1990s than they were in the mid-1970s. While plastics take up less room in landfills, they can take hundreds of years to degrade. Although it is possible to make the substance break down more quickly, it requires a novel and expensive production process. The “greener” plastic also takes up as much if not more room than the nonbiodegradable kind. Indeed, the entire idea of biodegradable plastic may be little more than a scheme to allow corporations to falsely market their products as being green. “Degradability is just a marketing tool,” a representative of the Mobil Chemical Corporation once said. “We’re talking out of both sides of our mouths because we want to sell bags. I don’t think the average consumer even knows what degradability means. Customers don’t care if it solves the solid waste problem. It makes them feel good.” And besides, most manufacturers choose plastic precisely because it is so durable and resistant t
o decay.15
Plastics may well represent a greater ecological threat at sea than on land. In the 1980s an estimated 52 million pounds of packaging were dumped from commercial fleets into the ocean every year, in addition to 300 million pounds of plastic fishing nets. Tens of thousands of sea mammals, birds, and fish died as a result of the plastic tidal wave. One estimate placed the amount of fish with plastic lodged in their stomachs, interfering with digestion, at 30 percent.16
For many environmentalists, plastic has come to symbolize all that is wrong with America. There is no question that in terms of the toxic waste produced in making it, a synthetic product like plastic is cause for concern. But with respect to disposal, it is rubber, a material every bit as important to the culture of consumption, that has posed an even greater environmental challenge.
TIRE DUMP
Piles of discarded tires, like these in Kilgore, Texas, littered the American landscape as early as the 1930s. (Library of Congress)
The problems with rubber derive from the nation’s love affair with the road. Early in the century, when the automobile was just getting its start, rubber came from Brazil, where workers went from tree to tree making cuts and capturing the latex, in order to meet the rising demand for tires. By the end of World War I, however, Asia, where major plantations were built on the Malay Peninsula, had eclipsed the Amazon as the world’s leading rubber source.
In the years after World War II, as the automobile rose to dominance, America’s stockpile of used tires began to grow. But the increase was slow since it was possible to harvest the discarded rubber and reuse it for making new tires. Beginning in the 1960s, however, tire manufacturers began to reject such recycled rubber. The advent of the steel-belted radial, increasing concern with tire safety, and a surplus of synthetic rubber all contributed to the downfall of tire reprocessing. Nor did it help that the new generation of steel-belted radial tires were harder to recycle.17
Down to Earth_Nature's Role in American History Page 31