Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash (11 page)

With hundreds of angry voters showing up at city council meetings and public hearings, it didn’t take long for city council members in the small cities ringing Los Angeles to gauge the political winds and join the smokestack opponents rather than risk being voted out of office. Soon the opposition included sixteen cities served by the Sanitation Districts, along with two congressmen and a passel of state legislators. With that, trash power was dead. All but two tiny demonstration plants already under construction were canceled, reducing waste-to-energy to a hobby rather than a solution in Los Angeles. This mirrored developments around the state and most parts of the country.

And so Puente Hills became the go-to place for burying, rather than burning, garbage. The Sanitation Districts made do with collecting landfill methane to generate power, a process about half as efficient as burning the trash, producing far less electricity and doing nothing to reduce the volume of material going into the landfill.

At the time, the citizens who opposed the plans for Puente Hills had said they weren’t necessarily against waste-to-energy “done right.” They just thought it should be done in some remote location, far away from the city—away from their homes. Then the unsightly smokestack, the question of emissions, the flow of trucks filled with trash—all would be out of sight and out of mind, the way trash is supposed to be. “If we have to burn garbage, let’s put it on a train and take it out to the desert,” a leader of the anti-trash-burning coalition said. “It may cost us five or ten dollars more per person a month, but it’s worth it. They shouldn’t be built in a metropolitan area.” This statement proved to be quite prescient in one way—the trash train would one day be chosen as L.A.’s trash solution—but it also reflected just how poorly the opponents of waste-to-energy understood the economics and logistics of trash.

The neighbors of Puente Hills thought they had scored a victory, but they had only traded a power plant for an even bigger trash mountain. And when 1993 rolled around, they were outraged anew when, instead of closing down as they expected, the landfill was allowed to expand and extend its life another two decades, to 2013. Sanitation officials couldn’t resist a bit of schadenfreude at that, for the neighborhood opposition to the power plants had left the county with no other option but to ramp up trash burial at Puente Hills. There simply was no other place for the garbage to go at that point. The protesters had, in effect, made sure that the biggest landfill in the country would be in their backyard for decades. And so the tradition of creating waste-management systems through miscalculation continued.

Because of its convenient location, because the Sanitation Districts are a public agency with no need to amass profits, and because of savings from generating power on-site, Puente Hills became the most affordable place in California to dump trash. For many years it charged cities (the same cities that owned and governed the Sanitation Districts) as well as private trash collection companies and everyone else who needed to dispose of waste just $18 a ton to dump. This was half of what some other public and private facilities charged in Southern California. During boom times through the nineties and up until the recession, garbage trucks would line up at sunrise for the privilege of tipping their loads at Puente Hills, and by eleven in the morning, the gates would have to be shut, as the operating permit limits daily intake to 13,000 tons. Big Mike and his colleagues had to scramble to keep up with the constant flow of garbage at that rate.

Even charging below-market rates, Puente Hills took in more money than it could spend. By 2011, it had salted away a quarter billion dollars to pay for the next trash solution in Los Angeles. This is what made Puente Hills the envy of the landfill industry. There was even enough income to skim one dollar from every ton of earnings and designate it for preserving wildlands next to the landfill. No other active landfill in the country has nearly four thousand contiguous acres of hiking trails, parkland and wildlife preserve abutting a massive garbage mountain. The preserve is so huge and has attracted so much wildlife that the conservation authority created to run it has hired a full-time ecologist.

The dump and power plant opponents couldn’t kill the landfill in 1993, or again in 2003, though they tried each time the ten-year permit came up for renewal. But they secured one other victory in addition to killing waste-to-energy: 2013, Puente Hills’s thirtieth birthday, was designated as the irreversible drop-dead date for the landfill. The trash train plan advocated by the opponents is supposed to come on line then, and L.A. garbage is supposed to hit the rails.

But there is a complication. Those who wanted the landfill moved, and who imagined it would be only slightly more costly to railroad the garbage out of town, were wrong. It is a
lot
more expensive. Transferring trash from a new rail depot at Puente Hills to the Sanitation Districts’ newly purchased former gold mine two hundred miles away in the desert of Imperial County will cost $80 a ton, more than four times what it costs to bury trash at Puente Hills. The Sanitation Districts can use its war chest to subsidize a lower price for the trash train, but even so, at a cut-rate price of $50 or $60 a ton, waste by rail will be more expensive than the power plants would have been, and far more expensive than Waste Management, Inc.’s private landfills in Los Angeles that, with the recession reducing trash flow, would be happy to take on the garbage now going to Puente Hills. It’s unclear, in a tough economy, if this waste-by-rail plan can succeed, leaving Puente Hills and its neighbors in trash limbo. And Los Angeles has an unexpected sort of trash crisis on its hands: It is supposed to open a new, very pricey mega-landfill in the desert, with four times the capacity of Puente Hills and a lifetime of no less than one hundred years—and it just might have no trash it can afford to put in it.

The dilemma has raised, once again, the specter of garbage crisis, and the equally long-lived question we have yet to answer well: Isn’t there something better we can do with, or about, our trash?

Decades of landfilling have answered, at least in part, the first of the big three questions that must be answered to begin to wipe away our 102-ton legacy: What is the nature of our waste? We may badly underestimate how much stuff we’re burying, but we do have a good handle on what it’s made of. And we also know what it’s worth—some $50 billion in value chucked each year, lost to us now, but waiting to be recovered if only we could somehow make the transition from waste management to materials management that the king of trash, Dave Steiner, dreams of. Yet every time we have approached a new paradigm for waste, we have turned away from it, dating all the way back to Colonel Waring and his White Wings, who arguably were better at reclaiming and recycling materials than we are today. We are still in thrall to J. Gordon Lippincott’s brilliant warping of human instinct from thrift to a disposable abundance. That marketing man’s sleight of hand still commands us, having redefined the American Dream so thoroughly that it is hard to envision a land in which no need or desire could justify the construction of a mountain made of garbage.

B
IG
M
IKE
climbs down from his BOMAG, another day of bending garbage to his will behind him. Gone are those 13,000-ton days of garbage and gates that closed at noon. Now the landfill stays open till five, and gets nowhere near the daily limit.

Back in the landfill boom days, a third of the trash was commercial, a third was building construction debris, and a third was household waste. With the bursting of the housing bubble, construction waste in 2011 became a trickle instead of a flood. With the economy in recession and Los Angeles unemployment at 12 percent, people are buying less, so the commercial and household trash was way down, too. All told, the daily flow in 2011 was hovering around 5,000 tons a day at Puente Hills. In theory, the place could stay open for years beyond 2013 without filling up.

“The thing is, it
will
stay open, no matter what happens,” Big Mike says, looking at his dozer fondly. “We may not take any more trash after 2013, but we’re not going anywhere.
I’m
not going anywhere. The work here will go on a long, long time.”

The day Puente Hills accepts its last load of trash is the day it enters its “Terminal Phase.” The first several years of the end phase will be spent placing a final, thick cap over the landfill, permanently sealing what by then will be close to 150 million tons of trash. Then there will be landscaping, road-building, park conversion—the transformation of Garbage Mountain into some other purpose, all of which will require big machines and Big Mike’s skills driving them. After that, there will still be years of maintenance and monitoring and repairs and retrenching and reinstalling gas lines and keeping the power generation going. There will be a full-time staff there a long time. How long? Consider Puente Hills’s predecessor, the Palos Verdes Landfill not far from the Pacific Ocean, part of which now lies tucked beneath a lovely urban oasis, the South Coast Botanical Gardens, billed as “the jewel of the peninsula.” The landfill stopped taking trash in 1980. Thirty-one years later, the Sanitation Districts still had a staff there, still maintained the landfill, still made electricity with the gas that still seeped up from its depths, albeit at a reduced rate. There are thousands of “closed” landfills that are similarly still maintained spread across the country. As Big Mike says, landfills are forever.

“I’m not worried about my job,” he says. “In this business, there’s always work.”

Waste Q & A

1.
  If every country consumed and threw away at the rate Americans do, how many planets’ worth of resources would be required to meet the demand?

2.
  America is home to 4 percent of the world’s children. What percentage of the world’s toys do Americans buy and throw away?

3.
  How many plastic water bottles do Americans throw away a second?

4.
  How much food do Americans throw in the trash every year?

5.
  How many people could be fed with 5 percent of that wasted food?

6.
  How many of your food dollars are spent on packaging?

7.
  How much waste does the entire U.S. economy create to make a year’s worth of food, fuel, resource extraction and products for one American?

8.
  How much of that total waste figure is recycled?

9.
  How much energy is wasted on junk mail?

10.
  How much of your life is spent opening and throwing away junk mail?

11.
  How many barrels of oil are used to make a year’s worth of disposable plastic beverage bottles for Americans?

12.
  How many liters of water are needed to make one liter of bottled water?

13.
  How much disposable plastic wrap is made each year in America?

14.
  How many nonrecyclable Styrofoam cups do Americans throw away in a year?

15.
  How much plastic trash ends up in the ocean?

WASTE Q & A ANSWER KEY

1.
  Five planets

2.
  40 percent

3.
  694

4.
  96 billion pounds

5.
  4 million for a year

6.
  $1 out of every $11

7.
  Just under 1 million pounds (waste water not included)

8.
  2 percent

9.
  One day’s worth could heat 250,000 homes.

10.
  Eight months

11.
  17 million

12.
  Three liters

13.
  Enough to shrink-wrap Texas

14.
  25 billion, or enough cups to circle the earth 436 times

15.
  The United Nations estimates there are about 46,000 pieces of plastic trash per square mile of ocean, and that 5.6 million tons of plastic trash are dumped, blown or washed into the seven seas.