Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (15 page)

Of course, that was before my bin started overflowing, before it became strongly aromatic, before it was shrouded in fruit flies. For every successful composter, there were probably a half dozen neophyte composters angrily punching the telephone number of the local composting help line. I should have realized, once I started running into officially sanctioned master composters, that tossing food into a bin was hardly the end of it.

But all that was later. Now I lay the rodent screen at the bottom of the bin, though there was nothing to hold it in place. “Installez le couvercle et commencez a composter!” read the final instruction. I positioned the lid and wiggled the bin into the yard’s corner, hard by the dryer vent. I wondered if the vent would be a good thing—its warmth might abet decomposition—or a bad thing—it could contribute too much moisture. I raked around our crab apple tree and tipped a layer of leaves into the bin. But where would I get my next load of brown material, and the next? And what about worms, which many said were essential to the composting process?

Across the nation, the number of municipal composting sites rose from 651 to 3,227 between 1989 and 2002. In
BioCycle’
s most recent “State of Garbage in America” report, thirty-five states said that they recycle organics (including yard trimmings and food residuals) and wood. Seattle, which has one-fourteenth the population of New York City but bigger lawns and a longer growing season, produces 47,000 tons of yard waste a year, all of which gets composted. (New Yorkers discard more than 78,000 tons of lawn clippings and leaves a year, and during the so-called leaf season, from fall into early winter, the Department of Sanitation sends special trucks around thirty-five of the city’s fifty-nine sanitation districts to pick this stuff up and tip it at a composting area in Fresh Kills. The extra shifts cost the department money, but leaving this debris in the waste stream takes up valuable space in landfills.) Like twenty other states, Washington bans green waste from burial. Los Angeles, with a population of 3.7 million, mixes a quarter of its 300,000 yearly tons of yard trimmings—more than 30 percent of the residential waste stream—with sludge from its wastewater treatment plant to make a fertilizer called TOPGRO; the remainder of the yard waste is composted or mulched.

According to New York’s Department of Sanitation, edible and inedible food debris accounts for about 15 percent of household garbage within the city (the second-largest fraction after paper), while the national average is about 9 percent. New Yorkers throw away more food, it is suspected, because most apartments don’t have food waste disposers. (The appliances were illegal in the city until 1997, and relatively few households have caught up with the change in regulations.)

Not counting yard waste, my little family was soon dumping an average of 2.18 pounds of organic matter into the compost bin every two and a half days. The weight was mostly coffee grounds; the rest was potato peels, onion skins, and the bread crusts my daughter refuses to eat. (According to the Garbage Project, the average elementary school student throws away three and a half ounces of edible food a day. Over the course of a month, that’s equivalent in weight to about three hundred Big Mac foam clamshells, at .233 of an ounce each, to put things in perspective.) I collected this stuff in a small metal bucket near my kitchen trash can. Lori and Simon, on the first floor, and Cynthia and Sid, on the second, began their own composting programs as well. The bin rapidly filled.

My garbage was now light and dry. I was delighted with the change. But about once a week, or more often if we had carnivorous company, things took a turn for the worse. The composter, I realized, was getting the cream of the food waste. The worst stuff—the guts of chickens, the bones of fish—was left behind, for the Garden Gourmet would brook no animal products.

I knew that I could freeze my food waste and lose the smell. But I met a science teacher at a garbage symposium who warned me against it. “The food will become anaerobic as it thaws,” he said, sampling a cake shaped like the Fresh Kills landfill, complete with ersatz methane-venting pipes. “You want oxygen in there. You need it for decomposition.” He gave me his number and urged me to phone if I had any other questions.

What makes meat so much worse than vegetables? Indeed, why does garbage smell so bad? I phoned the Monell Chemical Senses Center, in Philadelphia, and spoke with Pam Dalton, an experimental psychologist who studies how people are affected by odor. “The putrid smell of garbage is sulfur and nitrogenous compounds,” she said. “As waste heats up, a lot of chemical compounds will be liberated by microbes, but the first ones we notice are sulfurous. We have a low threshold for smelling them.” With freezing, Dalton said, the gas molecules that carry odor become unavailable. “It’s called partitioning, when a chemical changes from one form to another. Over time, and with temperature, the smell becomes more available to the nose.”

The rotting flesh of animals produces organic acids that attract flies, which aim to deposit their eggs in a food source that will nourish their growing larvae. “Vultures are also attracted to those sulfur compounds,” Dalton said. “That’s one of the early signs of decomposing organic matter in the wild. Ethyl mercaptan, a sulfur compound, is added to natural gas to odorize it. When there’s a break somewhere in the pipes, linemen locate it by looking for vultures in the air.”

I had called Dalton because I’d been told she knew more about how we perceive stinkiness than just about anyone else in America. To profile a smell, Dalton first identified its constituent chemicals. She shot either a liquid or gas sample into the long coiled column of a gas chromatograph. “Chemicals go through phases at different temperatures,” she said. “At room temperature you can smell acetone, for example. Other smells take a higher temperature to notice.” As a complex mixture was gradually heated in the column, the chromatograph separated its ingredients into individual chemical components that could be detected and quantified by comparing them to a reference standard. So sensitive were her machines, they could pinpoint aromas that occurred in amounts as low as one part per billion. (Still, the human nose—except for the noses of san men, who are inured to stink—betters the machine by more than two orders of magnitude: it can detect aromas at a few parts per trillion.) Among the compounds Dalton had run through her chromatograph were garbage, decayed mice and rats, the famously stinky durian fruit, and urine and feces from many animals, including humans.

These efforts were not blue-sky research. Monell had been approached by the Department of Defense for help in creating a universally offensive odor that could be used for, among other things, crowd control. According to an article in
Chemical & Engineering News,
tests show that putrid odors are “potent in making people want to flee in disgust.” They also cause increased heart rate and shallow breathing, and can lead to nausea.

Dalton and her colleagues made chemical mimics of various smells and tested them on people. They discovered that a person’s interpretation of an odor depends on his or her upbringing. Aroma and memory are linked. “I had a student from Beijing smell the worst female gingko fruit, and he said it smelled like the cooking odors from the exhaust fans behind Beijing restaurants,” Dalton said. “It wasn’t offensive to him at all.”

The Monell researchers focused on biological odors, Dalton continued, “because we thought those had the best chance of being recognized universally. People really hated these odors.” Eventually, the lab came up with a winning nonlethal “odor bomb.” Its signature elements were reported to smell like human waste, burning hair, and rotting garbage.

By November, a month after setting up my composter, I had diverted a running total of twenty-six pounds, four ounces of food waste from the landfill in Pennsylvania—the landfill I hadn’t yet received permission to visit. By December, I had saved the city another chunk of change by keeping an additional sixteen pounds, twelve ounces from the great waste train. According to the EPA, 67 percent of America’s household waste stream could be composted; I was diverting 37.7 percent of my kitchen’s putrescible waste, the stuff I measured on my kitchen scale. So the government and I were out of sync (because the EPA included yard waste and paper in its compost figure), but that was nothing new.

By now, the Garden Gourmet was three-quarters full. We didn’t have any actual compost yet, but I believed things were going well. The pile didn’t smell, and I didn’t notice any vermin around. Still, guilt gnawed at my conscience. I knew that I wasn’t always aerating the pile properly. And sometimes if I was in a hurry, or if it was raining, or if I was wearing a skirt (the bin was closely flanked by a boxwood shrub that tore at tights), I didn’t even try. I knew that decomposition slowed dramatically in the winter, and I worried that the bin would top out long before the weather warmed up. Would turning my compost more often really help? Did I need more brown material? Did I need worms?

For vermicultural assistance, I considered subscribing to
Worm Digest,
a quarterly out of Eugene, Oregon. I flipped between dozens of worm-related Web sites on the Internet, read meandering threads in composting and master gardener chats. My head swirled with arguments regarding hot versus cold composting, the questionable value of newspaper in compost, whether or not kitchen grease was welcome, and with methods for stemming nitrogen loss, upping carbon-to-nitrogen ratios, suppressing weed seeds and pathogens, nurturing disease-suppressing microbes, avoiding exposure to the elements, and achieving the proper ratio of wet to dry materials.

It seemed so much simpler to throw our food waste to the pigs, the way our urban forebears and our country cousins did. As late as 1892, a hundred thousand pigs roamed New York City’s streets, feasting on scraps tossed out doors and windows by the working poor, who relied on these animals to convert waste into edible protein. The pigs weren’t docile: they were wild animals that defecated on sidewalks, copulated in public, and injured and occasionally killed children, according to historian Ted Steinberg in
Natural History
magazine. Crusading mayors occasionally passed antipig ordinances, starting in the 1810s, but they didn’t stick. Riots to free captive swine (potential pork roasts) broke out in 1825, 1826, 1830, and 1832. “The fatal blow to the urban commons came in 1848,” wrote Steinberg. “Cholera broke out in New York, and health officials linked the outbreak to the city’s filthy conditions.” Club-wielding police herded thousands of pigs from the dwellings of the poor. By 1860, the mayor declared the area below Eighty-sixth Street a pig-free zone: by the 1890s, every last street pig had been slaughtered.

I’d been reading
Charlotte’s Web
to Lucy during these confusing early days of composting and was struck by the volume of food little Wilbur devoured. Breakfast: “skim milk, crusts, middlings, bits of doughnuts, wheat cakes with drops of maple syrup sticking to them, potato skins, leftover custard pudding with raisins, and bits of Shredded Wheat.” Lunch: “middlings, warm water, apple parings, meat gravy, carrot scrapings, meat scraps, stale hominy, and the wrapper off a package of cheese.” Supper: “skim milk, provender, leftover sandwich from Lurvy’s lunchbox, prune skins, a morsel of this, a bit of that, fried potatoes, marmalade drippings, a little more of this, a little more of that, a piece of baked apple, a scrap of upside-down cake.” Unless Wilbur was depressed and weepy, he rarely left anything for his barn mate Templeton the rat. If I could keep a pig on my roof (the environmentally correct green roof of my dreams, which would function as a personal wastewater treatment plant, a storm-water abatement system, and a microclimate modifier), I felt confident I could achieve Zero Waste, a goal I’d begun to hear vague rumblings about along my trail of trash.

I continued going to garbage events around the city—a roundtable on recycling, city council meetings, garbage art shows, garbage movies—and I kept running into Tom Outerbridge, who ran an outfit called City Green. His firm worked with the city and with the private sector to establish programs and facilities for dealing with city waste, especially the organic kind.

Outerbridge didn’t look like the other garbage folk. His shirts were tailored and pressed; his blond hair was lightly gelled and dramatically swept back. He looked more like a TV newsreader than a city employee or a garbage activist, yet he had been director of composting for New York’s Department of Sanitation (the position no longer exists) for several years and took credit for launching the composting programs at Fresh Kills and at Rikers Island, a city prison that handled up to forty thousand pounds of food waste a day.

We met for coffee one December morning in Manhattan, and I asked Outerbridge about the origins of city composting. “It started in New York in the early nineties as a collaboration between the Parks Department, which had land that was sort of derelict and needed compost, and the Department of Sanitation, which had a lot of trucks,” he told me. But every time the city budget was tight, recycling and waste-prevention programs got cut. Today, the only organic matter the city composted was the leaf-season material and yard waste tipped by the Parks Department and private landscapers at Fresh Kills.

“The economics of composting are challenging,” he went on. “Is it cost-effective to collect? In Park Slope, there used to be four trucks going around on one day: the garbage truck; the metal, plastic, and glass truck; the paper truck; and the compost truck. Those trucks have a huge environmental impact. And then there are all the trucks and bulldozers pushing the compost around at the facility—it’s very labor intensive.”

“Do you compost?” I asked.

“No. I may bring a bag of it to the green market now and then, but I’d rather spend my time working on bigger solutions.”

Outerbridge wanted to talk about anaerobic food digesters, his next big cause. There were about seventy-five of these contraptions, which accelerated the composting process, in Europe, a few of which he’d be seeing over his upcoming Christmas holiday. In the United States, Seattle was considering building a digester to handle both pre- and postconsumer food waste from commercial establishments and homes, plus its compostable paper. Digesters were basically enclosed vertical tanks hooked up to dewatering and gas collection systems. “They’ve got a pretty small footprint,” Outerbridge said. “You put food waste in one end, usually from some kind of factory, and you cook it until the end product is ninety percent decomposed. Then it spends a couple weeks in an aerobic system, and you get compost. The by-product of an anaerobic digester is forty percent carbon dioxide and sixty percent methane, which you can burn in fuel cells or a microturbine. Or scrub it and get purer methane to use as natural gas. It’s a net energy producer.”