Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (40 page)

Bernick set up his spotting scope, just to see what he could see, and I walked the tide line, stopping to pick things up and marvel at the processes of nature and the shortsightedness of man. Jamaica Bay was slowly rising, and its islands were subsiding. No single theory explained the shrinkage, but scientists suspected that development had reduced the flow of sediment feeding the marshes, and sea lettuce was smothering them. The trash heaped under the sand was slowly being exposed by the action of winds and tide. “Every time I come down here it’s different,” Bernick said. “The beach looks different, and the garbage is different.” The layers most recently dumped were the first to be revealed; as time passed the oldest material would come to the fore. We guessed that today’s snapshot—a glass pipe, an old spool, vinegar and ale bottles, chicken bones, crockery, an octagonal blue Milk of Magnesia bottle, a brittle plastic doll—had been buried in the forties or fifties. The reduction plants of a century past had left very little behind. Still, it was easy to find horse bones on this beach.

Folding up his scope, Bernick and I rounded the shoulder of the bay. Here, the beach rose to a meter-high bank topped by phragmites and spilling some creamy white guts—a tangle of thick nylons filled with sand. The stockings were reinforced for garters; some had seams up the back. The movement of water had twisted the mass into a soft Mummenschanz sculpture. In some areas, the junk was segregated by type: a section of white cold-cream jars, a section of ketchup bottles, a section devoted to crushed bottle necks, a region of white ceramic fixtures interspersed with metal machine parts rusted thin. Bernick and I walked with our eyes downcast, lost in thought. Now and then we tossed things at each other—a doll arm, an Empire State license plate. Everywhere, we found leather shoes: men’s boots, women’s pumps, children’s lace-ups. Twisted and bent, they invoked in me an overwhelming sense of poignancy. They all seemed to have been worn to death, and the people who’d worn them were long gone.

Most of the refuse on the beach was glass. It glittered in the afternoon sun and its broken shards tinkled delightfully at every crest of wavelet upon the shore. Why was there so much glass? Because glass is what remains. An inorganic, nonbiodegradable solid, it didn’t float “away,” like plastic; it didn’t have value for recyclers or scavengers; and it didn’t break down into tiny pieces, on its own, over human-scale time. Just as the modern city had found no outlet for its Everests of shattered household glass, neither had the waste brokers of Barren Island.

I collected an ale bottle I thought Lucy would like and some shards of pottery hand-painted in Italy, but she wouldn’t immediately latch on to them, and eventually I’d put them in my trash. If the city actually recycled glass, my idle scavenging—which was illegal, as we were on National Park Service property—would have been called poaching.

Some manufacturers and processors, like Hugo Neu, were moving toward dumping their separated wastes in “monofills” that they’d maintain until technology evolved and the waste became valuable. It didn’t seem that glass was headed in that direction. Even die-hard environmentalists admitted that collecting and processing glass consumed more energy than it saved. They said there was no shortage of sand, the principal ingredient in glass, and that it wasn’t toxic in a landfill. Left alone, the bottles on this beach would eventually return to sand. The thought gave me a creepy
2001: A Space Odyssey
kind of feeling. Barren Island would be under several feet of water by then.

But what about in fifty or a hundred years: what will the garbage landscape look like then? Already, the stuff we set on the curb is circling back to bite us. We burn our electronic waste, and its chemical fallout shows up in the breast milk of Eskimos and in the flesh of animals we eat. We bury our household waste, and poisons rise into our air and leach into our waterways. We can recycle and compost as much as we want, but if the total waste stream continues to grow—and it
is
growing, whether in places where recycling is on steroids, like Seattle, or in places where recycling is anemic, like the entire state of Mississippi—we’ll never escape our own mess. For better or worse, consumers and producers respond to economic arguments: if we don’t wake up and make the connection between our economy and the environment (which provides the resources to make all our stuff), the planet will eventually do it for us. And it won’t be pretty.

When I got home from my Barren Island outing, I learned that the Coastal Cleanup folks
had
descended on Dead Horse Bay, filling their plastic sacks with today’s seaborne litter and yesterday’s heavier fill. The bags went onto a truck and joined the parade of refuse heading out of state. There was nothing more personal and local, I thought, and nothing more inadvertently global than an individual’s garbage. Three hundred years from now, I imagined someone excavating a Pennsylvania hollow, perhaps in search of raw materials no longer abundant in nature, and pondering how an ale bottle, filled and refilled in nineteenth-century Brooklyn, had made it so far from home.

Acknowledgments

Among the many people who helped me with this project, I’d like to single out Daniel Katz, Benjamin Miller, Robin Nagle, and Lisa Reed for their early leads and inspiration; Bob Besso, Dennis Diggins, Virali Gokaldis, Allen Hershkowitz, Robert Lange, G. Fred Lee, Eve Martinez, Peter Scorziello, Steve Shinn, and Nick Themelis for fielding endless waste-related questions; Phil Heckler for his help with the pipes; Carl Alderson for misreading the tide chart; and Tony Israel for trying to save the earth. I’d like to offer a 2.9-billion-cubic-yard thank-you to my editor, Geoff Shandler, who saw through the muck; to Liz Nagle, whose comments were always spot-on; to Betsy Uhrig, copyeditor extraordinaire; and to my agent, Heather Schroder, for her support and guidance. I’m especially grateful to my husband, Peter Kreutzer, for closely reading and commenting on every version of the manuscript, and to Lucy, who almost always said yes to an outing.

A Note on Sources

To research this book I relied on many books, reports, and articles. Among the most valuable were:

Bronx Ecology: Blueprint for a New Environmentalism,
by Allen Hershkovitz, Island Press, 2002.

The Consumer’s Guide to Effective Environmental Choices: Practical Advice from the Union of Concerned Scientists,
by Michael Brower and Warren Leon, Three Rivers Press, 1999.

Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things,
by William McDonough and Michael Braungart, North Point Press, 2002.

Fat of the Land: A History of Garbage in New York; The Last 200 Years,
by Benjamin Miller, Four Walls Eight Windows, NY, 2000.

The Meadowlands,
by Robert Sullivan, Scribner, 1998.

My Life in Garbology,
by A. J. Weberman, Stonehill, 1980.

Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution,
by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, L. Hunter Lovins, Little, Brown, 1999.

The Road to San Giovanni,
by Italo Calvino, Pantheon Books, NY, 1993.

Rubbish!: The Archaeology of Garbage,
by William L. Rathje and Cullen Murphy, University of Arizona Press, 2001.

Takedown: The Fall of the Last Mafia Empire,
by Rick Cowan, Random House, 2002.

Toxic Sludge Is Good for You!,
by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, Common Courage Press, 1995.

Underworld,
by Don DeLillo, Scribner, 1997.

Up in the Old Hotel,
by Joseph Mitchell, Pantheon, 1992.

Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash,
by Susan Strasser, Metropolitan Books, NY, 1999.

Biocycle
magazine’s “State of Garbage in America,” 2004.

“The Case for Caution,” Cornell Waste Management Institute, 1997.

“Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia,” prepared by the Basel Action Network and the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, 2002.

“A Gospel According to the Earth,” by Jack Hitt,
Harper’s,
July 2003.

“Life After Fresh Kills: Moving Beyond New York City’s Current Waste Management Plan,” a joint research project of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, Earth Engineering Center, and the Urban Habitat Project at the Center for Urban Research and Policy of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, December 1, 2001.

“No Room to Move: The City’s Impending Solid Waste Crisis,” City of New York, Office of the Comptroller, Office of Policy Management, October 2004.

“Overview of Subtitle D Landfill Design, Operation, Closure and Postclosure Care Relative to Providing Public Health and Environmental Protection for as Long as the Wastes in the Landfill Will Be a Threat,” by G. Fred Lee, PhD, PE, DEE, and Anne Jones-Lee, PhD, January 2004.

“Pavlov’s Pack Rats,” by Joel Bleifuss,
In These Times,
November 13, 1996.

“Recycling Is Garbage,” by John Tierney,
New York Times Magazine,
June 30, 1996.

“Recycling Reconsidered: Producer vs. Consumer Wastes in the United States,” unpublished paper by Samantha MacBride, October 2001.

“Recycling Returns: Ten Reforms for Making New York City’s Recycling Program More Cost-Effective,” by Mark A. Izeman and Virali Gokaldis, Natural Resources Defense Council, April 2004.

“Report of the Berkeley Plastics Task Force,” by Richard Lindsay Stover, Kathy Evans, Karen Pickett, April 1996.

“The Urban Blind Spot in Environmental Ethics,” by Andrew Light,
Environmental Politics,
Spring 2001.

“Urban Residential Refuse Composition and Generation Rates for the 20th Century,” by Daniel C. Walsh,
Environmental Science & Technology,
November 15, 2002.

“Wretched Refuse,” by Keith Kloor,
City Limits,
November 2002.

About the Author

Elizabeth Royte is the author of
The Tapir’s Morning Bath: Solving the Mysteries of the Tropical Rain Forest,
and has written for the
New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, National Geographic, Outside, Smithsonian, The New Yorker,
and numerous other national magazines. A former Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellow, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband and their daughter.