Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (19 page)

“We’ve got to keep doing it, even if we’re just holding the line,” the NRDC’s Allen Hershkowitz told me. “Recycling paper
is
slowing global deforestation. Conservatively, timber harvests would expand fifty percent in the next thirty-five years if we didn’t recycle paper.”

We need to make sure we are
buying
recycled, too, because shifting all this household paper from the landfill to a company that pulps, dries, and flattens it isn’t worth a thing if economic markets don’t signal its value. Collectively, the United States consumes more than eighty million tons of paper a year, and less than a third of that comes from recycled sources. The paper pushers of Washington, D.C., the nation’s largest buyer of office supplies, are required by an executive order to purchase products made with at least 30 percent postconsumer recycled content, when available. Any state or local procurement agency that uses federal funds has to do the same. Buying recycled products ups the demand for more recycled products, which in turn saves even more resources, reduces pollution, and lowers prices for those goods.

A solid-waste expert, Hershkowitz had the intensely focused, suffer-no-fools manner of a Beltway policy wonk. He angled forward in his chair, the better to spring up and snatch documents from his several shelves of garbage-related reports. His walls were covered with pictures of his children; a framed
New York Times
review of his book,
Bronx Ecology: Blueprint for a New Environmentalism;
and an actual blueprint of the book’s subject, a recycled-newsprint mill he had conceived of, and designed with the architect Maya Lin. The mill would have employed residents of Hunts Point, recycled gray water from a nearby sewage treatment plant, and kept bargeloads of paper from landfills (as well as a few from Visy, with which it would have competed for commercial paper). After nearly ten years of negotiations and delay, Hershkowitz’s dream was crushed by lack of support from City Hall.

I didn’t find it strange that Hershkowitz had a roll of toilet paper on his office shelf, and he didn’t find it strange when I pulled a toilet paper wrapper from my backpack.

“What do you think of this?” I said, showing him the high postconsumer recycled content of my brand, Marcal.

“Pretty good, very good,” he said.

Why, then, didn’t Marcal advertise its green credentials, like Seventh Generation (which cost nine cents more, even at my food co-op, for a roll half as long)? “It’s a public perception thing,” Hershkowitz said. “People care a great deal about what they use on their bottom. Even though it’s there for only five seconds. I timed it.”

“If it’s recycled, some people feel its quality is less or that it’s less clean,” said Peter Marcalus, senior vice president for recovered materials at Marcal, in New Jersey, when I phoned him later. “I’ve had countless people at public meetings say to me, ‘I just can’t understand how you get my used tissue clean again.’”

Hershkowitz was currently knee-deep in a campaign to halt the pulping of Canada’s boreal forests—a vast, ancient, and globally rare ecosystem of hardwoods and high mammalian biodiversity—for the creation of toilet paper. To some, this was an environmental crime on par with converting wetlands to shopping malls. It was toilet paper that had brought me to Hershkowitz in the first place. It had been he who’d answered a reader’s query posed in the the
New York Times’
s science section: “Is it better for the environment to dispose of toilet paper in the garbage or in the toilet?” It was a question I had asked myself for years, every time I blew my nose.

Hershkowitz had answered: “It is both practically desirable and ecologically superior to flush it down the toilet.” Sewage treatment plants decompose both organic waste and the cellulose of toilet paper, he had said, but in a landfill, microbial activity would generate methane, a potent greenhouse gas. No matter where it ends up, though, the big ecological problem with toilet paper, Hershkowitz pointed out, is that companies produce it from virgin wood instead of recycled paper. If toilet paper is made directly from trees, the yield is only 43 to 47 percent (depending on what type of wood is used). But make toilet paper from wastepaper, and the fiber yield is considerably higher: between 85 and 95 percent.

“Paper recycling does save water, energy, and forests,” Hershkowitz said, “but because the extraction of virgin timber is subsidized by the government, it’s still cheaper than buying old paper.” The paper subsidy favored well-financed and politically influential extractive industries over recycling and reuse enterprises. Where the former tended to deplete natural resources, pollute the air and water, and eliminate jobs, the latter tended to be resource efficient, entrepreneurial, and community based. According to a 1999 report by the GrassRoots Recycling Network, Taxpayers for Common Sense, the Materials Efficiency Project, and Friends of the Earth, tax breaks and spending subsidies for timber, mining, and energy extraction—which were instituted in the nineteenth century to help develop the West and industrialize the nation—cost taxpayers more than $2.6 billion a year. Eliminating the subsidies would “give recycling and reuse industries a more even playing field on which to compete while also saving taxpayer money.” Not surprisingly, politicians accustomed to donations from extractive industries have no interest in changing the situation.

On a wintry morning I walked up the ramp of the Department of Sanitation’s marine transfer station on Manhattan’s West Side and gazed down from a platform upon the swirling black Hudson. According to the office blackboard, the station was home to the Fifty-ninth Street Killer Whales, who were “Sleek, Powerful and Fearless.” The Killer Whales, who in their green sweatshirts and trousers looked like any other DSNY employees, were a study in energy conservation today, minimally supervising paper-filled packer trucks as they backed their loads to the edge of an elevated tipping platform. Far below waited an enormous blue barge, of the same size and type that once carried putrescible waste to Fresh Kills. A single barge could hold 450 tons of paper, and when four of them topped out, the Killer Whales would fearlessly cover them with netting, sleekly lash them together, and then hand them over to a tug, which would push them down the river and across the harbor to Visy.

The metal building on the one-acre pier was as cavernous as an airplane hangar and sheared by river winds. Nor’easters and high tides had been known to trap barges against the platform’s underside; ice locked tugs and barges in place. Dust swirled in the summer heat, combatted by san men wielding hoses. “Men have fallen in, but no one has drowned,” Austin Johnson, the shift supervisor, told me.

From the lip of the platform, I watched as a city truck weighed in at the entrance to the station, trundled up the ramp, and tipped its compacted load of paper. Freed from its confines, the clot seemed to hesitate on the brink of the hopper, as if reluctant to make the forty-five-foot plunge. Then slowly it began to tumble: a white-and-brown cascade of cardboard, loose paper, and junk mail that gradually picked up speed. The ten-ton mass hit the barge hard. There was a bounce and a whooshing sound, and then a tremendous updraft pulled a portion of the paper back toward the truck. The lightest stuff rose ten, fifteen, twenty feet. It reached its zenith, the force of gravity took over, and the paper wafted back onto the barge. Within hours, it would be transformed into a liquid, and then the mass with a million edges would be transformed once again into a single continuous ribbon.

The decision to recycle paper seemed like a no-brainer in New York. The stuff was picked up in its own container at the curb, transported to a local plant by barge, and turned into a product for which there was a fairly strong market. The city even made money off the deal. Not surprisingly, it was hard to find anyone, in government, in the advocacy community, or in the recycled-paper business, who would complain about the system. And yet paper and paperboard still made up nearly 40 percent of the garbage that New Yorkers—and millions of other Americans who had curbside recycling programs in their cities—sent to landfills. Even in the best of times, New York’s Department of Sanitation diverted just 19 percent of the city’s residential paper from landfills or incinerators. It was worrisome that something that seemed so uncontroversial and took such minimal effort on the part of residents was so pitifully attended to. If we couldn’t do right by paper, I wondered, how were we going to manage with materials that had a more complicated recycling profile?

Clearly, doing right by paper isn’t a black-and-white issue to big corporate buyers. When I asked Little, Brown about printing
Garbage Land
on recycled paper, I was told that my book would be printed on paper that uses approximately 50 percent less virgin fiber than other book papers, that it would be produced by a manufacturing process that uses fewer bleaching chemicals than other papers, and that more than 80 percent of the fiber would come from lands certified by the Canadian Standards Association as sustainably managed. Sounds pretty good, right? But in fact, this statement says nothing about recycled content. I was happy to learn that the virgin fiber came from CSA-certified forests, but I’d be even more pleased if those forests were certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, which is more widely endorsed by conservation groups. And it doesn’t get to the heart of the problem: not using new trees at all.

In the case of this book, there wasn’t much I could do after suggesting a reputable company selling well-priced, high-quality recycled stock. Little, Brown is owned by Time Warner, and because Time Warner buys vast quantities of paper for all its books and magazines, it receives a deep discount. And then there’s this: Like any author, I’m hoping many people will buy my book, which will result in even more paper usage. I’m still hoping Time Warner will eventually take the leap into all-recycled terrain, and in doing so radically alter the paper landscape, just as California lawmakers affect the automobile market when they introduce new emissions standards. Perhaps future editions of
Garbage Land will be printed on recycled stock (or mostly sold electronically). Given the way we’re decimating our forests, there may not be a choice.

Chapter Seven

Hammer of the Gods

I
n 1928, a young metals trader named Hugo Neu left his native Germany for New York City. By 1945, he had started his own scrap business, buying and selling metals all over the world. Most of his stuff came from peddlers and auto wreckers, but he didn’t shy away from shiploads of bombs, which he defused, dismantled, and sold. It was a great time to be in the scrap metal business: the government was urging citizens to contribute to the war effort by scouring their attics, basements, and garages for any bit of salvageable metal.

In the 1950s, Neu tried to get his hands on New York’s household metal, which was commingled with residential garbage. But the city had no interest in reviving a sorted waste stream, and the Neu Corporation carried on with its bulk metal business. The invention, in the sixties, of cutting blades that could make mincemeat of the thickest steel allowed Neu to start shredding metal. Smaller pieces were easier to transport and to melt into new shapes: business expanded exponentially. Today, the Hugo Neu Corporation runs the fifth-largest steel recycling operation in the United States (out of about twelve hundred dealers). The company has scrap yards in New England, Los Angeles, Hawaii, New Jersey, the Bronx, and Queens. It was to this last yard that my household metal—less than four pounds of it a month—now went.

I stopped in at the Hugo Neu Corporation’s Manhattan headquarters on a winter morning to see Wendy Neu, the company’s vice president for environmental and public affairs, who also happened to be the wife of John Neu, the late Hugo’s son. We’d met a few months earlier at a recycling roundtable. She was tall and exotic looking, with long black hair and olive skin. Her boots were high heeled and her suit, for an industrialist, incongruously hip. When Wendy agreed to meet with me, my pulse quickened: I had a date with the coolest chick in the room.

The Hugo Neu offices were sleek and muted, with arty photographs and a lot of big plants. They seemed more suited to an independent film company than to scrap metal dealers. I suspected this was Wendy’s doing. In ways subtle and bold, she was trying to change the face of her industry.

“Recycling is still a niche business,” Wendy said from her cluttered desk as she slowly peeled a clementine. “There’s a junkyard, scrap yard mentality—you set up on an empty urban corner. There’s no OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] standards, no environmental compliance.” As the head of the government relations committee of the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI), Wendy was trying to raise the environmental bar. “We’re dealing with storm water runoff, with oil-based materials, mercury from car switches, appliances, anything. We’ve got PCBs, Freon, paints. We recycle ten-year-old cars, which contain stuff that’s since been outlawed.”

Her scrap yards, she said breezily, received Notices of Violation from the state “all the time.” It was her idea to contact the local environmental groups—the wetlands scientists, the bay keepers—to find cleaner ways of doing business. “The idea in the past was for scrap companies to keep hidden. We made a policy decision to let people in. It made good business sense, forget about the reality of cleaner workplaces. And we want small companies to toe the line, too, because we need a level playing field. We’re all competing for business, but we all have to put in the same capital investment.”

Because I was still having trouble connecting scrap yard images with Wendy’s green leanings, I asked how she’d come to work here. After graduating from American University, she said, she’d started studying for a master’s in social work at Rutgers. She worked at Trenton State, a maximum-security prison. “But I was bad at it. I got too close to the inmates. Basically, I recycled them—they’d go out and then come back.” After that she worked at a youth correctional facility in Yardville, New Jersey. “It was sex offenders and murderers—the trash no one wants,” she said. She smiled ruefully. “I’ve been consistent in that regard.”