Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (16 page)

Outerbridge thought the Bronx’s Hunts Point Cooperative Market, through which passed 2.7 billion pounds of produce a year, would make an ideal location for a digester: this single spot, in a single borough of a single city, generated fifty-five tons of food waste and compostable paper a day. According to the EPA, digesting the city’s annual output of more than 7 million tons of food and other organic waste, as opposed to burying it, would avoid 1.8 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions and generate 1.4 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity. Outerbridge was prepared to tell me a lot more about food digesters and where they might be stationed, but what I really wanted right now was some free composting advice for my front-yard bin. I told Outerbridge how much green material I was producing every week, that I didn’t think there was a lot of decomposition taking place in this weather (in fact, when I was turning my pile the other day, my potato fork had hit solid ice), and that I was afraid the bin would soon overflow.

Outerbridge sighed. “People think composting is the greatest system in the world,” he said. “But it takes a lot of energy to make it work—to deal with odor abatement and collecting it and turning it to aerate it.”

“Yeah,” I said, nodding in sympathy. “But do you think I need worms?”

“No, you don’t need worms.” He smiled condescendingly. “You need two bins.”

I had first learned about red worms many years ago at a green market, where a young German woman sold half-pint containers of
Eisenia foetida,
a common earthworm, for use in countertop composting bins. She also accepted food waste from civilians and turned it into compost on four lots occupied by the Lower East Side Ecology Center, on Manhattan’s East Seventh Street. The yard waste and food scraps attracted rats, with which the neighborhood cats could never quite keep up. In 1998, the Ecology Center moved to East River Park, just below the Williamsburg Bridge, and switched from the windrow method, with its long narrow rows of organic material that had to be turned periodically, to in-vessel composting. The process shortened the decomposition time from four months to three by accelerating the rate at which organic matter heated up. It also reduced by about 99 percent the surface area over which rats could forage, and reduced by 100 percent the number of neighbors who might complain about odors.

The name Christina Datz-Romero had come up several times in conversation with city composters, but I realized only when I shook Datz-Romero’s calloused hand that the director of the Lower East Side Ecology Center was the green-market worm lady I’d met long ago. She looked a little more weather-beaten now, and she seemed a lot less friendly. The first thing she asked me, in a suspicious tone, was how I’d gotten her contact information. “Your name, your phone number, and your e-mail address are on the Internet,” I said. “Anyway, I wanted to talk to you about the composting project because I’m writing a book about garbage—”

“It’s not garbage,” she interrupted. “It’s waste.” She smiled coldly.

Datz-Romero sat me down in an old stone building inside East River Park. The sun shone off the water through large windows, and two cats prowled the office, which was sparsely furnished and smelled of disinfectant. “We fished Lucky out of the river in a plastic crate,” she said as a black-and-white cat with a harelip boxed with a cord that dangled from my jacket. Lucky’s companion, a dull-looking calico, rubbed against Datz-Romero’s legs, then against mine.

Here in the park, with the river to the east and greenswards to the west, it was possible to imagine an earthbound community that bonded over seedlings and fresh produce, reveled in seasonal rhythms and cycles completed. Lift your gaze above the park’s London plane trees, however, and cookie-cutter high-rises, dozens of them, told another story. “What’s the significance of composting in this urban environment?” I asked. Datz-Romero took a deep breath.

“Compost is a natural process, and you can do it from beginning to end. We are community based, and that allows us to be connected and it gives us an understanding of our city as a green and living place. We make our own soil and we plant things. A tree we planted on Seventh Street is now taller than a tenement. You can change your environment and make it more livable. This place is small, but you need to start someplace.”

She showed me a desktop worm composter, a round white take-out container with a vent drilled on top. “You could compost the remains of your office lunch,” she said. “All you have to do is add worms and damp paper towels.” Red worms consume their weight in food every twenty-four hours; their manure, or castings, make superb fertilizer. I savored an image of Anna Wintour, editor in chief of
Vogue,
composting her melba toast crumbs. “It’s an educational tool,” said Datz-Romero. “It’s consciousness raising.”

The compost farm was long and skinny: a north-south row of sixteen yard-high grayish cubes with PVC tubes curling out of them. Four days a week, Datz-Romero’s truck picked up food scraps from green markets and greengrocers. She blended the scraps with sawdust in the bins, and the PVC pipes, connected to a motor, pulled air through the mixture. From its weekly 3,000 pounds of raw material, the Ecology Center produced 750 pounds of compost. A part-time employee blended the compost with vermiculite, peat moss, perlite, green sand, and black rock phosphate to form New York City Paydirt, which sold for a dollar a pound. I wanted to ask why she had to add so many ingredients if food scraps were such a valuable source of soil nutrients, but Datz-Romero was pushing ahead.

“Leachate collects at the bottom of the air intake pipes and drips through these white pipes to a sump pump,” she said, lifting the cover from an orange fifty-gallon pickle barrel. The leachate was frozen, though its molecules were still sufficiently available to remind me of vomit crossed with rotting fruit.

“What do you do with that?” I asked.

“We pour it down the drain and hope it gets treated.” In the weeks to come I’d spend some time with inflow and infiltration maps and come to doubt that it did. The storm drain into which she poured about four barrels of concentrated leachate a week was thirty feet from the East River; I was certain the drain led straight out.

After four weeks in the gray bins, the food scraps were mixed with some finished compost and moved to a series of wooden curing boxes. Datz-Romero opened one of these and scooped out a handful of lumpy dirt. I saw leek skins and twist ties, seeds, and a whole lemon. Obviously, the compost was at an early stage in its eight-week development, and the worms were not at the top of their game. It was about 19 degrees this morning, not counting the wind coming off the river. Datz-Romero dangled a skinny, stretched-out specimen in the air. “This one is dead,” she said. “I’m hoping some adults will survive the winter. They lay their eggs in the fall.”

“How do you know it’s dead?” I said. It was insensitive of me, but I couldn’t help teasing Datz-Romero, whom I found a little tendentious. Moreover, I had by now become slightly disillusioned about worms’ alleged power to transform waste into valuable fertilizer. I know that Charles Darwin revered worms: he’d written that they “have played a more important part in the history of the world than most persons would at first suppose.” But the creatures have tiny mouths, it turns out, and they are slow and fussy eaters. They won’t eat onions, orange rinds, dried-out lemons, or banana peels. They want their food fresh. They won’t tolerate a move from indoors to out, and they can’t withstand the cold.

Ignoring my question, Datz-Romero led me past a row of sixty curing bins, a blending machine, and a screener, which pulled out the undigested chunks. “Jah,” Datz-Romero said, perusing her acreage. “Composting takes a lot of land. You need a partner. We sell most of the finished product in the spring, so we need a place to stockpile it. It’s a little smelly. . . .” Indeed, I detected both the nitrogenous compounds from the curing boxes—they weren’t so bad—and the anaerobic sting of leachate from the primary bins.

“Recycling this way is too labor intensive to make money off it,” she continued. The Lower East Side Ecology Center had operating expenses of about $100,000 a year. Sales of worms, bins, and compost met 25 percent of that. The rest came from grants. But Datz-Romero had grander schemes. She wanted to leave the small-potatoes world of community composting behind. She dreamed of composting the entire city’s food waste in anaerobic digesters. “A digester could take fifty tons a day in a twelve-foot tank and generate methane for energy.” It took me a few seconds to realize she was talking about the same project that Outerbridge dreamed of siting at Hunts Point. “The way we compost here, we’re creating carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. The digester would give us compost, produce energy, and prevent the greenhouse gases of decomposition.”

“What about community empowerment?” I asked. “What about changing your environment for the better?” It seemed to me that a digester would shift the emphasis from neighbors who biked their carrot peels to the river and got potting soil in return, to an industrial process that involved massive amounts of materials and trucks. “The first scenario is about a cycle,” I said. “The second one is about getting rid of garbage.”

“It’s not garbage,” Datz-Romero said to me, for the second time that day. “It’s recycling. It’s about making it economically feasible to compost. Our little system is nice and it’s loved, but it’s not going to be around for too much longer if we can’t get sufficient funding. It’s an economics of scale—it will generate money through tipping and through selling the end product.”

Just before leaving, I decided to ask Datz-Romero about my compost problem.

“Do you think I need worms?” I asked, after laying out the situation.

“It’s too cold to start with worms now,” she said. “They’d freeze. What you need to do is cut your food up smaller. The more effort you put into it, the better your compost will be.”

I took Datz-Romero’s advice to heart. As the air space in my compost bin shrank, I began to put a lot more effort into it. In times of abundance, no one cares about conservation: the beginning of the shampoo bottle always goes faster than the end. When Europeans first explored this country they saw unlimited timber, fish, game, and clean water. Now that our population is so large—or, more accurately, that our perceived needs are so large—we realize that our natural capital is finite. And yet we seem helpless to stop ourselves from taking.

Trying to stretch out the last couple inches in the composting bin, I began to slice my banana peels into squares the size of Wheat Thins and whittle my celery stalks into matchsticks. I wanted more surface area available to hungry microbes. This was tedious and annoying and time-consuming, and I sometimes found myself slashing away with a knife inside the metal bucket. “How can I grind up all this food into little pieces more easily and more safely?” I asked myself. And then a light bulb blinked on over my head.

Food waste disposers were invented in 1935, but they weren’t commercially developed until the country recovered from World War II. In 1948, the American Public Health Association predicted that the garbage disposer would send the garbage can the way of the privy, making it anachronistic. (Perhaps they should have said disposers would send garbage cans the way of the pig, which was, funnily enough, the name many householders used for the machine underneath the sink.) But there were holdouts. I, for one, had a strong presumption against disposers. There was the extra water they used, and electricity. But mostly I worried about all that potential food energy running down the drain. I thought Tom Outerbridge, Mr. Compost, would agree.

“Disposers?” he crowed when I asked. “I think they’re great!” I was taken aback, then he qualified his statement. “It’s dependent on the wastewater treatment system. If it’s clean sludge and the system can handle it, so there’s no overflow into waterways, then it’s good. It adds nutrients to the composted sludge. If it’s going to agricultural land, versus picking up food waste on a truck and composting it, the former is preferable. You don’t have all those trucks pushing it around.”

I asked Christina Datz-Romero for her opinion. “Food waste disposers suck. It’s a waste of water. And why would you want to overburden the wastewater plants?” Indeed, the commissioner of New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection publicly grumbled about clogging the already fragile system and about harming aquatic life with the increased nitrogen loads.

“But disposer studies say water use is negligible,” I said to Datz-Romero.

“Look at who paid for those studies.”

I did, and the answer brought me to Kendall Christiansen, co-chair of the Citywide Recycling Advisory Board, or CRAB, and PR flack for the Plumbing Foundation. Writing on behalf of the plumbers, not the city, Christiansen sent me an e-mail:

Most environmental issues are trade-offs: in this case, food waste collected by sewer system uses a) high water content of food waste, b) gravity/energy of existing infrastructure to collect vs. diesel-spewing trucks, c) beneficial end-use of all of city’s sludge for land application, vs. burying in landfills where it generates methane and contributes to global warming.

This gave me pause: was my compost bin altering the climate?

Christiansen acknowledged that the treatment plants would have slightly higher costs, but these were offset, he wrote in his virgule-heavy style, by running fewer trucks, lowering garbage exports, and lessening landfill impacts.

Given that 2/3 of NYC’s residents live in apartments, etc., composting—while good/fine—isn’t practical/feasible/likely as reasonable alternate for diverting significant quantities of food waste, either short- or long-term. . . . Not suggesting either/or; but where composting makes better sense is with larger-scale generators so that collection/transport efficiencies are more significant.

The studies that Christiansen touted said that food waste disposers used about a gallon of water a day, but critics considered that a gross underestimate.

The ReSource Institute for Low Entropy Systems, which promotes the use of composting toilets and offers a multipoint plan for protecting clean water (it includes unhooking toilets from municipal sewers in favor of composting models), has campaigned to abolish garbage grinders. “It is as irrational to use water to transport food wastes as it is to use water to transport human excreta or industrial wastes,” the foundation believes. “Water should be used only for drinking and for washing.”