Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (12 page)

The architects of this building, which had cost $25 million to erect in 1996, had incorporated into the design a long L-shaped corridor with plate glass windows that overlooked the tipping floor, conveyor belt, balers, and recycling operation. The idea was that visitors would be allowed to see what happened to their trash: school groups would come through, senior citizens, city planners, book writers. The windows were big; little was hidden. The public looked and it learned. Today, though, there were no finger smudges on the window, and the hallway was dim. When the market for recyclables had dropped in the midnineties, heavy on supply but low on demand, National Ecology, the private company that held the recycling contract, had quit pulling plastic, paper, metal, and glass from the coffee grounds, pizza crusts, dust balls, and toys. Everything, now, went into the bales. The show had changed, and the school groups no longer came.

I watched forklifts position the compressed crazy-quilt cubes of waste on flatbed trucks—each cube weighed a ton and a half—then got into Chris Murray’s SUV to follow them out into the light of day.

We drove on winding roads through the hundred-plus-acre property. Most of the landfill sections had been closed and planted long ago, so it was a bit like touring a country estate in a well-groomed park, but instead of waiting for the manor house to loom up from the monoculture of knee-high grass, I awaited a gash in the earth, the proverbial active face. Murray had the tour all planned: we circled around the back of the property and topped the highest mound, which had an elevation of 256 feet. A thousand-acre army base surrounded the landfill, and the view from up top was of unbroken forest, mostly oaks and pines. There wasn’t a man-made object in sight.

Murray turned his Jeep around and we headed toward the main attraction. He parked on the muddy road, and we watched from a slight distance as forklifts snatched bales of garbage, one by one, from flatbeds. They turned and stacked them, three bales high, creating terraces of garbage on the edge of a flat plain. There was an air of solemnity to the garbage stacking, an aspect of restraint that befits a burial. But the men were, in fact, building even while they buried. I was reminded of Mayan ball fields and the ruins of other ancient cultures—the ochre color of the dirt, the escalating ramparts and terraces, the angularity of the place. I was looking at an ending, but I was thinking, This is how civilization began.

Archaeologists know that ancient people did the same things with refuse that we do today: they threw it in holes in the ground, they buried it, and then they found another hole. Sometimes they left detritus on the floors of their houses, then covered that layer with dirt. Over time the floors rose high enough that roofs and doorways had to be raised. The ancient Trojans, it’s estimated, accumulated waste at the rate of 4.7 feet per century. In Don DeLillo’s
Underworld,
a novel about a waste trader, a character named Jesse Detwiler teaches his UCLA students that garbage has its own momentum, that it has the power to shape people. Pushed to edges, garbage also pushed back. “People were compelled to develop an organized response,” Detwiler says. “This meant they had to come up with a resourceful means of disposal and build a social structure to carry it out—workers, managers, haulers, scavengers.” In Detwiler’s view, garbage acted as an evolutionary force, helping to shape early man. “[I]t forced us to develop the logic and rigor that would lead to systematic investigations of reality, to science, art, music, mathematics.”

Sitting inside the climate-controlled SUV, I sensed grandeur in the scene playing out before me. Here was Monmouth County’s waste: this was Monmouth County’s organized response. There was none of IESI’s shame in the operation. It was just a place where men buried garbage.

Chapter Four

The Spectacle of Waste

R
obin Nagle had invited me to join her undergraduate Urban Anthropology class at New York University, but I didn’t take her up on the offer until one late-spring morning, when three employees from the Department of Sanitation had been invited to address her students. I was mostly keen on meeting Dennis Diggins, who happened to be the director of Fresh Kills.

Nagle began by walking the class through the officers’ uniforms: the insignia, the hash marks on sleeves, the collar pins. For Nagle, uniforms were a text, or “identity markers.” She wore her own set of these: a small barbell in the rim of her left ear, a tailored leather jacket, a shoulder tattoo. Nagle was tall and lean, a triathlete, and she favored long skirts, which lent her a sexy-librarian look. When her guests, describing their jobs to the class, used DSNY jargon, she interrupted peremptorily. “Explain RO,” she’d command. (It meant rotating officer.) “Explain chart.” (A san man’s day off.)

Nagle, of course, knew exactly what these terms meant. She had been working unofficially at the Manhattan 7 garage, in her Upper West Side neighborhood, for the last half a year. She woke before dawn and pulled on the green uniform, then spent the next several hours dragging garbage cans from curb to truck and tipping them inside. After “getting it up” with her two male partners—ten tons or so—she took the subway downtown to her paying job. The director of NYU’s Draper Interdisciplinary Master’s Program, Nagle investigated the social meanings of trash in her graduate-level “Garbage in Gotham” class and conducted ongoing ethnographic research on sanitation workers, about whom she planned to write a book. The following spring she’d take the citywide DSNY test, answer seventy-three out of seventy-five questions correctly, and go on to ace the physical.

Chief Diggins, as he was known, stood before the students with his green cap in his hands. There was a sadness to his ruddy, rounded face. His mustache was graying; his eyes were gentle. Diggins wasn’t sure what Nagle expected of him, so he quietly offered an overview of Fresh Kills. “We finally got the landfill up to code, except for the liner, and then they closed it. It’s kind of sad because we were a good neighbor—we controlled odors with gas and leachate systems. You don’t smell anything now. It used to be awful.” He didn’t go into detail—and the students didn’t press him—but for as long as state and federal environmental laws have existed, Fresh Kills had been violating them.

After Nagle’s class I let a decent interval pass before phoning the chief at work and asking if I could come out to see him. I was apologetic, and he was accommodating. Nagle wanted a tour, too: she hadn’t been to Fresh Kills since it had closed.

Keyed up, I arrived five minutes early for our 7:00 a.m. appointment. Nagle had been here for twenty minutes already. Her eagerness seemed in keeping with her competitive spirit. I noticed that we were dressed alike, in blue jeans, hiking boots, and white T-shirts. We both had black backpacks. We both had a four-year-old child home in bed.

“You bring something to eat?” she asked me.

“Peanut butter sandwich.”

“Turkey,” she said with an approving nod.

Chief Diggins had a large office inside a paneled trailer, one among a series of trailers stationed in a scruffy parking lot. From here, there was no view of trash, no hint of the marvels to come. A few trucks and cars rumbled around the potholed roads, driven mostly by private contractors building a new transfer station. DSNY had only about a hundred people on the payroll at Fresh Kills these days. (At its height of activity, the landfill employed more than five hundred, including metalworkers, chemists, blacksmiths, steamfitters, plumbers, riggers, welders, and machinists.) Things were so quiet now, the guard at the entrance gate was asleep in his tiny booth. “You gonna bang him?” Nagle asked Diggins, a gleam in her eye. She liked the word
bang:
it meant write someone up, get him in trouble. “Can’t,” said Diggins. “He’s from a private company.” But it was obvious the guard’s days here—if not his hours—were numbered.

The phone rang and Diggins lifted the receiver an inch, but instead of saying hello he finished what he was saying to Nagle. I was struck by his self-assurance, a confidence that whoever was on the other end would not only wait but probably wouldn’t mind listening to this conversation, either. Now Diggins said, “Diggins,” into the phone, nodded a few times and said, “Uh-uh.” He hung up, handled two calls on his walkie-talkie, then suddenly decided it was time we headed out.

The chief didn’t start with the big stuff, the spectacle of waste. He drove Nagle and me through what would be, in a film studio, the back lot: miles of muddy roads connecting convocations of large machines. I saw front-end loaders with buckets big enough to hold a Humvee, dump trucks with tires higher than my head, bulldozers with studded iron treads. The lowlands, where the roads were flat, seemed elaborately unkempt. Chain-link fences were torn, vines crept over concrete barriers, weeds grew through cracks in asphalt. The wildness contrasted starkly with Monmouth County’s trim little landfill, but I had to remember that burying twenty-six million pounds of municipal solid waste a day—or double that, in the days when Fresh Kills accepted commercial waste as well—was considerably more complicated than Monmouth’s puny 3.7 million.

My first land-based peek at an actual section, closed for several years now, was anticlimactic: the graded road wrapped around an enormous shoulder of grass, and Queen Anne’s lace, dandelions, black-eyed Susan, cinquefoil, yellow-blossomed mugwort, blue chicory, and pink multiflora roses covered its 145-foot-high plateau. There was a slight smell of swamp gas in the breeze, and meter-high candy-cane-shaped methane venting pipes sprouted from the ground here and there. But everything that was supposed to be important about this place—its Jovian mass, its horrifying contents!—suddenly was not. I got out of Diggins’s truck on the section’s plateau and, as the cops on TV say, took a moment. Not only couldn’t I see the garbage piled under my feet, I had no other physical or emotional sense of it, either. I knew the place held 2.9 billion cubic yards of trash (about the volume of 1,160 Pyramids of Cheops), but someone had done a very, very good job of covering it all up.

What struck me, instead, was the incredible view. I could see for miles—over other hundred-foot-high mounds of grass, over creeks and marshes, over distant neighborhoods, and up over the treetops to the highlands of Staten Island. I felt a strong urge to ditch the tour and light out with a compass, to reconnoiter the entire 2,500 acres. This was, for 99.9 percent of the eight million people who lived nearby, completely new ground. In a vertical city that barely offered breathing room, this was a tremendous windfall of air, of unshadowed space, of landscape without edge, pavement, telephone poles, or people.

The tidal creeks were the best part of it. Fresh Kills, Main, and Richmond Creeks meandered around the bases of the great hills, forming a shaky letter
Y
. Rafts of bufflehead ducks and geese dotted the waters, which were buffered on either side by wide mudflats and ribbons of spartina grass. They gave the vistas perspective; they brought the eye in and out of the frame. Diggins said he was dazzled by it all, especially now that the place was closed and he wasn’t constantly rushing from one emergency to the next. “When this place greens up, it’s incredible,” he said. “I always said that if you put a couple plastic cows up there”—he gestured across Main Creek toward a pastorally grassy slope—“no one would know the difference. You’d think you were in dairy country.” In this bucolic paradigm, it was easy to imagine the two tall stacks of a methane flaring station as grain silos. (Well, almost. Imagining Fresh Kills as a dairy farm forced me to contemplate methane, a potent greenhouse gas, rising not only from the rotting garbage but also from the oral and anal sphincters of cattle, who, along with other domestic ruminants, annually produce about 19 percent of global anthropogenic methane emissions.)

Diggins seemed lost in thought. In the convivial silence, I scanned the middle distance and for the first time had an inkling of how a place that was universally reviled could be reborn—after a lot of fancy landscaping—as a place universally admired. A dump was a negative space, in every sense of the word. But a dump could be filled and capped, and something alive and new could be created in its place. Transformed into a positive space, the landfill had the potential to be, as city planners liked to say, an amenity.

We drove downhill and Diggins pointed out planted sections and sections recently closed but still sporting only a rough preliminary cover. All appeared calm on the surface, but I knew that underneath, the garbage roiled. Of all the landfills studied by the Garbage Project, Fresh Kills enjoyed the fastest rate of decomposition. Anthropology students digging in drier landfills have discovered forty-year-old hot dogs that look just like the ones currently sold in the Times Square subway station. Seventy-year-old newspapers can still be read. Cling Wrap still clings. Most landfills are more like mummifiers than composters, it turns out. Achieving a rich, moist brown humus in a sanitary landfill is nothing but a romantic fantasy! (As my garbage research proceeded, this fantasy would come to haunt me. Master composters dangled visions of “rich brown humus” before me; even Synagro, the company in the Bronx that handles my neighborhood’s processed sewage, tried to win me over by describing its product in those same exact terms.)

Of course, wet garbage starts decaying almost as soon as it hits the plastic bag in my kitchen—my nose told me that. But at almost every landfill in the country, this process grinds nearly to a halt once bagged garbage is compacted and buried. Below the top eight feet of a landfill, few organisms that require oxygen—which means precious few of the variety that most greedily chew up waste—can survive. (Where do those hungry microbes come from in the first place? Basically, everywhere: the air, the ground we walk on, the food we eat, the hands that tie up our garbage sacks.) Aerobic biodegradation works best when organic material is chopped up, kept moist and warm, and exposed to oxygen with regular turning. Any organic compound in this top layer of the landfill—or in the transfer station or the kitchen garbage pail—is fair game for digestion by bacteria, fungi, and insects, which use their enzymes to break the large organic compounds into fatty acids, water, and carbon dioxide. In this phase of biodegradation, the landfill temperature rises, and a weak acid forms within the water, dissolving some of the minerals.