Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (25 page)

Dutchin went on. “The next section of the trommel has bigger holes. Aluminum cans, steel cans, water bottles, that kind of thing, drop to another conveyor.” The conveyors here were distant cousins to the rubber-belted things in supermarkets. Five feet wide, they rose ponderously from below the floor, girded with steel bars. The belts rolled through a gallery of eight “pickers,” who were paid nine dollars an hour to pluck plastics by type and drop them through crude chutes to bunkers down below. The plastic was crushed and baled, then sold to brokers who resold it, or to mills that shredded the plastic for resale or extruded it, as Kwiatkowski did, into other products. The metal rode for another few feet along the conveyor until magnets pulled out the steel; an eddy current handled the aluminum. Both of these commodities were delivered to Hugo Neu’s Greenpoint scrap yard, where they had an appointment with the Prolerizer. The shredded metal was then loaded onto barges, tugged to Jersey City’s Claremont Channel, and transferred to ships bound for the highest bidder.

I walked up a metal stairway to the picking line. The conveyor belts were covered with dust and pigeon droppings. In the gloom I made out shards of glass, a floor mat, a dinosaur toy from a fast-food restaurant, and a take-out container stamped with chasing arrows around the number 7. Plastic number 1 (PET, used in soda bottles) and plastic number 2 (high-density polyethylene, or HDPE, used in milk jugs) are the two most commonly collected and recycled types of plastic. Number 3 plastic, polyvinyl chloride (PVC), is used to make pipes, shampoo bottles, carpet backing, and automotive parts. Number 4, low-density polyethylene (LDPE) is used in plastic bags, six-pack rings, and flexible lids. Number 5, polypropylene (PP), appears in bottle caps, snack food wrap, and some containers and film packaging. Number 6, polystyrene (PS), is most commonly found in plastic cutlery and food containers; and number 7, “other,” is just what it sounds like, and usually unrecyclable.

The triangular symbol was nothing but a headache for Daren Dutchin. The recycling industry developed it to signify recyclability, but the chasing arrows were appropriated by the Society of the Plastics Industry in 1988. The arrows make the virgin-plastic manufacturers look good, but they encourage the public to dump anything with a symbol into the recycling bin regardless of whether local MRFs can handle it, along with some plastics, like coolers and sports watches, that have no arrows at all. The result is contaminated loads of material that ultimately have to be dumped. Recyclers have requested that plastic-container manufacturers modify their use of the misleading graphic, but the industry has so far refused.

The vast emptiness of the Scott Avenue MRF gave me the creeps. Not twelve months ago, the warehouse had been a miserable hive of low-wage activity, operating six days a week, twenty-four hours a day. The conditions, I’d heard, were medieval: hot, cold, damp, noisy, dirty, relentless. Now I had the sense that rats were moving stealthily over the rafters, that cats slunk through the derelict equipment, just out of sight. Sumac trees were growing up under the conveyor belts near a train siding. I heard creaking from the roof, the thrumming wing beats of pigeons.

Dutchin, of course, wasn’t remotely creeped out by this place. He knew every nut and bolt here, and possibly every rat, too. He was proud of the operation. To him, the emptiness represented lost opportunity: jobs for recent immigrants, a way to reduce the burden on landfills. “It was so beautiful,” he said to me now, interrupting my horror movie thoughts. “I wish you could have seen it.” Never had two individuals, gazing upon the same scenery, been so out of sync.

I sat down one morning and cut a sheet of paper into small slips. On one I drew a stick figure representing me. On another I drew a horizontal rectangle representing D’Agostino’s, my local grocery store. On the third I drew a slightly stylized beverage distribution truck. Then, I cut out two paper nickels and one paper soda bottle, made of PET plastic. And then sliding these scraps around on my desk, I enacted a small play to help me visualize how New York State’s bottle bill works. The action began when the distributor brought a cola bottle to the D’Agostino’s and the store paid the distributor a nickel deposit. In the second act, I showed up to buy my cola and paid a nickel deposit. I drank the cola, offstage, then returned the empty to D’Agostino’s and collected my nickel. In the third act, the distributor returned to the store for the empties and paid back the nickel that set this drama in motion. At this point, the distributor also paid the store a two-cent fee for handling.

But let’s change the scenario a bit. What if I bought my cola (or a beer, which also has a five-cent deposit), walked offstage with it, and never came back? Who would keep my nickel? In New York, Connecticut, Oregon, Vermont, and Delaware, it is the distributors. In the six other states with bottle bills, unclaimed deposits go toward recycling education or administration, alcohol treatment programs, or the state’s general fund. In 2000, estimates the Container Recycling Institute, beverage distributors in New York retained $140.9 million in unclaimed nickels. Proponents of a bigger, better bottle bill in New York State, which would include sports drinks, water, teas, juices, and other hugely popular “New Age” beverages, are trying to redirect that money—more than $172 million is expected—to recycling and other environmental programs. (Bottle bills in California, Hawaii, and Maine already cover New Age drinks.)

Who could argue with an expanded bottle bill? It would keep litter off the streets and beaches, keep solid waste from the landfill, conserve natural resources through recycling, and direct money to environmental programs. (According to the NRDC, such a bill would lighten New York City’s waste stream by 220 tons a day, saving as much as $10 million in curbside collection and disposal costs.) Well, grocery store operators, to name just one group, aren’t so keen on an expansion. They’d have to devote more storage space to the sticky, wasp-attracting beverage containers and hire employees to handle them. And then there are distributors, who pay the two cents-per-container fee, and bottlers, who have to clean those containers and find an outlet for them. Waste haulers and MRF owners don’t like bottle bills, either: they take weight away from them, and in the garbage world weight equals money. Over the years, packaging, food, and petrochemical industries have quietly spent tens of millions of dollars fighting existing and proposed bottle bills. And they’ve done it at exactly the same time that they are very publicly promoting recycling.

The garbage landscape is littered with greenwash tactics, in which polluters pose as friends of the environment but spend more money advertising their green projects than on the projects themselves. One masterful example of corporate greenwash is the Keep America Beautiful campaign, which was founded by beverage companies and packaging executives in 1953 after magazine ads began promoting beverage cans as “throwaways” (one depicted carefree boaters slinging empties into a lake). Litter alongside roads, rivers, and farm fields had begun to accumulate, prompting Vermont to pass the nation’s first bottle bill, which banned the sale of beer in nonrefillable containers. Beer companies didn’t like that one bit. They lobbied hard against the law, and in four years it expired. (The state enacted a new bottle bill in 1972.)

In a stroke of marketing genius, Keep America Beautiful (KAB) urged individuals to take responsibility for this waste, to “put litter in its place.” In 1971, the organization sponsored one of the most successful public-service announcements in history, a TV commercial in which a Native American, complete with braid and eagle feather, paddles down a pristine waterway until he reaches a teeming city. When he spots empty beverage cans swirling in the shallows, a tear rolls down his leathery face. KAB proudly called the “Crying Indian” spot an “iconic symbol of environmental responsibility.” (Iron Eyes Cody, who played the Indian and claimed to be a Cherokee-Cree, was later outed as a Sicilian American named Espera DeCorti.)

But whose responsibility is the foul mess along the shore? The organization’s underlying message is that individuals, not corporations who produce single-use containers, are responsible for trash, and that individuals must change their behavior, not manufacturers. Keep American Beautiful focuses on antilitter campaigns—which enlist millions of volunteers a year to clean up beaches and roadsides—but it ignores the potential of recycling legislation and resists changes to packaging. Between November 1992 and July 1993, the American Plastics Council, a KAB sponsor, spent $18 million on a national campaign to “Take Another Look at Plastics.” The ads crowed that more than a billion pounds of plastic had been recycled in 1993, but they failed to mention that fifteen billion pounds of virgin plastic were produced during that same eight-month period. According to a report by the Environmental Defense Fund, for every one-ton increase in plastic recycling between 1995 and 1996, there was a fourteen-ton increase in new plastic production.

For twenty years environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, the National Audubon Society, and the National Wildlife Federation, lent legitimacy to KAB by sitting on its advisory committee. Those relationships ended after a board meeting in July of 1976, when American Can Company chairman William F. May denounced bottle bill proponents as communists and called for a total KAB mobilization against proposed bottle bills in four states. Today, KAB is funded by about two hundred companies that manufacture and distribute aluminum cans, paper products, and plastic and glass containers, in addition to companies that landfill and incinerate all of the above.

Do bottle bills work? Do they “put litter in its place”? According to the Container Recycling Institute, the eleven states with bottle bills recycle beverage containers at a rate of 70 to 95 percent, while states without bottle bills average 37 percent. (Though, thanks to the declining value of the nickel, and, again, Americans’ increasingly mobile lifestyle, the percentage of cans and bottles redeemed even in bottle bill states is dropping.) New York’s bottle bill is estimated to divert more than 650,000 tons of aluminum cans, and glass and plastic bottles from the state’s municipal waste stream each year. Of states that track how much waste their container deposit laws divert, Iowa clocks in with 50,000 tons, Maine 54,000 tons, and Vermont nearly 16,000 tons.

There is a lot of green pride in New York over the bottle bill, but it isn’t widely known that the law doesn’t require distributors and bottlers to actually recycle the containers they collect back into new beverage containers. Only between 4 and 6 percent of glass bottles sold in New York are refillable; the rest of the redeemed bottles are melted down and reincarnated as new containers. It is technologically possible to blend recycled plastic with new resin in plastic bottles, but there isn’t much incentive to do so. (In Scandinavia, Germany, and the Netherlands, consumers return PET bottles, which have a sturdier formulation in those countries, to companies that sterilize and refill them again and again.) In the United States, packagers and manufacturers prefer new plastic because it is cheaper than recycled plastic, it’s free of incompatible polymers, and its color is easier to control. The quality of virgin plastic is guaranteed, and the infrastructure to make it is already in place. Pressured by shareholders in 1990, both Pepsi and Coca-Cola promised to use 25 percent recycled plastic in their bottles, but neither company did. In 2000, both companies committed to using 10 percent recycled content by 2005.

So where are all the postconsumer plastics going? If they are part of a mixed stream collected at curbside, they might end up at a place like American Ecoboard. If they are PET bottles redeemed in bottle bill states—and therefore cleaner and less contaminated with other grades of plastic than loads of curbside bottles—they are probably transformed into sleeping-bag fiberfill, carpets, and fleece jackets. Turning Sprite bottles into Synchilla hoodies is slightly more complicated than turning shredded pellets into picnic tables. The bottles are first shipped to a processing plant to be washed and granulated. The flakes are dried and sold to a mill, where they are melted and squeezed through tiny holes in flat plates called spinnerets (named for the tubular structures from which spiders secrete silk threads). After the plastic solidifies, it’s spun into long threads and stretched to many times the fiber’s original length. The strands are then crimped into wave patterns, using heat, and cut to length, ready for weaving into Synchilla, Capilene, Polartec, or another product with a fuzzy-sounding name.

Not all postconsumer plastic cycles back into gross domestic product. According to the Association of Postconsumer Plastic Recyclers, 35 percent of PET bottles collected in the United States in 2003 were exported, mostly to China. The bottles followed a national trend: more and more, recyclable materials for which industry has no use or that it can’t afford to process are being sent overseas. In 2002, we shipped to China about 450,000 metric tons of scrapped plastic (more than seven times the amount in 1996), 3.3 million metric tons of paper (more than five times the 1996 figure), and 2.3 million metric tons of scrap iron and steel (nine times more than in 1996). This global trade sends recycling jobs overseas, but it gives us cheap goods. Is it a fair deal? Our nation consumes more than its share of natural resources, we create the most waste, and then we send it to be processed in countries that fail to protect their workers or their environment from industrial pollution. Sure, overseas workers get jobs, but they also get contaminated water, soil, and air. Seattle’s recycling program owes much of its success—it had a 39.7 percent diversion rate in 2002—to strong overseas markets for plastic. But that could change. “People are starting to realize that recycling isn’t so simple,” said Pete Erickson, of Seattle’s Cascadia Consulting. “We’re thinking about our impact overseas. We want to be a good global citizen.”

In the midnineties, Greenpeace researchers poring over US Customs Department data discovered that the Pepsi-Cola Company was shipping plastic scrap to Madras, India. When the company denied the practice, Ann Leonard, who now works at the Global Anti-Incinerator Alliance, packed her bags and went off in search of proof.