The result was predictable: a massive buildup of used tires. By the 1980s, Americans threw away roughly one tire for every man, woman, and child, some 200 to 250 million each year. Of that amount, an estimated 168 million eventually entered either landfills or junkyards.18
The problem with tires is that like old ghosts they have a way of returning to haunt. Bury them with a bulldozer and they will eventually resurface as they expand back to their original shape. So the operators of dumps routinely collected them and put them in piles. Soon the piles became literally mountains. By 1990, somewhere between two and three billion scrap tires existed nationwide. Not surprisingly, California, with its affinity for auto transport, led the country in the 1990s with roughly 28 million tires located at 140 sites.19
What harm is there in tire mountains? Unexpected biological consequences have been one result. Beginning in the 1970s, a market arose in the United States for used tires imported from Japan and other Asian countries. (Japanese drivers are apparently more finicky than Americans, who are untroubled with buying slightly worn tires.) The tires made the trip overseas and so, evidently, did the Asian tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus), which can transmit a number of diseases to humans, including malaria and some forms of encephalitis. Because of their ability to retain water, tires provide ideal breeding environments for mosquitoes. In 1984, the Asian mosquito surfaced in several Houston area tire dumps. By 1997, the insect, hitching a ride as the tires were hauled around the nation’s vast interstate system, had expanded into 25 states, although, as yet, no evidence has linked the mosquito to the onset of disease in this country.20
Of more concern is the fire threat that tires pose. Since the 1980s, a number of blazes have broken out at tire dumps around the country (and in Canada) as lightning, arson, and spontaneous combustion have ignited the huge stockpiles of rubber. In 1983, a fire at a Virginia tire dump burned for a full nine months. Somewhere between five million and seven million tires went up in the blaze, producing 250,000 million gallons of toxic sludge. “You don’t know what Hell’s going to look like,” said one volunteer firefighter, “but you had that feeling about it.”21 A 1998 California tire fire smoldered for more than a year because officials feared that suppressing it might contaminate ground water. And in 1999, what has been described as the West’s largest tire pile, near Westley, California, went up in smoke after a lightning strike, igniting a blaze so fierce it required the state to hire a crew of professional firefighters from Texas to extinguish the inferno.
The fire threat has helped to spur recycling efforts, which increased markedly in the 1990s. Scrap tires have been used to make roadways, cover landfills, and in place of rock as a substitute drainage material. They are also burned to make cement. But once again market imperatives undercut such efforts. The demand for recycled rubber simply cannot keep pace with the millions of tires Americans heave each year. As one scrap tire expert put it, “tires, like diamonds, are forever.”22
DUMPED ON
Between 1940 and 1968, Americans doubled the amount of solid waste, per capita, they produced each day, from two to four pounds. Today, the United States leads the industrialized world in waste generation, producing twice the amount of trash per capita as such countries as France, Britain, and Japan.23
To deal with the garbage, cities in postwar America built sanitary landfills. Earlier in the century, municipalities had relied on incinerators. But they were expensive to build, and burning garbage severely compromised air quality. In the years following World War II, the number of municipal incinerators fell from some 300 to just 67 in 1979. Landfills took up the slack. Unlike a dump, where garbage was scattered willy-nilly across an area, a landfill, thought to be a concept invented by the British in the 1920s, involved burying the garbage with dirt on a daily basis, a practice designed to eliminate the foul smell from decomposing organic matter. The idea left open the possibility that the area might again become productive—landscaped and transformed into real estate—when its capacity for garbage had been exhausted. Although landfills may have appeared in America early in the twentieth century, they arose in great numbers after 1945. There were roughly 100 landfills when the war ended and 1,400 a decade and a half later.24
The notorious Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island, New York, had its start in 1948. Robert Moses planned to fill the area with garbage for about two decades and then turn the site into viable real estate suitable for homes, parks, and light industry. That has yet to happen, although it remains a possibility. Before its reinvention as a dumping ground for New York City’s trash, the Fresh Kills area was essentially a swamp. Indeed, the word kill is Dutch for creek. In the 1940s, scientists had yet to realize that wetlands (a term ecologists only first employed in the 1950s to replace the pejorative swamp) served an important ecological role. We now know that wetlands absorb and filter water and thus help prevent floods, while preserving water quality. Unaware of this information, planners believed that wetlands made perfect landfill sites. In fact, moist environments, where trash and soil are in direct contact, aid biodegradation, causing the surrounding water and soil to be contaminated with toxins. (Today landfills are commonly lined with plastic to prevent this problem.)25
In the booming postwar years, a number of other landfills went up in the New York metropolitan area. But given the high water table throughout much of the region, especially Long Island, it was not long before people discovered the dangers involved. Slowly the brimming landfills, indicted as nuisances, began to close down, but Fresh Kills, the largest in the city, indeed, in the nation, hung on. At its peak in 1986, the landfill received a stunning 21,000 tons of garbage each day. When the Edgemere landfill in Queens shut down in 1991, Fresh Kills became the city’s last remaining solid waste disposal site. As monuments go, Fresh Kills is nearly unrivaled. It is the second largest man-made structure in the world, only lagging behind the Great Wall of China.26
Staten Islanders, unsurprisingly, are not impressed with what the city has built them. “You ask yourself what it would smell like if you had a huge piece of rotting meat in your back yard,” one local business owner complained in 1996.27 The stench, however, is only the beginning of the problem. Millions of gallons of leachate, a toxic, sludgelike substance that oozes from landfills, have flowed straight into New York Harbor. In addition, tons of methane gas emanating from the pile pollute the air every day. Perhaps most sobering of all is this: As of the late 1990s, the Fresh Kills facility was disposing of just 0.02 percent of all the solid waste produced in the United States.
Whatever the problems of Fresh Kills, it has for decades met the city’s needs for waste disposal. It is worth remembering that as a culture we need to do something with our trash. The only question is who will bear the costs. In 1996, Republican Guy Molinari, Staten Island’s borough president, decided that the time was right to ask the city of New York to close down Fresh Kills. For generations Molinari and his family had fought the dump; now with Republicans occupying both city hall (Rudy Giuliani) and the governor’s mansion (George Pataki), Molinari prevailed on New York City to let Fresh Kills rest in peace. The decision was made despite the knowledge that the landfill still contained some 20 years’ worth of unused capacity. Although the details surrounding the move remain shrouded in secrecy, this much is clear: City leaders gave virtually no consideration to what closing the site might mean for public health and environmental quality such as the increasing truck traffic that would come as trash was shipped to transfer stations located outside the city.28
Now the landfill is closed. That, of course, is the fate of all landfills. The 1980s witnessed a series of such closings. In the period between 1979 and 1986, some 3,500 landfills shut down either for lack of space or because of their failure to comply with tougher federal safety standards. Meanwhile, new landfills did not open to replace the defunct ones. During the mid-1970s, the state of Texas licensed about 250 landfills per year; in 1988, it licensed fewer than 50.29
To pick up some of the s
lack, northeastern cities, where the space crunch has been particularly acute, have started shipping their garbage out of state. Traveling trash itself is nothing new. During the 1960s, large numbers of so-called transfer stations came on line. These facilities, common in urban areas with limited disposal sites, were essentially garbage terminals where collection trucks came to unload trash before it went, often by barge, to a more distant resting place. The interstate movement of trash increased in the 1980s, with New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania exporting eight million tons, mostly to the Midwest. By 1995, every single state, even Alaska and Hawaii, either imported or exported garbage. More than 17 million tons circulated throughout the nation in an intricate web of movements.30
THE FINAL BURIAL
The last load of New York City garbage destined for the notorious Fresh Kills site on Staten Island arrived on March 22, 2001. The landfill, now closed, was at points as high as the Statue of Liberty. (Mary Chapman)
In the summer of 1992, 80 boxcars worth of New York City trash left the South Bronx headed for a landfill in Libory, Illinois. There was only one problem: The landfill’s permit had expired by the time the trash train arrived. The load of putrefying waste changed course and made stops in Sauget and Fairmont City, Illinois; Kansas City, Kansas; Medille, Missouri; Fort Madison, Iowa; and Streator, Illinois. No one seemed to want it. Eventually the entire smelly mess had to be hauled back east—the sides of the cars buckling as the heat swelled the size of the load—and buried in the Fresh Kills landfill.31
That same summer, another trainload of trash pulled out of New York and again chugged west toward Sauget, Illinois. This time residents protested the dumping of out-of-state garbage in their community by organizing a sit-in. “The people here have dictated they don’t want any part of it,” the town’s mayor remarked. “If it was from Illinois, it might not be near as bad. But being from New York, they frown on that.”32
The “poo-poo choo choos,” as the media dubbed them, were just one symptom of the dilemmas raised by the free market in trash. Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, increasing numbers of landfills were taken over by the private sector. By 1998, nearly two-thirds of all waste destined for a landfill went to a private facility. Many of these installations are now owned by large, multinational corporations such as Waste Management, which operates over 300 landfills and serves approximately 19 million residential customers nationwide.33
None other than the U.S. Supreme Court helped sanction the move toward the privatization of waste. In a string of cases dating back to 1978, the court has held that state laws attempting to bar interstate trash shipments violate the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, which gives Congress the right to oversee trade among the states. Prior to 1978, the court had commonly allowed states the right to regulate imported goods that compromised human health. In a landmark decision involving the city of Philadelphia and the state of New Jersey, the court overturned that precedent and has upheld its new position for more than two decades. As a result, garbage has become a commodity that moves, unfettered by state laws, according to the market’s invisible hand.34
The court’s decision might well impress many economists, but its social ramifications have proved more dubious. One recent study of garbage movement has uncovered three important trends. First, trash seems to move from states with high population densities to those with lower ones. Second, the waste gravitates from states with high per capita incomes to poorer ones. And third, the trash apparently flows from states confronting fewer air and water pollution problems to those with more such dilemmas. Are the rich dumping on the poor? Perhaps. The commodification of anything—whether it is land, water, beaver, bison, or even garbage—it is best remembered, has always produced both winners and losers.35
CONCLUSION
Garbage thus met very much the same fate that meat and fruit did earlier in the century. By the postwar period, Americans had become largely unaware of where their food came from and of where their trash went to. In this sense, garbage had become an abstract entity, a “solid waste stream” that went flowing to either local landfills or wherever the calculus of the market took it.
The solid waste problem is a creation of the American consumer economy and its incredible penchant for producing seemingly endless numbers of things made to break down or to go obsolete, a culture in love with beautiful cars and lawns while oblivious to the full consequences of those desires. Locally sited landfills, where things went to die, at least served as a reminder of what it meant to produce and consume. But with the increasing trend toward a national free market in garbage, with New York City’s sanitation fleet headed for the state line, trash has become lost in space in one of the world’s largest nations.
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SHADES OF GREEN
Spontaneous combustion is not something that is supposed to happen to a river, unless it happens to be the Cuyahoga, an 80-mile long stream that cuts through the center of Cleveland, Ohio, before debouching into Lake Erie. The worst fire on the Cuyahoga raged through a shipyard, seriously burned three tugboats, and resulted in excess of 500,000 dollars in damage. Exactly what caused the river to ignite that day is not totally clear. What is clear is that water was not the only substance flowing in the river that day. “We have photographs that show nearly six inches of oil on the river,” Bernard Mulcahy, a fire prevention expert, said after the blaze.1
It was 1952. American soldiers were battling in Korea and Dwight D. Eisenhower was poised to win the presidency in a landslide victory. The Cuyahoga, meanwhile, was merely repeating itself. A half-century earlier, on December 31, 1899, two men operating a Cleveland railroad bridge were minding their own business when one of them noticed, in the words of a newspaper account, “a great volume of smoke intermingled with flame rising from the river.” The fire, however, caused no significant damage.2
So when fire broke out yet again on the river on June 22, 1969, no one in Cleveland was probably all that surprised. Although a picture appeared on the front page of the city’s main newspaper, the actual story detailing the fire lay buried deep inside. “It was strictly a run of the mill fire,” said Chief William Barry of the Cleveland Fire Department. To this day, Clevelanders must wonder why the 1969 fire, which did merely one-tenth the damage of the 1952 conflagration, became such a focus of national attention, solidifying, it might be added, the city’s reputation as the “Mistake by the Lake.” Later that summer, the Cleveland disaster became a poster child for the ills of modern America when Time magazine unveiled a new “Environment” section with a report on the sorry state of the Cuyahoga. “Chocolate-brown, oily, bubbling with sub-surface gases, it oozes rather than flows.” What changed to make a routine event in the local history of a gritty industrial city into an environmental cause célèbre?3
As the story of the Cuyahoga suggests, the culture of consumption with its predilection for oil left a giant footprint on the nation’s landscape. It brought about everything from the devastation of rivers and draining of wetlands to declines in biodiversity, ground water, public grazing lands, and air quality to the degradation of manure from a farm asset into a major pollution headache to the transformation of the very landscape itself into a dichromatic expanse of black and green.
CUYAHOGA FIRE, 1952
Although most people recall only the 1969 fire that helped marshal support for the environmental movement, Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River, home to a large number of oil refineries by the latter part of the nineteenth century, often ignited, as it did here in 1952. (Special Collections, Cleveland State University Library)
How could such a sweeping set of ecological changes not sow seeds of protest in its wake? As early as the 1930s, wilderness advocates introduced Americans to the idea that making an area off-limits to development could actually enrich society more—in the benefits it conferred on the soul—than allowing timber, oil, and mining interests to profit from such areas. But by the 1960s, environmentalism began to evolve in a different direction, away from its w
ilderness roots and more toward a broader concern with ecology itself. In a decade known for its political activism, be it demonstrations against the Vietnam War or protests for civil rights, environmentalism took on the trappings of a mass movement organized around cleaner air and water for all, not just in wilderness areas.
By the following decade, ecology-based environmentalism grew to be one of the most dramatic and significant reform movements in American history. The movement questioned corporate capitalism’s tendency to view nature solely as an instrument in the service of economic gain. It helped inspire the push for a vast set of new environmental regulations. It even brought a whole new field of law into existence. Within the space of just two decades, it created a concern for nature that penetrated the fabric of everyday life. A 1990 Gallup poll found that an incredible three-quarters of those Americans surveyed fashioned themselves environmentalists.4 Environmentalism has evolved into a diverse, multifaceted phenomenon—broad enough to include within its spectrum everyone from conservative Washington lobbyists in suits to renegade ecowarriors in jeans and plaid shirts.
SAVING THE WILD KINGDOM
The automobile brought rising numbers of Americans to the doorstep of wilderness. By the early 1920s, perhaps as many as 10 million to 15 million people were piling into their cars and heading off on summer vacations away from the hectic pace of urban life. Millions more set off on Sunday afternoon trips to nearby lakes and woods now within easy reach. Under the leadership of Stephen Mather, the National Park Service reorganized itself to accommodate automobile tourism. In 1913, Mather arranged to open Yosemite National Park to cars. Four years later, Yellowstone did the same. The number of visitors leapt from 356,000 to 1.3 million in just seven years (1916–1923), as the National Park Service engaged in a massive publicity campaign, replete with photographs, postcards, and magazine articles. As the parks became tourist attractions, nature came to be seen as a separate and faraway locale packaged up for human consumption. “Yellowstone is like an aquarium,” observed writer E. B. White on a visit in 1922, “all sorts of queer specimens, with thousands of people pressing in to get a glimpse…. [I]t is so obviously ‘on exhibition’ all the time.”5
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