Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash

GARBOLOGY

ALSO BY EDWARD HUMES

Force of Nature:
The Unlikely Story of Wal-Mart’s Green Revolution

Mississippi Mud:
Southern Justice and the Dixie Mafia

Eco Barons:
The New Heroes of Environmental Activism

Monkey Girl:
Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America’s Soul

Over Here:
How the G.I. Bill Transformed the American Dream

School of Dreams:
Making the Grade at a Top American High School

Baby ER:
The Heroic Doctors and Nurses Who Perform Medicine’s Tiniest Miracles

Mean Justice

No Matter How Loud I Shout:
A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court

Murderer with a Badge:
The Secret Life of a Rogue Cop

GARBOLOGY

OUR DIRTY LOVE AFFAIR
WITH TRASH

EDWARD HUMES

AVERY

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BOOK DESIGN BY TANYA MAIBORODA

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

ALWAYS LEARNING

PEARSON

In memory of my grandmother Maggie,
who survived famine, weathered the Great Depression,
drank her Irish whiskey neat, taught me to play poker at age seven,
and instructed me that, while wasting is not exactly a sin,
it is rather stupid

CONTENTS

Introduction: 102 Tons (or: Becoming China’s Trash Compactor)

PART 1.
 THE BIGGEST THING WE MAKE

1.
   Ain’t No Mountain High Enough

2.
   Piggeries and Burn Piles: An American Trash Genesis

3.
   From Trash TV to Landfill Rodeos

4.
   The Last and Future Kingdom

5.
   Down to the Sea in Chips

6.
   Nerds vs. Nurdles

PART 2.
 THE TRASH DETECTIVES

7.
   The Trash Trackers

8.
   Decadence Now

PART 3.
 THE WAY BACK

9.
   Pick of the Litter

10.
   Chico and the Man

11.
   Green Cities and Garbage Death Rays

12.
   Put-Downs, Pickups and the Power of No

Epilogue: Garbage In, Garbage Out

Endnotes

Index

INTRODUCTION: 102 TONS (OR: BECOMING CHINA’S TRASH COMPACTOR)

O
N
M
AY 24, 2010, RESCUE WORKERS DONNED IM
permeable hazardous materials suits, then burrowed into the creaking, dangerous confines of a ruined South Side Chicago home, searching for the elderly couple trapped inside.

More than an hour later, as curious neighbors gathered and a television news crew arrived to film the emergency rescue operations, Jesse Gaston, a seventy-six-year-old chemist, and his wife, Thelma, a retired schoolteacher, walked unsteadily into the hazy afternoon light, dehydrated and hungry but still among the living.

The Gastons had been trapped by trash—their own trash.

The debris had accumulated for years until every surface of the house was covered by layers of old newspapers, empty plastic jars, pieces of broken furniture, worn-out coolers, splintered garden rakes, thousands of soda bottles, cans of every size, clothing old and new, broken lamps, dusty catalogs, mountains of junk mail and garbage bags filled with the detritus of daily life. All of this, and much more, had been kept for reasons no one could coherently explain, not even the Gastons, until the junk and trash reached the level of the highest kitchen cupboards, the ones that held the good china. A broken refrigerator lay in the kitchen, half buried and resting on its side, as if buoyed up by the sea of bottles, cans, cartons and sacks engulfing it. No room in the house could be called usable or even safely navigable; the stairs were blocked, the furniture buried, the garage packed floor to ceiling. The disordered accumulation looked as if it had been swept in by a tidal wave.

The Gastons simply grew unable to part with their trash. This hoarding compulsion gripped them gradually, a slow evolution, a piece at a time, then a bag here and there, then whole boxes of trash until, finally, the Gaston home became a one-way depository, the garbage version of the Eagles’ famous “Hotel California”: stuff checked in, but it could never leave. They hoarded until goods and trash consumed their home and almost their lives. Neighbors, alarmed by the fact that the couple hadn’t been seen in three weeks—not to mention the increasingly persistent stench emanating from the home—had called police and firefighters. The rescuers eventually determined that Thelma had become trapped by falling debris somewhere in the bowels of the house, and Jesse, trying to reach her, had been pinned by piles of trash that toppled around him, too.

Although most of us tend to view this sort of extreme hoarding as an aberration, it’s a surprisingly common occurrence. Variations of the Gaston household are found around the country more or less on a daily basis, although most often after the hoarder’s demise, and seldom with the fanfare of news coverage. Somewhere between 3 and 6 million Americans are thought to be compulsive junk hoarders with living spaces that, to varying degrees, resemble the Gastons’. The phenomenon offers enough freak-show fascination to have spawned a cable television series: the A&E Network’s
Hoarders
, which entertains viewers by taking them inside different hoarders’ homes every week. The show’s website offers a handy interactive quiz to help viewers determine if they, too, are addicted to hoarding or merely “just messy.”

This phenomenon has not yet achieved true immortality as a distinct mental illness—the bible of psychiatry, the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
, categorizes extreme hoarding as merely one of many forms of the catch-all obsessive-compulsive disorder—although some experts are lobbying to have it classified as its own, unique ailment: disposophobia. The proposed malady is alternatively known as Collyer Brothers syndrome, named for one of the earliest and most dramatic manifestations of media-immortalized trash hoarding. Homer and Langley Collyer, rich and reclusive, rebelled early in the twentieth century against the still-evolving practice of mandatory municipal garbage collection in New York City. They turned their multistory brownstone into a crammed and putrefying museum of trash, featuring endless piles and rows of newspapers, bottles, boxes, broken gadgetry (Langley Collyer fancied himself an inventor) and a partially buried Model T Ford hidden on the second floor beneath layers of debris. The brothers were found dead in their home in 1947—Langley had been crushed by a collapsing tunnel of trash, and his invalid older brother, Homer, helpless without Langley’s care, died later of thirst and starvation. Authorities eventually removed about 130 tons of trash from the brothers’ home.

As morbidly compelling as such extreme hoarding may be (healthy ratings for cable television’s looky-loo show earned it a multiple-season renewal deal, along with spawning a rival program, TLC’s
Hoarding: Buried Alive
), the most revealing aspect of disposophobia is society’s tone-deaf response to the phenomenon. The focus of therapists, “organization coaches,” family, friends and TV show hosts is always on persuading disposophobics to do as “normal” people do: take the trash to the curb so it can be hauled away. A little counseling here, a little psychoactive drug therapy there, throw in a cleanup crew, a dump truck and some liberal doses of Mr. Clean and, poof, problem solved. But little if any thought is given to the refuse itself, or to the rather scarier question of how any person, hoarder or not, can possibly generate so much trash so quickly.

Of course, there’s a reason for this blind spot: namely, the amount of junk, trash and waste that hoarders generate is perfectly, horrifyingly normal. It’s just that most of us hoard it in landfills instead of living rooms, so we never see the truly epic quantities of stuff that we all discard. But make no mistake: The two or three years it took the Gastons to fill their house with five to six tons of trash is typical for an American couple. The Collyer brothers were outliers in their own time, but they would fit in the normal range circa 2011 quite nicely: Their lifetime trash production seventy years ago matches almost to the pound the prodigious modern American equivalent. The rest of us are just better at hiding it—mostly from ourselves.

This turns out to be something various government, industry and university surveys attempt to track quite carefully: Americans make more trash than anyone else on the planet, throwing away about 7.1 pounds per person per day, 365 days a year.
¹

Across a lifetime that rate means, on average, we are each on track to generate 102 tons of trash.

Each of our bodies may occupy only one cemetery plot when we’re done with this world, but a single person’s 102-ton trash legacy will require the equivalent of 1,100 graves. Much of that refuse will outlast any grave marker, pharaoh’s pyramid or modern skyscraper: One of the few relics of our civilization guaranteed to be recognizable twenty thousand years from now is the potato chip bag. (And no, those new biodegradable plastic bottles and bags intended to save the day so far haven’t saved much of anything. Turns out manufacturers failed to check whether their lab-tested degradability is compatible with the real-world network of local composters and recyclers across the nation. Mostly, they’re not.
²
)

And so the trash trail only grows: The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that, between 1980 and 2000, the average American’s daily trash load increased by a third. The difference between now and 1960 is even greater, nearly double the per capita trash output. Americans have “won” the world trash derby without really trying, making 50 percent more garbage per person than other Western economies with similar standards of living (Germany, Austria and Denmark, among others), and about double the trash output of the Japanese. America’s production of waste exceeds past projections of previous generations who tried to estimate how wasteful their twenty-first-century counterparts would be. The futurist marketers behind the 1964 World’s Fair in New York felt they were being fairly conservative when they built scale models of the gleaming future cityscapes we were supposed to be living in by now (hover cars and moving sidewalks, anyone?) in which problems of energy and waste had been solved by technology rather than exacerbated by it. Garbage was so old school; we were supposed to have scienced away that ancient problem ages ago.

What no one considered back then (and few acknowledge now) is waste’s oddest, most powerful quality: We’re addicted to it.

It turns out our contemporary economy, not to mention the current incarnation of the American Dream, is inextricably linked to an endless, accelerating accumulation of trash. The purchases that drive the markets, the products that prove the dream, all come packaged in instant trash (the boxes, wrappers, bags, ties, bottles, caps and plastic bubbles that contain products). And what’s inside that packaging is destined to break, become obsolete, get used up or become unfashionable in a few years, months or even days—in other words, rapidly becoming trash, too. When the tide of garbage bound for the landfill grows from year to year, America’s leaders rejoice because, despite the economic and environmental cost of waste, it signals the welcome reality that more people and businesses are buying more stuff. This is why countries with booming economies—China being the prime example—are frantically digging new landfills to ring their growing cities.

Garbage has become one of the most accurate measures of prosperity in twenty-first-century America and the world.

The opposite holds true as well. When the lines of garbage trucks headed to America’s landfills grow shorter, as they did in 2008 and the years that followed, it makes for a surer sign that our disposable economy is headed for recession than a plunging Dow Jones Industrial Average or a falling dollar. No stockbroker could out-predict the landfill dozer and compactor operators, who saw the bubble bursting ahead of everyone. Presidents used to fret that Americans did not save enough. Now they worry when we do not shop enough, the modern cure for recession and economic crisis, epitomized by President George W. Bush’s call to Americans in the wake of the 9/11 attack to go out and spend more money for the good of the country. This prevailing viewpoint that favors spending rather than saving our way to prosperity, whatever its merits, creates a powerful societal and economic undertow that fuels America’s garbage addiction.

It’s an ailment that did not exist in anything like its current form for 99.9 percent of human history. Today’s hoarders perform a kind of public service, letting us see what our true legacy looks like. Otherwise those 102 tons remain virtually invisible, too big to see. We chuck pieces of it in the can every day, push it out to the curb every week and then forget about it as if it’s gone. But that clever vanishing trick hides the fact that nothing people do has more impact than their waste. It’s connected to everything: energy, food, pollution, water, health, politics, climate, economies. Trash is nothing less than the ultimate lens on our lives, our priorities, our failings, our secrets and our hubris.

One out of every six big trucks in the U.S. is a garbage truck. Their yearly loads would fill a line of trucks stretching halfway to the moon. The creation of products and packaging that end up in those trucks contributes 44 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions that drive global warming, more than any other carbon-spewing category.
³
Garbage costs are staggering: New York City alone spent $2.2 billion on sanitation in 2011. More than $300 million of that was just for transporting its citizens’ trash by train and truck—12,000 tons a day—to out-of-state landfills, some as far as three hundred miles away. How much is 12,000 tons a day? That’s like throwing away sixty-two Boeing 747 jumbo jets daily, or driving 8,730 new Honda Civics into a landfill each morning. Imagine an armada of the U.S. Army’s mighty M-1 Abrams main battle tanks lined up bumper to bumper for more than a mile. That’s 12,000 tons—one city’s trash, one very costly day.

Now multiply all that about thirty-six times to gauge the nation’s daily garbage spend and flow. In a year, Americans throw out a collective 389.5 million tons of rubbish—what the feds call “municipal solid waste,”
⁴
the stuff we personally throw away. This annual load of trash is roughly equivalent to the collective weight of the entire U.S. adult population—eighteen times over.
⁵

This staggering number is not easy to find, because like any addict, America is living in an official state of garbage denial. The statistical bible of municipal waste put out annually by the Environmental Protection Agency—accepted for decades as the garbage gold standard by policy makers and media alike—scandalously underestimates America’s trash by relying on byzantine simulations and equations rather than actual counts of trash going to landfills. More than 140 million tons of garbage come up unaccounted for in the process. It turns out that obscure but far more accurate scientific surveys made jointly by Columbia University and the journal
BioCycle
reveal that we’re sending twice as much waste to landfills as the EPA’s calculations let on, and recycling proportionately far less than the rosy official stats suggest. The EPA reports a third of our trash gets recycled or composted, but the real-world figures indicate that this diversion rate is less than a fourth of our total trash—a milestone that the supposed gold standard incorrectly asserts we surpassed a decade ago.
⁸