Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash (10 page)

This vision arose originally from a general trash and energy panic in the U.S. that began in the seventies and continued into the eighties. First there were the oil embargoes, gas lines and overall energy crisis of the era. These events had sparked a brief, federally backed renaissance for renewable energy sources (begun by Jimmy Carter, killed by Ronald Reagan) intended to ease the national and economic security nightmare of foreign fossil fuel dependence. Trash seemed like a ready, plentiful and affordable alternative fuel supply to bolster the effort.

Then there were mounting worries over the safety of the nation’s aged, largely unregulated dumps—numbering about eight thousand active in the early eighties, with another twenty thousand closed landfills sitting and stewing. Many of the working dumps were rapidly reaching capacity and subject to toxic leaks, methane explosions, foul odors and contamination of drinking-water supplies as the chemical soup deep inside seeped into even deeper aquifers. Trash, sometimes with hazardous chemical waste mixed in, had been buried carelessly all over the country for decades without installing plastic barriers and other protections now deemed essential to containing landfill pollution. The result was a number of dire threats such as the Love Canal scandal in the 1970s, when a neighborhood near Niagara Falls, New York, was shown to have been built atop a toxic chemical disposal site from the 1950s, leading to a rash of birth defects, miscarriages, infections and other ailments. When Congress created the “Superfund” program in 1980 to clean up such toxic hazards nationwide, one hundred out of the first eight hundred most contaminated locations in the country were municipal landfills.

With such an array of fresh fears in the air, cities across America were having trouble finding suitable sites for new landfills. When they could find a good spot to bury garbage, community opposition got in the way—getting a new dump up and running was proving extremely tough. So why, the waste managers began to ask, should we endure so many problems burying garbage when much of it could be burned to make steam to drive generators that could power cities? We could kill, or at least blunt, two threats to our environment, security and prosperity with one elegant solution: waste-to-energy.

Those were different times marked by relative bipartisan environmental concern, an era in which the landmark Endangered Species Act passed unanimously in the U.S. Senate and the Environmental Protection Agency was signed into law by a conservative Republican president. The idea of burning massive amounts of garbage to generate a form of alternative (and somewhat greener) energy appealed to a broad cross-section of businessmen, politicians, activists and even some environmental groups. Industry leaders asserted that they could clean up the toxic and particulate emissions that bedeviled old-time, soot-spewing incinerators and still make it a profitable endeavor. Advocates asserted it would simplify the sorting necessary for recycling and so complement efforts to recycle more materials. (Others, however, feared it would do the opposite, since recyclable plastic is ideal, and therefore very tempting, fuel.) No one back then worried about the additional carbon emissions these plants would release. Global warming wasn’t on the radar, with public and scientific angst focused instead on the prospect of the Cold War becoming hot. An exchange of atomic weapons, scientists warned at the time, could initiate a worldwide “nuclear winter,” a dim, starved and frigid modern ice age triggered by immense amounts of sun-blocking dust propelled into the atmosphere by atomic explosions. In that reality, the threat of seeping landfills despoiling land and water was deemed a far greater threat than burning trash to keep it from the dump.

This waste-to-energy idea gripped the entire state of California then, where leaders imagined the state as a world leader in turning trash into electrical treasure, and exporting its expertise globally. It was embraced in a big way in the Los Angeles area by the two main trash-dealing government entities of Southern California: the city of Los Angeles, which has its own dedicated sanitation fleet and landfills, and Puente Hills’s owner, the L.A. Sanitation Districts, a unique quasi-public agency that serves the other seventy-eight cities in Los Angeles County, from Agoura Hills to Malibu to Whittier (whose mayors compose the agency’s governing board). Each jurisdiction, city and county, simultaneously laid plans for massive trash-fueled power plants as the solution to aging, leaking landfills that, in those boom times for Southern California, were rapidly filling.

The first step in making these plans a reality in Los Angeles was the Sanitation Districts’ permit to expand the old dump on the Pellissier ranch into a modern sanitary landfill, a process that led in 1983 to the first of many public hearings. These hearings were not cordial. It proved to be a very difficult time to seek consensus on plotting the future of the Valley of the Dumps. Robert Bennett had just been murdered, his body missing but presumed hidden in the trash of Puente Hills, raising questions about safety, security and oversight. In Sacramento, dire warnings of a severe budget crisis gripping the state became a daily ritual, making large capital projects such as power plants a dicey proposition at best. And in Washington, the Reagan administration’s top environmental officials, including the head of the Superfund, were under investigation for cover-ups and for being in the pocket of toxic polluters and crooked waste-site operators—hardly a climate conducive to trusting the plans and promises of landfill operators in Reagan’s native state. Residents in the neighboring communities marched to the podium at public hearings to express their alarm about the expansion of the Puente Hills landfill. They were outraged to have received official assurances that there were no hazardous materials or leaks there, only to learn later that there had been both. Now they wanted the dump shut down and Los Angeles’s growing flow of garbage redirected to some remote location out in the desert, rather than have it dumped and piled in the midst of a growing community of more than fifty thousand residents adjacent to Puente Hills who had been there long before the landfill. “We didn’t move here for this,” was the oft-repeated slogan.

But the trash bosses assured them that the future of garbage wasn’t about landfills—it was all about drawing clean energy from waste. And in the process, the volume of the trash would be reduced 95 percent. They’d barely need landfills after that. The whole country was going in this direction, they confidently predicted. Burying trash for eternity was old school. Lighting your houses with it made so much more sense.

First, though, the Sanitation Districts’ leaders said they needed a ten-year permit to expand the dump near the Nike missile site and turn it into a modern landfill while they planned the new trash-to-energy future, then got it up and running. There’d be more hearings once those plans took shape in a few years. In the meantime, an innovative power plant was already being built to make the old dump’s noxious emissions into electricity instead of simply burning it in flaring stations—giant Bunsen burners powered by garbage gas—as was done in the past. When dubious homeowners and local activists pointed to the dense fine print of the new Puente Hills permit proposal—the parts that suggested the newly modernized landfill could, if necessary, operate for thirty years and absorb 100 million tons of garbage without breaking a sweat—this was dismissed as a mere contingency. Nobody wanted that future, what one homeowner prophetically envisioned as “seventy stories of ugly.” That would be a crazy squandering of resources, it was agreed. “We have a lot of money in this,” the Sanitation Districts’ spokesman said of the waste-to-energy plans, and it was true—the plants would cost three-quarters of a billion dollars to build, to be financed primarily with municipal bonds. “We’re committed.”

So the road map for the Puente Hills landfill of today was approved. The landfill got a ten-year lease on life through 1993. The evidence suggests that the waste-to-energy goals announced at the time were sincere rather than a ploy or a smoke screen, that those in charge really did expect to make the landfill part of Puente Hills virtually obsolete. Combined with similar proposals up and down the state, those plans would indeed have made California the world leader in generating energy from trash, and provided a new model for the rest of the nation to follow. But then public opposition to such plants turned out to be even more vehement than the sentiment against landfill expansion, and it was accompanied by a new laissez-faire politics that dismissed concerns over fossil fuel dependence and energy security as if the crises and embargoes of the seventies had never occurred. The combination slowly strangled the waste-to-energy plans in California and most of the rest of the country, and contingency plans became the
only
plans. Garbage Mountain was born.

The energy plan had been nothing if not ambitious. Puente Hills was to have been the site of the largest waste-to-energy plant in the world, capable of swallowing up to 10,000 tons of trash a day. The smokestack, which proponents of the plant promised would emit no visible plume, would have reached up to 450 feet high in order to make sure emissions blew up and away from the neighborhoods below. It would rise as tall as three Statues of Liberty standing on one another’s heads. That image alone was enough to alarm the locals. They imagined a towering spire despoiling the foothills and the low-slung suburban skyline. This was anathema to men and women who still recalled the sounds of dairy herds lowing and shuffling by every morning. They didn’t know in the early 1980s that Garbage Mountain would eventually rise up higher than any smokestack would have, blotting out a much bigger piece of the skyline without a trash-burning energy plant there to suck up the waste and give them power in return.

The Sanitation Districts’ plan also called for seven other smaller plants, with capacities ranging as high as 4,000 tons of trash burned daily, to be placed in strategic locations designed to reduce the number of miles trash had to be hauled around the Los Angeles Basin. If all were built, their combined capacity would be great enough to handle all the trash then going to L.A. landfills, with ample extra capacity to handle future trash growth. There would be little more than ash left to bury at any landfill once the plants came on line—the garbage “crisis” would be solved for decades. And power for up to a half million homes could be squeezed out of that trash at the same time.

The city of Los Angeles, meanwhile, separately proposed three large-scale plants of its own to burn almost all of the city’s garbage. This proposal, dubbed Project LANCER (a somewhat tortured derivation from Los Angeles City Energy Recovery), though not as ambitious as the county’s plans, was better publicized and drew most of the national attention and debate. It had been conceived in the 1970s as concerns mounted over the use of the city’s remote landfills in the scenic Santa Monica Mountains. One plant alone was supposed to save 1.6 million miles of garbage truck travel to one of the city’s distant garbage dumps. In comparison to the spewing diesel fumes from those trucks, the anticipated emissions from the state-of-the-art trash plant would, at least according to city officials, represent a net gain for the environment and the battle against smog.

Such cheery pronouncements were soon displaced in the headlines by the campaign to stop it all from happening. The specter of Los Angeles’s fight decades earlier over backyard and old-style industrial incinerators haunted the proceedings. The last time Los Angeles fired up a trash incinerator had been in 1947, when the thick, black smoke pouring out looked like the sickly plume of a forest fire so big and so foul that it stopped traffic for miles. A city councilman complained that his district was “inundated in ashes like from a volcano,” and the plant was soon shut down in favor of … landfilling. Incineration was the past, sanitary landfills were the future—that had been the line in the fifties and sixties. Now people were bewildered: Hadn’t city and county leaders spent years convincing us that incinerators were the big evil, contributing to smog, asthma, cancer and who knew what else? Now we’re supposed to embrace all that again?

The backlash caught the sanitation engineers flat-footed. Four hundred angry residents showed up at a 1985 city council meeting in the nearby suburb of Duarte, where the leaders had initially acquiesced to the waste-to-energy plants. Council members immediately reversed their position. Another 250 people showed up for the next hearing in Puente Hills, condemning plans for the giant landfill incinerator envisioned there. Yes, they had been told waste-to-energy was the future back in 1983. But they hadn’t known then that that future, that monster plant, the biggest in the world, would be erected in their neighborhood. They had assumed it would be built out in the desert somewhere, and Puente Hills would be phased out or at least gradually shrunk until it closed when its permit lapsed in 1993. Now they were being asked to accept a plant that would be there for another twenty or thirty years, and their answer was a resounding no. Protestors at the meeting bore signs saying, “Dump the dump.” They wore surgical masks to indicate their fears about pollution should trash burning return in force to the Los Angeles Basin. “Keep your ash out of the San Gabriel Valley,” another protest sign proclaimed.

Similar complaints about plant location, about the city of Los Angeles trying to saddle the poorest parts of town with everyone’s burning garbage, and concerns that the pollution solutions were not as effective as waste-to-energy proponents had claimed, all served to increase public opinion against trash burning for power everywhere it had been proposed for Los Angeles. Dioxins were again a huge concern, with opponents warning that the smokestacks would be spewing the same potent carcinogens that had made the military defoliant Agent Orange so harmful, something the sanitation officials vigorously disputed. It didn’t help that Sweden, a leader in the waste-to-energy industry, had put a moratorium on building the plants at that time because of dioxin concerns. The moratorium was later lifted once new emissions controls were put in place, but the impression that the technology was dirty and dangerous lingered.