Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (18 page)

He stopped to snatch a crumpled cigarette pack from the gutter. How exemplary, I thought. But no, Toro was only after the coupon inside the cellophane. “You can get some pretty neat stuff with these,” he said. “I once got a camera.”

He dropped the rest of the pack into an empty garbage can and continued parsing neighborhood compliance. “In Bed-Stuy, Bushwick, Borough Park—there’s no recycling over there. They don’t know how to do it! The people in Borough Park bring their garbage back from the Jewish Alps, the Catskills, where they go on vacation. Then they complain about us not taking things, and we file a complaint, and the Jewish mayor gets them off.”

There was no stopping Toro. “The Chinese are the Jews of the Orient. They compact their trash till it’s tiny and they can fill up a can with a hundred pounds. The more money people make, the less they care. I’m talkin’ renters—they pay a lot; they want the landlord to take care of things. If people just did as they were told, it would be easier. They put it all in plastic bags, and they overfill them, and then they break.”

It was a little after eight now, and Billy Murphy and John Sullivan, who’d whisked away my putrescible waste about two hours ago, had caught up to us on Tenth Street. I yanked my containers a little faster, feeling pressured by one of the fastest teams in the garage, but McLean and Toro wouldn’t be hurried. They dragged, they stopped to chat, they walked from house to house.

“They are slow, aren’t they?” Sullivan said to me, shaking his head and smiling. He put a foot up on his dashboard and took a slug of water. CN191 couldn’t squeeze past CN231, so Murphy and Sullivan resigned themselves to an unscheduled break. When the paper truck got to the avenue, it pulled left. The garbage truck went right.

We were on Thirteenth Street now, where my paper collectors stalwartly ignored a car honking to pass. “If we let one person through, then ten will want to get through,” Toro said. “It don’t bother me. You see them lights?” He nodded toward the flashing yellow and red lights high over his truck’s hopper. “They can see them a block away. They don’t have to drive down here.”

We picked our way past whitewashed town houses and geranium-bedecked brownstones. In front of a yoga studio, a contractor had double-parked a van. “Same thing every week,” snorted Toro. “This guy is supposed to be so holy.” He gave three long blasts on his horn, enough to pull a wizened yogi from inside, his robe and white beard flowing. “What do you mean?” I asked Toro, not making the connection between the contractor’s van, the yoga studio, and the snort. “It’s a tax write-off for him, a religious organization,” Toro barked. I risked having my head bit off, but I told Toro his truck could probably fit past the van. “I don’t want to risk it,” he said piously. “If someone hits us, we have to go to court. You lose a day’s pay.” That, and it was way more fun to make a yogi run.

The Visy Paper plant occupied the ur-edge of town, a desolate spot on the sort of exurban borderland romanticized by numerous Bruce Springsteen songs. The potholed boulevard that ran past the factory’s front gate dead-ended in the marshes of Staten Island’s western shoulder. At high tide, water crept between cattails to lap at what had become a visual convention for illicit pleasure: shattered beer bottles and spent condoms. A couple hundred yards away, steam from Visy’s smokestacks wafted over fields of phragmites and dissipated over the West Shore Expressway.

The factory itself was a utilitarian metal box with minimal landscaping. A bright mural out front illustrated various corporate talismans: green trees, blue skies, and the New York City skyline, complete with twin towers. I found one element of the mural cryptic—a ball field upon which stood a brown-skinned man in coveralls, arms stretched wide, feet and chest bare, his head tipped rapturously back toward puffy clouds. What did it mean?

Judy Goodstein, when we met in her office, didn’t have a clue. I was here for a tour, to see how 360,000 tons of paper—nearly half of it collected by the DSNY—was turned into the equivalent of about 650,000 new cardboard boxes a year. (Not all of New York’s wastepaper ended up at Visy. The city had contracts with a handful of independent paper dealers, some of whom sold material to Visy, or sorted and baled it for sale to other recyclers, or shipped it overseas, mostly to Asia. Wastepaper was America’s largest export, by volume, to other countries. Where the city’s paper went depended on the market, and the market was highly variable. Visy also bought commercial paper from private carters, who collected 170,000 tons a year from offices and institutions.)

Goodstein pressed upon me a pair of foam earplugs and led me into the bowels of the plant. Making paper is a noisy, dirty process, but my tour started at the concluding end of the mechanical mayhem, where a single 200-inch-wide roll of brown paper hung serenely from the ceiling. At this point, Goodstein handed me over to production supervisor Chris Lovett, who whisked me straight back to the beginning.

A quarter of Visy’s residential paper supply arrived aboard DSNY trucks that plied parts of Brooklyn and all of Staten Island; the rest arrived on barges loaded, from packer trucks, at a marine transfer station on Manhattan’s West Side. Both supply lines ended in a thirty-foot-deep pit on the plant’s western edge. Peering over a railing into this concrete hole, I saw examples of nearly half the sixty-odd paper types listed on the Loose Waste Paper Exchange, a price index published by trade groups, including boxboard, beer carton waste, white envelopes, colored ledger, hard white, soft white, glassine, brown kraft, and “other.”

The first step in papermaking, Lovett impressed upon me, was paper cleaning. It started when the loose magazines and the junk mail, the boxes and the paperboard, were transferred, via a grapple the size of a small shed, from the pit to the pulper, which sloshed the stuff around with water to separate wood from plastic fibers. “We skim the big stuff off, then pump it through another cleaner that takes out plastic, staples, tape, glue, and clay, which comes from colored paper.” In the DAF, or Dissolved Air Flotation unit, Lovett continued, air surrounded contaminants and floated them to the surface for skimming. We walked along a high iron catwalk, where Lovett directed my gaze at a vat twenty feet in diameter. A shroud of steam obscured its contents until a sudden draft revealed a surface of bubbling brown scum: primordial paper soup.

After the initial cleaning, the slurry went into a forty-foot dump chest, where it was again mechanically agitated. “It’s continuous cleaning throughout the plant,” Lovett said. “We’re basically just wetting and rinsing here.” He showed me an outdoor waste pile that contained rock, sand, glass, popcorn, and the shredded remains of the plastic bags that McLean and Toro hated to see. In an instant I realized that putting waxed-paper bags in my recycling pile wasn’t the worst thing in the world, that I didn’t need to tear out glassine windows from pasta boxes or get every last popcorn kernel from the microwave bag. Chris Lovett would do it for me.

Back inside, Lovett pointed to another machine churning out a thin brown crumbly material—more rejects. “It looks like potting medium,” I said. Pleased, Lovett said I was correct: the company hoped to sell it to gardeners. Paper recycling mills, in terms of waste, are hardly zero-sum operations. They produce far more short-fiber sludge than do virgin mills. In fact, 15 percent or more of the incoming paper comes out as sludge. Contaminated with bits of plastic and strapping, it makes poor compost. Visy landfilled its dirty remains but entertained notions of drying and burning them to power the mill. The company would save on fuel and on trucking to a landfill. The idea of a new smokestack on the horizon, however, didn’t sit well with the Staten Islanders who had fought incinerators in their borough for twenty years, and ultimately the mayor nixed the plan.

After four centrifugal cleaning sessions and a bit more dewatering, the slurry was forced through hoses and sprayed onto a screen that fractioned, or sorted, the long fibers from the short. Lovett wanted the long ones on top of the sheet because they looked better and they were stronger. Visy received a lot of ONP (old newspapers) and MOW (mixed office waste), which had short fibers. Long-fibered OCC (old corrugated cardboard) vastly improved the quality of the mix, and Goodstein was perpetually on the hunt for more of it.

She also preferred fancy office paper to the 100 percent postconsumer stuff that I regularly bought, used, and then shunted to the recycling pile. (Postconsumer fiber is paper collected through recycling programs; preconsumer fiber is mill trimmings and scraps discarded on the manufacturing end. The higher the postconsumer content, the more resources are conserved and the more waste and pollution are minimized.) As paper is recycled again and again, its fibers become shorter and shorter and it becomes useful only for lower grades of paper, like the linerboard used in cereal and shoe boxes, or paper towels. According to the giant paper manufacturer Weyerhauser, clean white paper can theoretically be recycled nine times, but the reality of inks, clays, and glues drags that number down to four times. When the fibers become too short to be rewoven into paper, they are washed out into the reject pile, to be reincarnated as kitty litter or, in Visy’s case, potting soil.

I returned my attention to the chugging machinery. At this point in the recycling process, the paper was more like watery gruel than something you could fold into an airplane: it was only 8 percent solids. A dewatering machine brought the density up to 14 percent, and then an apparatus called a Kramer, made up of long rollers, thickened the pulp to 28 percent through a process of vacuuming and pressing.

Cleaned and reorganized at the structural level, the slurry rolled on. “It comes in here at about one percent solid,” Lovett said, leading me through a door that separated the subtropical region of the plant from the tropical, “then gets up to twenty-one percent within about thirty feet.” A “Flexo Nip” squeezed water from the paper, bringing it to 50 percent, and then it moved in one continuous ribbon to a series of drying cells. Lovett lifted a roll-up wall so I could see the paper flowing in a mile-long serpentine pattern around fifty-seven cylinders. A blast of heat hit my face, and I quickly stepped back.

“We add cornstarch to the paper to strengthen it, which brings it back to twelve percent wetness, and then dry it back down to nine percent,” Lovett continued. “Then we smooth the top for printability, that’s called calendaring, and add dye so it’s the color of paper, not gray. People don’t want that.”

Three hours after my ONP and MOW had tumbled into the pit, they reemerged from the machine as brown linerboard, tightly rolled onto a spool twelve feet in diameter and then sliced by giant knives into something your basic forklift could manage.

Seventy percent of the paper produced at the Visy plant on Staten Island was fed to a Visy plant in Valparaiso, Indiana, that produced boxes made of 100 percent recycled fibers and linerboard, and the rest of the paper went to other Visy box plants and corrugators in the Northeast. Goodstein liked to call the environmental savings of recycled paper “the TOWEL effect”—for trees, oil, water, energy, and landfill. “We benefit all of that,” she said, meaning that she saved trees from being turned into pulp (the Staten Island plant claimed to save 13,500 trees a day), saved oil burned in logging operations, saved water by recycling 600,000 of the 700,000 daily gallons used inside the plant, used 25 percent of the electricity consumed in a virgin wood-pulping operation, and kept 350,000 tons of paper a year out of landfills. Actually, about 15 percent of the weight Visy received had to be landfilled—dirt and plastic and the other stuff agitated out of the mix. But virgin mills were even worse: 25 percent of a harvested tree went onto the waste pile.

Virgin papermaking is one of the most environmentally harmful industries on earth. It depletes forests and their biodiversity, it uses more water than any other industrial process in the nation (more than double the amount of recycled papermaking), and it dumps billions of gallons of water contaminated with chlorinated dioxin and a host of other hazardous and conventional pollutants into rivers, lakes, and harbors. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the paper industry is, after chemical and steel manufacturing, the third-largest source of greenhouse gases in the United States. Each year, paper factories send 420 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, water vapor, methane, nitrogen oxides, and other heat-trapping gases up their smokestacks (and emissions are expected to double by 2020). Along with the gases come 38,617 pounds of lead and 2,277 pounds of mercury and mercury compounds. The mercury, released by plants’ coal-fired boilers, settles in water, where bacteria transform it into a highly toxic form called methylmercury. Small organisms, like plankton, consume the methylmercury and are in turn consumed by small fish. The small fish are eaten by larger fish, which are in turn consumed by other animals, like us. Ingest too much methylmercury and your kidneys and brain are ready to reenter the nitrogen cycle.

Converting old paper into new paper avoids many of these environmental costs and, by creating jobs and transforming a material worth $10 per ton to paper collectors into a material worth in excess of $400 per ton to linerboard buyers, makes sound economic sense as well. Recycled newsprint, which goes for $600 to $700 a ton, is an even better deal.

While residential and commercial paper-recycling rates across the United States have steadily increased—from 30 percent in 1988, when the American Forest & Paper Association started to keep track, to 50.3 percent in 2002—consumption of virgin paper has steadily risen as well. Over the past fifty years, according to the independent market research firm Nima Hunter, worldwide use of virgin paper has increased sixfold, with the average US office worker running through more than ten thousand sheets of printing and copying paper per year. Ninety-five percent of the twelve billion magazines printed annually in the United States have zero recycled content, and only about 20 percent are recycled, which puts more than nine billion magazines into landfills and incinerators every year. According to the Worldwatch Institute, virgin wood pulp consumption continues to expand at roughly 1 to 2 percent a year, making recycling efforts all the more crucial.