Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (14 page)

How much waste went into one bank? I asked. Diggins squinted at the horizon. “Let’s see, ” he said. “Six Payhaulers come up from each barge, so that’s 480 cubic yards of trash.” How much was that in city garbage trucks? We both did the math, coming up with fifteen. “But don’t forget,” Diggins said. “Banks go on and on. We were building them twenty-four hours a day, six days a week.”

As we drove on, I spotted Carl Alderson’s small wetland. “Are you doing any wetlands restoration as part of the closure?” I asked, not mentioning that I’d gotten an egret’s-eye view of his spartina six months earlier.

“We do shoreline repair,” Diggins said, braking to let another truck pass. “We use geotextile fabric and put rip-rap [a jumble of large stones] on the slope.”

“Why do you use rip-rap?” I asked, thinking of all the ecological services provided by functioning wetlands—erosion and flood control; filtering of excess nutrients, metals, pesticides, and herbicides; a nursery for fish; a habitat for wildlife.

“Because we want something that’s not going to erode,” he said, as if it were the punch line to a joke. “We had some people come in to do a restoration,” he continued. “They used three kinds of plants, they did 189 of them, and it cost $350,000.” (Rip-rap would have cost about a third as much.) Ever polite, Nagle chuckled along with Diggins, but I couldn’t join the bonhomie. The new marsh functioned, it was all-natural, and, according to Alderson, it showed no signs of eroding. Even two years on, he wrote me, “it’s still the best-looking restoration I’ve seen in five boroughs and twenty-one New Jersey counties.”

We headed toward the leachate treatment plant, a low-rise building in the shadow of Section 1/9 that was currently treating about 800,000 gallons of leachate a day. In his command-and-control office, Don Tuscano, the plant manager, clicked through a series of computer screens that offered schematics of the plant, the landfill, and its underground plumbing. I half expected to see a green horizontal line pulsing like a heartbeat on his home page: the postclosure Fresh Kills, like a brain-dead patient on life support, still throbbed, and its effluents and exhausts were minutely monitored, collected, and analyzed.

“The system we use is called a Sequencing Batch Reactor,” Tuscano said to Nagle and me. “Our two concerns are ammonia and suspended solids, like silica and metals. We remove the metals by letting them precipitate out, and we use microorganisms to break the ammonia down into nitrogenous compounds that are then converted to nitrates, which are harmless to the environment.”

Nagle was less interested in leachate treatment than in pumping Diggins for information on the Staten Island sanitation garage, which she’d soon be joining (her goal was to work the trucks in every borough). While she and the chief hung back, Tuscano and I strolled outside to the far end of the plant, where leachate flooded from two nine-inch pipes into “influent distribution boxes” made of concrete. The leachate was coffee colored and it produced a bubbly froth several inches thick. “We never get less than two hundred gallons a minute from the landfill,” Tuscano said. Flows spiked with rainfall, but the pipes never ran dry, even in a drought: the buried refuse was constantly leaking garbage juice.

I had expected the plant to reek, to smell like a thousand packer trucks on a 90-degree day, but the odor was mild. The solution to pollution is dilution, environmental engineers like to say. It had been the wettest June on record, ideal conditions for visiting a leachate treatment plant. Keith Kloor, writing in
City Limits
about an Alliance landfill in Pennsylvania, described its treatment plant as emitting a “gag-inducing smell—imagine a hog farm overrun with sewage sludge” that “easily penetrates the car, even with the windows rolled up.”

From the distribution boxes, the leachate was decanted into holding tanks, then to a mix box, where its pH was raised to 9.5 with the addition of caustic soda. “That gets the metals to coagulate, which makes them easier to remove.” Tuscano also added aluminum sulfate, which caused tiny particles to combine and settle, and polymers, which also aided in settling. The leachate rested in octagonal clarifying tanks that had four spokelike weirs radiating from a central point. The liquid in here was tea colored, but Tuscano promised that by the time it was discharged into the Arthur Kill, with its pH adjusted back to normal, about 8.0, the effluent was roughly the same color as Michelob Light. “I could swim in this!” he said in a video shown on cable TV. “What we discharge is cleaner than the Arthur Kill,” he pronounced in another video, produced by the DSNY’s official artist in residence, Mierle Laderman Ukeles.

The quote-ready Tuscano was quite possibly right, but his comparison didn’t count for much: the Arthur Kill was one of the filthiest waterways around. It was a major thoroughfare for tankers and cargo ships, and its banks were lined with chemical plants, scrap yards, oil refineries, and the discharge pipes of municipal sewage treatment plants. I looked at the EPA’s two-year Enforcement and Compliance history for Fresh Kills, dated October 23, 2002, and saw that its discharges significantly exceeded federal limits for sulfides and phenols (which came from plastics and were considered hazardous). It also had elevated levels of nitrogen, cyanide, oil and grease, and the outlawed pesticides aldrin, dieldrin, and endrin. And these data covered the previous two years, after the feds ordered Fresh Kills to clean up its discharge.

Tuscano claimed that today’s effluent met state and federal regulations. But while he fretted over Fresh Kills’ liquid exudation, its solids, the treatment plant’s sludge, didn’t receive nearly as much attention. It was pumped to a building seventy-five yards away, where it was dewatered and mixed with lime, for stabilization and to raise its pH. Just as sewage treatment plants preferentially moved toxins from water to solids in order to meet the requirements of the Clean Water Act, so did Fresh Kills. It produced thirty-six cubic yards of sludge a day, enough to fill two to three fifty-yard Dumpsters a week. The sludge was delivered to Millville, Pennsylvania, and tipped in a landfill owned by J. P. Mascaro & Sons, which used as its logo a squatting elephant.

Nagle and I ended our tour of Fresh Kills atop Section 1/9, which had received on March 22, 2001, with great media fanfare and a lot of DSNY bunting, the final load of New York City’s municipal solid waste. Fifty-three years of landfilling at Fresh Kills had come to an end. Staten Islanders rejoiced, but it was a sad day for Dennis Diggins, who’d made a life here. In September of that year, he was in the process of closing Section 1/9, applying its final layer of cover. “I was right here with my binoculars on top of this mound, watching the towers burn,” he said to Nagle and me, looking toward the Manhattan skyline, blurry in the distance. “I knew as soon as they started to fall that the rubble would be coming here. I came down off the hill and got moving. I knew they’d need our equipment.”

Debris from the World Trade Center was barged directly from Ground Zero to Plant One, then trucked up to Section 1/9, where police and FBI investigators searched the rubble for human remains. (For a short time, debris was also trucked to the Hamilton Avenue marine transfer station, on the Gowanus Canal, before it was barged over to Fresh Kills.)

The borough of Staten Island lost nearly two hundred people in the tragedy, including firefighters and civilians with jobs in the World Trade Center. The interment of their remains, and the towers’ 1.2 million tons of rubble, turned Staten Islanders’ opinion of Fresh Kills upside down. The landfill had been the shame of the island: now it was hallowed ground upon which a memorial, with federal funds, would soon be built. Under a proposal introduced by US congressman Vito Fossella, representing Staten Island and Brooklyn, the 160-acre site would be transferred to the federal government and managed by the National Park Service. Though much has been made by some writers of the majesty of enormous landfills, the particular majesty of Fresh Kills following one horrible gesture was suddenly a lot less literary and a lot more literal. The place was no longer a dump, in the public imagination; it was the final resting place of heroes.

I had lost no one in the disaster, but I could imagine how important this place would be for those who had. Today, the site looked unremarkable—it was a curving field of reddish, stony dirt. There was nothing to identify the ground as sacred. It was in transition: Diggins had to pile on another forty to sixty feet of cover atop the crown to achieve the regulatory geometry. When Section 1/9 was finished, it would be as tall as a twenty-two-story skyscraper.

Part Two

Avoiding the Dump

Chapter Five

Behold This Compost

I
’d gotten a feeling, by now, for the sordid afterlife of garbage in a dump. But there were branches of my waste stream that never made it to a landfill, that flowed in alternative channels that fanned out, alluvially, into seas of material optimism, the antithesis of a place like Fresh Kills. Some of that optimism was drawn from the promise of recycling, which I’d soon be tracking. But first came optimism drawn from the promise of rot.

Pawing through every single item in my kitchen trash bag to quantify my output, I hit upon a garbage fundamental almost instantly: the worst things we threw out were the things that had once been alive. Organics rendered everything in the can loathsome to touch and smell. By organics, I didn’t mean sheaves of lavender lovingly grown without pesticides in the California Floristic Province. Organics, in the garbage world, meant carbon-based stuff that could, theoretically, be transformed into a valuable horticultural product. Food waste was making my trash heavy and wet. Leftover spaghetti coated the plastic bread bags, eggshells dripped albumen on the jelly jars. I was driven to wear rubber gloves, which interfered with recording data.

And then there was the smell. It wouldn’t have been a problem if I had put my garbage outside every day, which is what most New Yorkers did. But having to quantify everything slowed things down considerably. Days went by when I didn’t have the time, or the will, to process my trash. So it sat around longer, and it made its presence known. Soon, my apartment took on the noxious qualities of a transfer station. It didn’t take long for me to realize that if I was going to minimize my garbage footprint—make it lighter and smaller and more pleasant smelling—I had to get the food out of there. I was going to have to compost.

New York City doesn’t seem as if it would be a hotbed of composting activity. But once I started poking into the matter, I tapped easily into a vein of composting fanatics. There were home gardeners arguing barrels versus bins; there were community activists at the city’s green markets proselytizing for earthworms that devour food scraps in countertop boxes. Park Slope itself was a composting nerve center, virtually preselected for success with backyard and front-yard gardens, a high level of environmental awareness, several organic-food stores, a food co-op, community gardens, and a weekly farmers’ market. When the Department of Sanitation started a pilot project ten years ago to collect household food scraps to be composted at Fresh Kills, the neighborhood reached a capture rate of 41 percent.

To help us compost on our own, after the pilot project ended with a round of budget cuts, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden sold composting bins at subsidized prices. My downstairs neighbors Simon and Lori had bought a bin a couple years ago but never assembled it. They were happy to have me set it up in the front yard, right next to the trash cans.

The black plastic Garden Gourmet bin was manufactured in Ontario; its shipping box was made of 100 percent recycled materials; the trilingual instructions promised I’d need no tools. Already, I felt good about this project. I didn’t even mind that the side panels, now slightly warped, wouldn’t slide easily into a stack. A couple whacks with the hammer and everything was in place.

Everything, that is, except for a square “rodent screen.” That was troubling. Did I need it? Where did it go? The booklet seemed to offer no guidance on this matter, though I couldn’t be sure. Most of its pages were obscured by splotches of purple, black, and yellow mildew. The decomposition process had already begun.

On a mold-free page, I read the list of things I could and could not compost. Fruit and vegetable peelings, eggshells, tea bags, coffee grounds and filters, bread, pasta, peanut shells, peat moss, garden scraps, wet leaves, fresh lawn clippings, corn cobs, corn husks, clean cotton rags, dryer lint, string, rope, and hair (if it wasn’t chemically treated) were in. This “green” material was to be mixed every time we dumped with similar amounts of “brown” material: wood chips, hay, twigs, wood ashes, and dried-out leaves and lawn clippings. Meat, fish, dairy products, and oily and buttery sauces were out. Once I had committed these guidelines to memory, I would tear the booklet into small pieces and toss the scraps inside: the Garden Gourmet would cannibalize them.

I was eager to witness the parade of arthropods that would, in theory at least, arrive on the heels of bacteria, fungi, and actinomycetes (filamentous or rod-shaped microorganisms). The next round of visitors would include white worms, earthworms, sow bugs, land snails, and slugs, followed by beetle mites, mold mites, flatworms, and springtails. The dregs of the dregs would attract ground beetles, centipedes, pseudoscorpions, predatory mites, and ants. Or so the scholars of biodegradation promised.

While I sat in my yard making micro-adjustments to the bin, passersby offered positive feedback. “Composting?”

I’d nod.

“That’s so great.”

People loved to talk about composting, even if they didn’t personally do it. It was a universal feel-good topic—or maybe it was just the crowd I ran with. I went to country houses and chopped up vegetables, and it was natural to ask, “You compost?” Sometimes the answer was yes, sometimes it was no, but always the no came with a regretful shrug that bespoke, perhaps, lost opportunity. Composting, it was understood, put us back in touch with nature’s most fundamental processes. It got the smelly stuff out of our kitchens, it kept weight out of the landfill, it nourished our fruits and vegetables. What could be better?