Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash (28 page)

Although it has garnered little attention nationally, it turns out the U.S. actually has a couple of mini-Denmarks of its own already. Lee County, Florida, where the city of Fort Myers is located, in 2007 added 50 percent more capacity to an existing garbage power plant, then closed down its last landfill. The county now recycles or composts half its trash, and burns the rest to make enough electricity to power thirty-six thousand homes.

Even more impressive is the state of Connecticut, America’s garbage power leader with six waste-to-energy plants, most built in the 1980s. They handle 62 percent of the state’s trash, supplying about 10 percent of the state’s electricity needs. Twenty-six percent of Connecticut’s waste is recycled, with about 12 percent sent to landfills, the lowest of any state. (Connecticut residents also make less trash than the national average—about five and a half pounds a day each—a lifetime trash legacy of 78 tons.)

The Connecticut program has been so successful that the state is scheduled to close its last active landfill by 2015. The plants have paid for themselves many times over.

And yet the head of the Connecticut Resource Recovery Authority says that, such success notwithstanding, they could never get another such plant built in today’s political and economic climate.

F
OR ALL
his advocacy for waste-to-energy, Nickolas Themelis believes that the most intelligent, most-likely-to-succeed, long-term solution to waste is far simpler than any giant trash-burning generator, and far less costly, yet so much more difficult to achieve: a changed culture.

He believes there must be a shift to a culture that wastes less, one that demands products that are less wasteful, and that embraces products designed to “close the loop”—to be reborn and remanufactured, rather than thrown away or burned. Call it “cradle to cradle,” architect and environmentalist William McDonough’s catchphrase. Call it zero waste. Call it conservation. Call it liberal, progressive or conservative, to Themelis it doesn’t matter. The point is, he says, there needs to be a change. And someday, that change will come—not out of choice, he says rather gloomily, but out of necessity.

“But then there’s what can be done now. Today. And the reality today is that we have to work with what we have, and with where we are
now
. And right now, we’re burying treasure instead of using it to power our homes. And that’s shameful.”

Could a Portland emulate Copenhagen on trash, much as it did years ago when exploring ways to make itself more bicycle friendly? Should it try? Should it even consider the waste-to-energy question, or continue to pursue ever-more recycling in the hope of achieving something close to zero waste—the goal San Francisco has set for itself? And is that goal even possible?

Themelis says no. For that matter, so does Andy Keller of ChicoBag, who sees recycling as a crutch to allow Americans to feel better about overconsumption of disposable things. How does a Denmark, with a robust economy and a standard of living at least as good as America’s, manage to make half as much trash per person as the U.S.? Keller suggests that consumers anywhere can make a culture shift all on their own, by looking at the kind of things being purchased and asking:
Is this thing I’m buying going to be in the trash in a year or two? Or is that going to be useful and treasured for many years to
come?

“If you’re buying something and thinking it could be an heirloom someday,” Keller says, “then you’re on the right track.”

These men who made a study of waste central to their very different careers ended up focusing on the same solution in the end: a societal shift from the culture of disposable abundance to a more measured consumption, a focus on quality over quantity, on more carefully chosen treasures. It sounds great in theory. Getting there is another story. A hint of what that future might look like may be in Denmark, which has shifted more toward sustainability than the United States. But even some communities in America have made inroads of their own. Plastic bag bans—removing a wasteful object, rather than redirecting it to some new destination—has become the first baby step toward lowering the 102-ton legacy in a growing number of American cities.

Metro Portland’s waste and recycling czar, Matt Korot, says all of these ideas could find their way to the table as one of America’s greenest cities plots the future of waste. Given the long commute Portland’s trash currently takes, a Denmark-style shift to trash heat and power would seem to be an attractive alternative. So far, it’s not been discussed beyond the small plasma gasification experiment out at Portland’s remote landfill, a far riskier, more exotic and unproven technology compared to the tried-and-true mass burn trash reactors now in place all over Europe and in Connecticut.

For now, it’s clear the momentum and the desire in green cities such as Portland are with recycling and composting. And even that can be a tough sell. In 2011 Portland adopted a San Francisco–style plastic grocery bag ban that brought complaints from all sides. There were those who missed having the bags for trash and dog poop-scooping. Others saw so many loopholes to the ban that it seemed next to useless, as exemptions included bags for produce, meat and bulk food at groceries, as well as vendors at the popular Portland Farmers Market.

Then there’s the new food scraps pickup process, in which Portland hopes to catch up with San Francisco. After a year-long pilot study, Portland launched its household food waste collection service to shrink the landfill loads and divert the food part to composting. Every home received an official pail with a lid for the kitchen counter to hold smelly food wastes in until they could be dumped into the curbside bin.

The well-thought-out plan had a rub, however: The new weekly food scraps collection meant other trash services had to be cut. Regular garbage would be picked up every two weeks instead of weekly. Considerable civic grumbling ensued. People were upset about having to keep out pails in the kitchen and overflowing trash bins in the yard.

“What’s easier,” the mayor quipped in a newspaper column, clearly irritated with his normally green constituency, “cutting gasoline use by three million gallons a year or getting Portlanders to toss pizza crusts into a pail on the counter? If Portland food scraps stay out of landfill where they produce greenhouse gases as they decompose, then we can keep up to thirty thousand tons of carbon-equivalent emissions out of the atmosphere in a year.”

Given these difficulties, plans to expand the food waste pickups beyond the city limits to the entire Portland Metro area may take years as residents debate that balance between convenience and environment. If selling composting is so difficult in Portland, waste-to-energy might be a nonstarter. And if it can’t fly in Portland, where can it fly?

“We need recycling, as much of it as we can do,” Themelis says. “And for now we need landfills. But the missing part of the puzzle is waste-to-energy. Hopefully, we’ll wake up … We can’t wait until the whole culture changes to a less wasteful one. We must act now.”

12

PUT-DOWNS, PICKUPS AND THE POWER OF NO

B
EA
J
OHNSON NEVER SAW HERSELF, HER HOME, HER
family or her habits as particularly wasteful. Certainly no more so than any other family with two active kids and a big house in the San Francisco Bay Area suburbs, where driving was the only viable option for getting anywhere. They put the recyclables in the right bin. They shopped at farmers’ markets so they could buy local foods. They did their part, as Johnson had seen it. What could be wasteful about that?

Then a move to a new town landed them in an apartment while they searched for a new house, and Johnson realized just how wrong she had been. The new apartment was less than half the size of their old three-thousand-square-foot home, and so everything but the bare essentials—including a lot of bulky furniture, extra clothes, a garage full of boxes of who knew what—went into storage.

It didn’t take Bea Johnson very long to realize something: She missed exactly none of it. She didn’t miss those two extra sets of dishes, the extra sets of silverware or the “good” wineglasses. Not the whole rack of clothes that had filled her closet but that she almost never wore. Not the extra shoes, including pairs she hated or that hurt her feet, but she never seemed to part with. Certainly not those chairs that had looked nice in all that extra space in the old place, but that no one actually wanted to sit in. She didn’t miss the clutter, or the gadgets on the kitchen counter, or the multiple TV sets. All that stuff she had spent years buying and accumulating, all the packaging and boxes and shopping bags and money that went with it, was gone, and instead of missing it all, she discovered that she reveled in its absence.

That’s when Bea Johnson finally got it: There’s power in putting things down instead of putting them in your shopping cart. There’s power in saying
no
—the power to change a family’s life and fortune. Maybe a community’s. Maybe a whole country’s.

“I like it like this,” she told her husband one morning. In years past, there would have been messes throughout the house to clean up—clothes and toys and extra dirty dishes in the sink that would rob hours from her day. Now five minutes of pickup and she’d be done. “I want to keep it like this.”

That’s how it started. Not with a conscious effort to be greener or more sustainable or less wasteful. The Johnsons didn’t know about, hadn’t thought about, the 102-ton legacy back then, and so they weren’t formulating a strategy for eco-consciousness-raising. They had just stumbled on the fact that they were happier in a simpler, less cluttered home, and agreed that they’d see where that idea would take them. They’d downsize a bit, cut out the impulse spending, the recreational shopping, and see. They had no idea this would lead to a near-zero-waste lifestyle, where their lifetime legacy of trash is on track to be measured in pounds rather than tons. These days, a year’s worth of trash for the Johnson house—the stuff that can’t be recycled, repurposed, given away or composted—fits in a mason jar.

“And we have never been happier,” Johnson says.

Some people, even friends, are put off by the lovely but spartan home, by Johnson’s indifference to shopping, her preference for thrift stores when shopping is unavoidable, her adamant resistance to anything packaged or plastic—basically, her lack of attachment to stuff, particularly the disposable stuff that drives our economy and fills our trash cans. “I could never live like this,” one girlfriend flatly told her. “Why would I want to?”

Johnson smiled and said she wanted to show her something. The friend expected to be shown some literature on the evils of plastic, or toxic landfills, or the planetary benefits of sustainability—the usual green justification for crazy eco-hippie behavior that strays far from the American norm. Instead, Johnson pulled out a page of figures her husband, a business consultant, had penciled out on what their new, low-waste lifestyle cost. She hadn’t needed that sort of practical information to support her desire to simplify and downsize, but Scott had. “He figured we’re saving about forty percent over what we used to spend,” she told her friend.

Four out of ten dollars that they used to spend, in other words, were wasted on things they either didn’t need or didn’t want. That’s made a huge difference for the Johnsons in a difficult economy. They can afford cool vacations. A new hybrid. A generous college fund for the boys.

A YEAR’S WORTH OF UNRECYCLABLE TRASH IN THE JOHNSON HOUSEHOLD

Receptacle: one large mason jar containing:

  several pieces of bubble gum

  plastic wrappers from prescription bottle

  plastic tamper-proof seals from contact lens fluid

  expired laminated ID card

  plastic stickers from grocery store fruit

  backing from postage stamps

  clothing tags (the itchy ones)

  masking tape from a paint job

Her dubious friend was quiet for a long beat. Then she said, “So how can I get started?”

B
EA
J
OHNSON
is a slim woman in her mid-thirties with long, dark blond hair with light streaks (achieved by adding a strong brew of chamomile tea for highlighting to her shampoo and conditioner—all bought in bulk, package-free, she is quick to point out. She is serious about living the low-waste life, which for her includes shunning packaging, harsh chemicals and plastic as much as possible—which isn’t as hard as it sounds, she says, though you have to be able to say no with regularity. Her gravity and determination are leavened by an easy laugh, particularly when she’s explaining the chemistry of making her own low-waste cleaners. (With vinegar and castile soap in hand, anything is possible, except—she has to laugh at this—for her disastrous attempt to concoct laundry detergent. Not a good idea, she chuckles, unless you want all your clothes gray.)