at dawn
The landfill looks nothing like what most people picture when they
imagine a landfill. Nothing messy, nothing gross, nothing slimy, no
trash anywhere at all. It looks, perhaps disappointingly, like an
enormous, lonesome construction site, a 1,365-acre expanse of light
brown dirt filling canyons reaching innocently toward the horizon—buried
trash from yesterday and several thousand other yesterdays. The scale
of the thing alone boggles the mind, and to stop and ponder the fact
that forty years of trash forms a foundation 400 feet deep is to simply
grow fretful with some unnamed woe about America’s past and the planet’s
future.
The first truck to arrive is no. 4272, a seventy-three-foot-long
tractor-trailer, driven by Herman Snook, 67 years old, wiry, chewing a
toothpick. He is quick to point out that he, too, thinks the landfill
looks nothing like a landfill, and he believes it doesn’t smell like
one, either. He allows that he may have just gotten used to the odor.
(He has.) When fellow truckers arrive, pulling up next to Herman, the
ground—so deep with trash—is so soft it bounces.
At six o’clock, the truckers are allowed to start dumping, and so
Herman pushes a red button inside a panel on his cab. The back end of
the trailer rises obediently and 79,650 pounds of debris comes
thundering out, most of it wood and plaster and nails and shreds of
wallpaper. Beside him a truck is dumping decidedly more organic garbage,
pungent indeed, and way down the row, off¬ to the side, a guy is
pouring a truckful of sludge, sterilized human waste, black as ink.
The Puente Hills Landfill, about sixteen miles east of downtown Los
Angeles, serves 5 million people in seventy-eight California cities, one
of six landfills operated by the Sanitation Districts of L.A. County.
Every day 13,200 new tons of trash are dumped here. That’s enough to
fill a one-acre hole twenty feet deep.
In five years, on November 1, 2013, the landfill will be out of room, and all that trash will have to go somewhere else.
Herman gets a broom, sweeps his trailer clean, then heads back to
South Gate Transfer Station, twenty miles away, for another load. He
will make five trips in a day, stopping only once to eat Oodles of
Noodles and cheese crackers and a cookie. On the ride home, he eats a
green apple. He is careful to note that he is just about the only one of
his entire eighth-grade graduating class of 1954 who has not yet
retired. “Why would anyone retire from a place like this?” he asks. “I
enjoy the sunrise. I enjoy being part of nature.” Having spent more than
a week at the landfill, by now I am getting used to hearing workers
here, from the highest to the lowest ranks, speak like this. Concerning
the landfill, they are all pride and admiration and even thanks. It
seemed, at first, like crazy talk.
A landfill, after all, is a disgusting place. This is a
100-million-ton solid soup of diapers, Doritos bags, phone books, shoes,
carrots, watermelon rinds, boats, shredded tires, coats, stoves,
couches, Biggie Fries, piled up right here o¬ the 605 freeway. It’s a
place that brings to mind the hell of civilization, a heap of waste and
ugliness and everything denial is designed for. We tend not to think
about the fact that every time we toss out a moist towelette or an empty
Splenda packet or a Little Debbie snack-cake wrapper, there are
people
involved, a whole chain of people charged with the preposterously
complicated task of making that thing vanish—which it never really does.
A landfill is not something we want to bother thinking about, and if we
do, we tend to blame the landfill itself for sitting there stinking
like that, for marring the landscape, for o¬ffending a sanitized
aesthetic. We are human, highly evolved creatures, remarkably adept at
forgetting that a landfill would be nothing, literally nothing, without
us.
In America we produce more garbage per person than any other country
in the world, 250 million tons a year. In urban areas, we are running
out of places to put all that trash. Right now, the cost of getting rid
of it is dirt cheap, maybe $15 a month on a bill most people never even
see, all of it wrapped into some mysterious business about municipal tax
revenue. So why think about it?
Electricity used to be cheap, too. We went for a long time not thinking about the true cost of that. Same with gas for our cars.
The problem of trash (and sewage, its even more o¬ffensive cousin) is
the upside-down version of the problem of fossil fuel: too much of one
thing, not enough of the other. Either way, it’s a matter of managing
resources. Either way, a few centuries of gorging and not thinking ahead
has the people of the twenty-first century standing here scratching our
heads.
Now what?
The problem of trash, fortunately, is a wondrous intellectual puzzle
to scientists and engineers, some of whom lean, because of the
inexorability of trash, toward the philosophical. The simple
conundrum—the intrinsic disconnect between human waste and the human
himself—becomes grand, even glorious, to the people at the dump.
“nobody knows we’re even even here,”
Joe Haworth is saying, as we make our way around the outside of the
landfill, winding up and up past scrubby California oaks, sycamore
trees, and the occasional shock of pink bougainvillea vine. He is
driving his old Cadillac, a 1982 Eldorado, rusty black with a
kerry-edwards
sticker on the bumper. He wears a Hawaiian-print shirt, a straw hat,
and wire-rimmed glasses, and the way he leans way back in the driver’s
seat suggests a simple, straightforward confidence. “People driving by
on the highway think this is a park,” he says.
The outside of the landfill, the face the public sees, reminds me of
Disney World, a perfectly crafted veneer of happiness belying a vastly
more complicated core. The western side, facing the 605, is lush green
and deep blues, a showy statement of desert defiance, while the eastern
face is quiet earth tones, scrubby needlegrass, buttonbush, and
sagebrush; the native look on that side was requested by the people
living in Hacienda Heights, a well-to-do neighborhood in the foothills
of the dump. They wanted the mountain of trash behind them to blend in
with the canyons reaching toward the sunset. A staff¬ of fifty
landscapers do nothing but honor such requests. The goal: make the
landfill disappear by making it look pretty.
“No matter what you do with your trash, nature has to process it,”
Joe is saying. “Okay? Think about it.” We are making our way up to a
lookout point where we can get an overview of the action of the trash
trucks and bulldozers and scrapers, a good show and a good place to sit
and think. “Look, we’d be up to our eyeballs in dinosaur poop if nature
didn’t have any way to run this stuff¬ around again.” He has a way of
putting things. He loves this. He is 64 years old, a retired PR guy, an
environmental engineer, a Jesuit-trained fallen Catholic whose
enthusiasm for waste management is oddly infectious. I have come to
regard him as the high priest of trash.
“Instead of being up to our eyeballs in dinosaur poop,” he says, “we’re made
of dinosaur poop. You know? And other chemicals. We got garbage in us.
There’s a carbon cell from Napoleon in your elbow somewhere. It’s nature
running things around again, a continuous loop. It’s all done by
bacteria breaking it down into carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, okay?
Think about it.”
I tell him I’ll add it to my list, which keeps getting longer, the
longer I’m here. Joe retired from the landfill a couple of years ago,
but he comes back to consult, to visit, to help Donny, his assistant who
took over his job, and to sit and marvel. He entered the refuse world
back in the 1960s, when people first awakened, as if from a lazy
daydream, to the notion that trash not only matters but trash is
matter, and matter never leaves. You can burn it. You can bury it. You
can throw it into the ocean. You can try to hide it, but it still exists
in some form: ash, sludge, gas, particulate matter floating in the air.
“It all comes back to the idea of the cycle,” he says. “We’re going to
keep reusing the same stuff¬, so let’s reuse it responsibly so we don’t
choke on it.”
He gives me an example. “See those pipes?” he says, pointing as we
cruise up the landfill. “Those mothers are gas.” The pipes are fat and
prominent, about two feet in diameter, and a constant source of crazy
wonder. Eighty miles of pipes encircle the landfill, sucking out a
deadly mix of methane, carbon dioxide, and other gases continuously
produced by the fermenting trash. The pipes are connected with
seventy-five miles of underground trenches and to a network of 1,400
wells. The methane mix is highly explosive and smelly and in the past
has been an environmental nightmare. As trash continues to ferment, the
methane is unstoppable. And so the pipes—a landfill miracle, a
technology pioneered by Sanitation Districts engineers—deliver the
methane to the Gas-to-Energy Facility. The methane feeds a boiler,
creates steam. The steam turns a turbine. The turbine generates
eight-eight megawatts of electricity—enough to power about 70,000
Southern California homes.
Before I started hanging out at the landfill, I had no idea we could
generate electricity from trash.
“Most people don’t know this,” I say to
Joe.
“Oh, a lot of people know it,” he says.
No, they don’t. I’ve checked. I’ve consulted folks back home, regular
trashmakers, average citizens going through cartons of Hefty bags, who
think little beyond “Gotta take the trash out” when it comes to the
final resting place of their garbage. “People don’t know we power homes
with landfill gas,” I say. “Don’t you think people should know this?”
He looks at me, weary. “Why do you think I’ve been busting my ass at this for thirty years, lady?”
He blinks, removes his glasses, takes out a handkerchief, and wipes
them clean. “That’s what I did,” he says. “I did nothing but tell people
about what we do here. Now, how much time does society have to listen?
Well, the answer to that is, society’s interest level is pretty low. It
doesn’t necessarily want to know where its waste goes. It’s embarrassed
by its responsibility in this arena.”
Joe parks the car and we get out. We stand and peer down into the
landfill, at trash, the very stuff¬ Herman and his fellow truckers
dumped earlier this morning. From this distance, the open landfill is a
giant brown 500-acre bowl. Trash is dumped in as many as three dumping
areas, or “cells,” daily. Each cell is about the size of a football
field, and every hour an additional 1,200 tons of trash is put into it.
Against the backdrop of brown, a cell of trash is a shock of red and
green and yellow and white, a smash of crawling color. A team of thirty
heavy-equipment operators dances madly over the pile. Huge bulldozers,
ten feet tall, equipped with seventeen-foot blades, push and sculpt the
trash into rows. Then the mighty Bomags, 120,000-pound compactors with
130,000 pounds of pushing power, smash and crunch and squish the trash,
forcing out air, forcing it tighter and tighter to save space. All of
these machines crawl impossibly close to one another, backward, forward,
over steep hills of trash, clinging lopsidedly to edges. From up here,
the sounds are all roar and backup beeps, echoing around the bowl.
After a cell has reached daily capacity, the scrapers move in, the
biggest machines of all, three-three feet long, sixteen feet high—the
wheels alone are nine feet tall. Scrapers are dirt movers. They haul
dirt from enormous piles and dump it a foot thick over the cell of
trash, sealing in odors, rats, bugs, concealing the leftovers of a
yesterday everyone is more than ready to be done with.
By day’s end, there will be no trace of trash anywhere in the landfill.
The next day, the process repeats. Cell by cell, the garbage spreads
across the landfill floor until it hits the far side, the edge of the
bowl, and a new layer, or “lift,” is begun.
A parade of water trucks spray the dirt with reclaimed sewage water
to control dust, and a team of paper pickers runs madly on foot to catch
anything the wind might pick up and try to carry away—the worst
o¬ffender being plastic grocery bags that can take o¬ like kids’
balloons. A chemical odor retardant is sometimes used when things get
too bad, or again if the wind conspires, and there are a lot of seagulls
waiting on a nearby ridge. Seagulls are a landfill nuisance because
they fly away with food scraps and, as is their reputation, fight each
other over them midflight, often losing them, and soon a lady has a
half-eaten hamburger splashing into her backyard pool. For a time,
engineers were utterly confounded by the seagull problem, firing off¬
cannons to scare them away, piping in the sounds of hawks and owls—but
the gulls got so used to the sounds they would stand on top of the
cannons and inside the speakers. The solution was elegant and simple:
tall, portable poles placed at intervals over the working face of the
landfill, with nylon fishing line stretched between them. The lines
disrupt the gulls’ unique spiral landing pattern; the birds give up
before even trying. “I guess they’re too stupid to walk on in under the
wires,” Joe says with a shrug.
A more urgent and literally more pressing concern than birds in any
landfill is leachate, the liquids that might ooze out. People are not
supposed to throw away paint thinner or nail polish or batteries or
transmission fluid or motor oil, but plenty do, plenty of it comes in on
trucks, and plenty of it gets smashed and smushed, mixing with
rainwater into a toxic cocktail that, if it escapes the landfill and
gets into the groundwater, could be deadly to nearby communities. And so
a twelve-foot liner of clay, plastic, sand, and other barrier materials
covers the walls and floor of the landfill—a diaper on the largest scale
imaginable designed to absorb and seal in wetness. Seventeen miles of
pipes carry the leachate into collection areas, where a team of field
engineers monitors it. One of the ways a landfill engineer anywhere in
the world earns bragging rights is if he can pour himself a glass of the
leachate from his landfill and drink it.
All of this—the operational area of Puente Hills—is invisible to the
public, thanks to earthen berms that rise ten feet above the working
face. The scraper drivers keep adding to the top of the berm as the
landfill fills, constantly building the fortress wall.
For their part, the scraper drivers refer to the berms as “visuals.”
Some of the most fun you can have on a scraper, they have told me, is
steadying your 155,000-pound machine over the tip of a visual barely
wider than the span of your tires. Once in a while a scraper will fall
off¬, sometimes sliding one hundred feet down or sometimes hanging
there, half on and half off¬, until a crane can be summoned to rescue
it. A driver who falls o¬ a visual will get called “Tipsy Toes” or
“Tipper” until the next guy does it and earns of the torch of shame.
A bulldozer or Bomag driver who manages to roll his machine over into the trash will likewise have to endure the name “Flipper.”
“You should go down there,” Joe says. “You should go down there and ride in the trash, get a feel for it.”
mike “big mike” speiser
is the most famous Bomag driver at the landfill, and some say the
world. This is only incidentally because he looks, as much as a person
can, like a Bomag. He is proudly boxy, enormous, and bald, and he
appears as though he could crush the trash without the assistance of
machinery. He is 45 years old and has impressive tattoos: a Grim Reaper,
a skeleton with a dagger through the head, a skull with flames shooting out, and a skull with horns and a bullet hole in its head. “Like the Devil got shot in the head or something,” he
says. “Basically.”
Liz Speiser is a shy man who blushes when he smiles, and he is known for being
a gentleman. He is famous because he won first place on compactors—a
test of agility and speed—in the 2002 Solid Waste Association of North
America’s International Road-E-O in Cocoa Beach, Florida. “He is the
best in the nation,” a few of the operators have told me. Mike does not
himself brag about the honor, but he does allow: “I am very, very good
at this.”
Mike and I stand at the edge of a cell of trash in motion, Bomag
chugging, ready to roll. He climbs the ladder to the cab and off¬ers his
hand to help hoist me up. “The air conditioner works nice, and it’s a
pressurized cab, so it keeps the smells out.” He shows o¬ the air-ride
feature of the cushioned seat, apologizing that there is only one. He
takes the controls while I hunch behind him and hang on to his
shoulders. We crawl slowly, as if in a tank, toward and into the cell of
trash, about thirty feet deep. We are high above with a marvelous view
of smeared paper plates, Target bags, egg cartons, Green Giant frozen
peas, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, all manner of Hefty and Glad bags
splayed open to reveal the guts of everyday American life.
E¬ffortlessly, we climb over a mattress and a TV and a tricycle and a
rocking chair and soda bottles and deodorant, until pretty soon the eye
refuses to di¬fferentiate the trash, refuses to register nonsense the
mind can’t begin to place in anything close to a meaningful narrative.
We go rolling through an acre of garbage, mounds and mounds of it
cracking and turning to mush under the teeth of the Bomag.
“No doubt, we make a lot of trash in America,” Mike says. “No doubt.
And this is a tiny piece of one day, in one landfill. But I don’t tend
to think about that. Mostly I just think about not getting run into by a
dozer.”
We sink in, climb out, sink, climb. Mike keeps moving forward,
pushing trash toward the edge of the cliff formed by the day’s massive
pile.
“You’re getting close to the edge,” I tell him.
He starts talking about smoothing and grabbing and peeling, but the only words I can understand are
diving over the vertical,
which we are about to do. We are about to free-fall over a cliff of
trash. I make the point that this is scaring the shit out of me.
“A lot of guys I train cry their first couple of weeks,” he says.
He assures me that the Bomag is extremely agile. He says the only
worry, really, is tree stumps. “One time I was coming over a vertical,
and on the way down I hit a stump about the size of a car. I started
sliding down the slope sideways. You just kind of hold on and gun it and
try to get o¬ of it. That was the only time I really had a pucker
butt.”
We fall over the ledge and sure enough, the Bomag clings to the trash
like a squirrel, and we begin our descent down, about thirty feet down,
into more trash, where there are six or seven bulldozers zooming about,
backward, forward, pushing trash, sculpting the cell.
I ask him who’s in charge here, who has the right of way, who yields
to whom. He says everyone more or less figures it out as they go along.
He says it’s part of the fun. He talks about riding dirt bikes when he
was 5. “Experiences like that prepare you. You learn the limits of
motion.” Any kid who grew up with dirt bikes and four-wheelers would
obviously love a job like this, he says, adding that he considers
himself blessed.
Like so many of the people I meet at the landfill, he tells me he
enjoys nature, being outdoors, solitude. We head back up the cli¬ff of
trash to square o¬ for another dive down, and he whistles. Then he
invites me to join him for lunch later. “I mean, if you want.”
Between the leachate, the methane,
the enormous equipment, the rotating cells, the seagull lines, the
bougainvillea vine, all the landscaping, all the field engineers, all
the chemistry, I’m thinking: This is awfully complicated. This is a lot
to go through so we can continue living irresponsibly, or in denial, as
if our trash has some magical way of just vanishing. At one point, I
confess to Joe Haworth that I have no idea where, back home, my own
trash goes after it leaves the end of my driveway, gets hauled o¬ in a
green truck while my dogs stand on the porch and bark stupidly at it. I
have no idea whatsoever, and I certainly have no sense of my trash
having a destiny of such complexity and such bother.
This, Joe tells me, is a preferable situation to when trash was
simple. Throughout most of history, trash was a linear concern, the end
of a simple four-beat pattern: You dig up raw materials, make something
with them, use the something, and when the usefulness is over, you throw
the thing away. One, two, three, trash. One, two, three, trash. One,
two, three, trash. The piling of trash became a concern as soon as there
were enough people clustered in one place to notice it. The city of
Athens organized the first municipal dump in the Western world in 500
b.c. Citizens were required to dispose of their waste at least one mile
from city walls. This was an oddly forward-thinking plan, especially
when you consider that, zooming all the way up to the eighteenth
century, most Americans were simply throwing their trash out the window
into the street—though trash-related diseases such as the bubonic
plague, cholera, and typhoid fever had been known to alter the
populations of Europe and influence monarchies across the world.
Burning trash became a big deal in the late 1800s, with the invention
of municipal incinerators as well as the practice of putting a match to
the stuff¬ in one’s own backyard. Burning trash was wonderful, magical,
because it made it seem to disappear.
For a while, Americans blithely dumped trash into the ocean—but then,
stinky, ruined beaches and clogged harbors prompted the Supreme Court
to ban that practice in 1934. Even so, it’s worth noting that a plastic
soup of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean now covers an area twice the
size of the continental United States—about 500 nautical miles o¬ the
California coast, past Hawaii, and almost as far as Japan.
Joe Haworth grew up in downtown Los Angeles, and he remembers burning
trash as a boy. “Everybody had a backyard incinerator,” he tells me. “I
remember looking at the wax melting off¬ the milk carton thinking, Oh,
that’s really cool. We put the ashes in a bucket, and the city would
haul the ashes away. You’d separate the food scraps. They’d be taken to
the pig farms. Then we had a mayor, Sam Yorty, saying, Hey, if we throw
all this stuff¬ together, we can make it easier for the housewives, make
it simpler for them; let’s put it all in one big can and haul it away.
Sam Yorty was elected, and housewives were banging trash lids together
saying, Bless you, Mayor Sam! Yup. Look up Sam Yorty. Y-o-r-t-y.”
And so, the urban landfill, which in the beginning was a dump on the
edge of town. When the pile got too high, someone would light a match to
it and make room for more. And more. And more. Volume became an
absurdly huge problem, with the dawning of the baby boom and the
quantity of trash exploding in the crazed TV-dinner consumerism
following World War II. Burn all that trash in a crowded place like Los
Angeles and you contribute to the most famous smog problem in the world.
In 1959 the American Society of Civil Engineers published a standard
guide to sanitary landfills. Instead of burning trash, the idea was to
bury it. To guard against rodents and odors, the guide suggested
compacting trash and covering it with a new layer of soil each day.
And so, the modern era of trash.
Joe Haworth and his college buddies were studying civil engineering
at Loyola Marymount University at the time. Joe had not yet had his
trash awakening, although he and his engineering friends, infected by
the idealism of the time, the dawning of the environmental movement,
were getting excited about…sewage.
“The whole nation’s plumbing was coming apart,” he tells me. “It was
literally going to pieces. It was like the mayor’s idiot son ran the
local sewage treatment.” There was no thinking. There was just
expediency: Dump the crap into the river. In the big-picture tradition
of the Jesuits, a professor at Loyola was urging Joe to do something
with his life. The professor told him about sanitary engineering. He
said there was a future, something big, bigger than anyone could
imagine, and a chance to do something good.
There was no EPA yet. There were virtually no federal laws concerning
pollution. Oil tankers were regularly dumping crankcase into oceans,
air pollution was literally killing people—ninety-six in just four days
in New York City, and in Ohio the Cuyahoga River burst into flames five
stories high from floating chemicals.
And so, the awakening. In 1962, Rachel Carson published
Silent Spring,
a cry of ecological radicalism meant to awaken a public lazily
dependent on the chemical control of nature. The book ignited the first
serious public dialogue about the dangers of pesticides and other
chemicals. Ed Muskie, the famously cranky U.S. senator, championed a
national environmental policy, pushing the Clean Air Act, the Clean
Water Act—much of the work born of his disgust over the polluted rivers
in his native Maine.
In 1970, President Nixon created the EPA.
The modern environmental movement was nothing without sharp young
minds capable of inventing change. Funds became available, traineeships
at places like Stanford, Cal Tech, MIT. The best and brightest,
including Joe, got free rides to study trash. Joe went to Stanford. “A
lot of us felt the obligation to go into public service,” he says. “This
was exciting stuff¬. We were thinking up all-new ways of helping nature
play catch-up after a couple of pretty messy centuries.” It was, he
says, a thrilling time to be a sanitary engineer, even as the title
gradually morphed into “environmental engineer.” In fact, these guys
would go on to change the paradigm, inventing systems that would begin
to provide relief to a planet choking on its own debris.
Joe never set out to be a PR guy. He was more or less called. So much
was happening, so many innovations. His colleagues didn’t have the
knack for putting multipart engineering concepts into the vernacular,
but Joe had it in spades. And so he created the information office and
became a mouthpiece.
Using landfill gas to generate electrical power—that was a good
example. He remembers those early days with the fondness of an old man
thinking of his first kid. It happened at Palos Verdes, one of the
Districts’ older landfills, which was adjacent to a handsome
neighborhood where a woman was complaining about her dead roses. She
blamed the landfill; surely something disgusting was emanating out of
that dump. She was right. Inspectors found that methane, the explosive
gas they normally simply flared to get rid of, had migrated from the
landfill into the neighborhood.
“So we said, ‘Whoa, we gotta do something,’ ” recalls Joe. “So we dug
a trench near her roses, put gravel in it. We figured, well, that
stu¬ff will just come up through the gravel because that’ll be the
easiest road for it to travel. When that didn’t work, we put a pipe in,
started to suck the gas out. Then our guys said, ‘You know what, we’re
burning this stu¬ff now just to get rid of it. That’s a pretty
good-looking flame. I wonder if that would work in an engine.’ So our
guys then began to run it through an internal combustion engine. And it
ran the engine.”
It was one of those eureka moments: Use landfill gas to generate
electricity! To a young environmental engineer, it was the most elegant
example imaginable of closing the loop, reusing everything, making
something useful out of, literally, garbage.
Currently, about 425 landfills in the United States produce landfill
gas (LFG), generating about 10 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity per
year. This is a green fuel, off¬setting the use of 169 million barrels
of oil per year or 356,000 railcars of coal. According to the EPA, the
carbon reduction is the equivalent of removing the emissions from nearly
14 million vehicles on the road or planting nearly 20 million acres of
forest.
And so all those complications of trash—the methane, the leachate,
all the enormous equipment, all the landscaping, all the chemistry—have
really nothing to do with enabling an irresponsible public intent on
ignoring trash. That’s our own deal, our own psychology. In real-world
terms, the complications of trash are the human inventions and human
interventions intent on closing the cycle to restore nature’s severed
loop.
“What is pollution?” Joe says. “Pollution’s just the wrong stuff¬ in
the wrong place at the wrong time. Any other time, it’s a resource.
Think about that.”
when i enter
the lunchroom with Big Mike, he lags behind, tells me to go ahead in
and get started. By now I know the dynamics of “second lunch,” at noon,
and I wonder where Big Mike will sit.
I head down to the table with Steve, Wes, Patrick, Jamie, the happy
loudmouths of second lunch. I tell them that I drove on the Bomag with
Big Mike today and also rode on a rig with Herman, who, I note, seemed
like such a happy, contented guy. This remark brings jeers. Herman?
Herman, they say, used to be such an old crank. Especially when he drove
the water truck.
His truck was no. 6601. He would hide it. He was
like, “That’s my water truck! You better not touch it.” He had his
cowboy hat. You better not touch his hat! They crack up over the
memory of Herman’s hat. Oh, that’s a good one. They are all gossip and
cackle. I tell them they sound like girls. The lunchroom is stark and
temporal, a large white double-wide with tables and bulletin boards and
newspapers and buzzing fluorescent lights.
Big Mike sits in the center of the action, chewing, smiling, never saying anything. He usually eats at eleven thirty.
Second lunch is almost all “dirt,” the men who run the scrapers and
push dirt. First lunch, at eleven thirty, is almost all “rubbish,” the
men who push rubbish with the dozers. The dirt crew is very gabby about
the rubbish crew. They say rubbish is aloof, boring, and miserable.
Dirt, they say, is happy, hilarious, and loving. I am trying to
understand the source of these distinctions.
Each day they seem excited to have a visitor in the lunchroom and
like schoolkids talk at me all at once. “We are the biggest landfill in
the nation,” one of them declares. “Did anyone tell you that? We are
number one.” They tell me again and again of Big Mike’s win at the
Road-E-O. “We are number one.” Mike waves.
“We have awesome equipment,” says one.
“We have
eighteen D9s.”
“We have two D8s.”
“Compactors? We’ve got five of those.”
“And two D10s—120,000 pounds
each.”
“We have a D11 out at our Calabasas landfill, which is even
bigger than that
one.”
“I personally don’t think I’ve ever seen a D12. To be honest with you, I don’t think Caterpillar even makes them anymore.”
“They don’t.”
“We have the biggest machines
in the world.”
“We are number one.”
Steve Utley, a scraper driver, tall, gangly, with long blond curls,
holds court at the corner table. If he is the leader of this group, it
is because he can withstand constant jabbing and ridicule, mostly about
his hair, with its history of bad cuts, bad bangs, Farrah Fawcett
layers. Lately, the guys have been encouraging Steve to get a mullet.
They have off¬ered to pay him to do it. Steve emphatically refuses, but
the image brings delight to Jamie, to Joe, and to Patrick, and somehow
morphs into a discussion of the possibility of Steve one day making
porn, mullet porn. There is no logical sequence to the evolution of this
riff¬, but it takes on a life of its own, until soon midgets enter the
story and the idea of Steve making midget mullet porn. The laughter is
uproarious, and one guy spits out his Mountain Dew, and there is
stomping of feet and pounding of tables until the lunchroom trailer
shakes, like a ship of drunken pirates.
All of these men are lifers, most having worked their way up from
paper pickers. Steve has been here for twenty-three years, Tony for
nineteen, and Patrick for fourteen. For a heavy-equipment operator,
getting a job with the Sanitation Districts is considered a ticket to
paradise, given the benefits and good pay—about $80,000 a year before
overtime—the steady year-round work, and the fact that trash is
recession-proof. Most of the crew lives far east of the landfill, sixty,
seventy, eighty miles away in the California desert, commuting more
than two hours each way because this is L.A. and nothing is affordable.
Because of the distance, and because they have to maintain squeaky clean
driving records in order to keep their jobs, they are not the sort of
guys who leave work and hang out together in bars. They vanpool
together, watch movies. They spend their days alone, pushing dirt from
here to there, and so aside from their time together in the van, all
they have is the lunchroom.
They tell me that any of these operators can run any piece of
equipment in the yard. All of the dirt crew has at some point run
rubbish and vice versa, and even dirt has to concede that rubbish is
more fun.
“Crushing things,” says one. “The biggest thrill at this entire landfill is crushing things.”
“Crushing boats. Just to destroy a boat. Or a trailer or something
like that. That’s probably the biggest thrill that I can think of.”
“I crushed a mobile once. What was neat about it was I didn’t know it
was there, but when I came up to it, I kind of tagged onto the corner
of it and I must have hit it just right, because when I hit it the whole
thing just flattened.”
“Awwww!”
For all the joy in crushing things, the facts of the matter sometimes
give these guys pause. “You’d be amazed at what gets thrown out,” one
says. “Stuff¬ that could be donated. We could write a book about the
American way of waste.”
“Companies throw stu¬ff away because of taxes. Like brand-new running
shoes. These companies cut all their surplus shoes up so nobody can get
them. But they would be perfectly fine. They could donate them. They
could do something with them.”
“When I first started here, for like probably two or three weeks
these big semitrailers were just dumping piles of brand-new computer
typewriters. Piles! Sometimes there would be three trucks next to each
other, dumping brand-new computer typewriters. Never been opened. Still
in the box.”
“Waste. Waste. Waste. Sure, it bothers you, but what can you do about it?”
“There was a Sears that closed down. And they had their big sale.
Then whatever didn’t sell came into the landfill. Brand-new. Brand-new!
Other customers would be here dumping, then run over and pick up
brand-new chain saws.”
Salvaging is strictly prohibited at the landfill. This may sound like
some picky rule, but the truth is, people who are stupid enough to dive
in among the dozers to grab something sometimes end up dead. Private
citizens who dump here are provided a separate dumping area away from
the action of the machines, but that doesn’t stop them from walking over
to the working cell and trying to go for the grab.
“We’ve had people crushed.”
“You can’t see them. You literally don’t know they’re there. No one is supposed to be there.”
“Remember that lady that got crushed?”
“Oh yeah.”
I make the point that with all this drama, rubbish sounds a lot
more…interesting than dirt. Why do they suppose the rubbish crew is so
miserable?
It is, they say, a body thing. Most of the rubbish crew is in pain,
or used to be in pain, or is fighting it. Typically, a man moves over to
rubbish only when his body can no longer take dirt. Rubbish is soft.
Dirt is hard. A man who spends eight or ten hours a day five days a week
on a D10 pushing dirt is a man with jangled bones, achy joints,
herniated disks. Most of the rubbish guys are old, nearing retirement,
with a history of back and neck operations. “Going over to rubbish is
more or less being put out to pasture,” one says.
There are exceptions. Big Mike drove a scraper for just two years
before his back got destroyed. He had surgery, a whole year in bed, and
then of course he returned to have a terrific career in rubbish on his
Bomag, number one in the U.S.A.
But usually, dirt means you’re still young. Falling o¬ visuals,
straddling one, Tipper and Tipsy Toes. Dirt is the good old days.
These days are, of course, numbered. In five years, the Puente Hills
Landfill closes. A Waste-by-Rail program will take over. Instead of
being dumped here, the trash will be put in sealed boxcars and delivered
200 miles west to the new Mesquite Regional Landfill in Imperial
County, a super-landfill said to last a hundred years.
A skeleton crew of maintenance workers and field engineers will keep
the Puente Hills infrastructure working, will monitor the leachate,
maintain the gas wells and the power plant that will continue to
transform methane into electricity for about thirty years. But there
will be no more trash, no more trucks, no more verticals to crash over,
and no more radical dirt moves on a D10. Most of the rubbish crew will
be old enough to retire, while the dirt crew will get absorbed somewhere
within the enormous Sanitation Districts organization.
None of the guys in the lunchroom will admit to the possibility of
ever missing this dump, this history, these good old days, but they
scheme together about their bosses getting permits to open more space in
the canyons, more space for trash, more time for Puente Hills.
“It’s a pipe dream,” one says. “Sooner or later, you just have to face the fact that this place is going to close.”
when the landfill closes,
it will be capped, sealed, covered in layers and layers of stone and
clay and soil, planted, and turned over to the Los Angeles County
Department of Parks and Recreation, a place for people to play. Plans
have been in the works for well over a decade: Every time a truck dumps a
ton of trash, a dollar goes into a Habitat Authority fund. The goal of
the fund is to maintain a wildlife corridor more than twice as large as
the fill area. Already miles of hiking and horseback-riding trails
traverse this land and even the landfill itself, separated from daily
operations.
Joe and I have been driving around the landfill, looking at flowers
and discussing how the landscape guys get them to grow. “See those
pipes?” he says, pointing this time to small irrigation pipes snaking
all over the ground—nothing so surprising to see in an arid landscape
made lush. But these pipes, explains Joe, carry reclaimed wastewater
from the Sanitation Districts’ nearby sewage-treatment plant. “Reuse
everything,” he says. “Keep it in the cycle.” He parks at a fence, up at
the top of the landfill, just beyond the horse trails, where there is a
strawberry farm. It’s on land adjacent to the landfill, rows and rows
of fat green plants ready for picking. The farm also depends on recycled
wastewater for its irrigation. “Isn’t that neat?” Joe says. He and
others keep talking about this recycled sewage with a shrug. No big
deal. This is just the way things work. Sewage water feeding strawberry
plants. It has taken me a while to accept the notion that this, in fact,
is the way things work.
“Oh, just think about it,” Joe says. “What is a sewage-treatment
plant? It’s an apology to nature for putting too many people in one
place. Nature isn’t designed for us to live the way we do. Nature
designed it more like the Native Americans had it, where, when the
neighborhood started to smell, you picked up your tepee and went over
there. There was some basic human rule that said you go thataway.
Primitive societies knew that nature would ultimately reclaim all that
organic material so they could come back in a few years.”
Nature, he points out, gave us rain, streams, rivers, and the ocean
to finish the job of digestion. “This is just a straight
environmental-engineering calculation,” he says. “Just about everybody
in this country has one cubic foot of digester somewhere out there
finishing the job that he or she couldn’t complete. Your guts start the
process and nature completes it. Now, where is that going to happen? If
you let our sewage from this L.A. area with 10 million people float into
the ocean, you would have one really beat-up ocean. So what do we do?
We take the processes that occur in an ocean or a river and we do it in
tanks. The same bacteria that work in nature, basically a big bacterial
soup that emulates what goes on in the ground or in a river, does the
whole thing in a tank in a more concentrated fashion. So instead of
taking ten days in a river, we do it in eight hours inside a tank.”
There is something vaguely utopian about all of this. A beautiful
landfill blooming with pink flowers, wastewater feeding strawberries,
eight-eight megawatts of electricity out of garbage and sludge, hiking
trails over trash. It would seem we were talking about an entirely
di¬fferent planet, not our own supposedly doomed one—where the sky is
falling, where because of our gluttony, we are in danger of making one
final grand mess of the place, if not melting it or blowing it up. Those
are all certainly viable outcomes. But there is more to the story:
There are people on this very same planet having a rousing good time
fixing the place, people motivated by the thrill of repair, the simple
joy of invention, and an urge to do good.
The more time I spend at the landfill, the more I get the sense that
I’m in a diff¬erent dimension, listening to more highly evolved beings
that, somehow, nobody ever noticed.
in the end,
I tour the newest building on the site, the Puente Hills Materials
Recovery Facility, or MRF. I have been resisting this place. It could be
because it looks so bland and sterile, like a mint green shopping mall,
or a giant municipal office building, or it could simply be because I
am reluctant to face my own responsibility in all of this. The MRF is to
be the starting point of the Waste-by-Rail system; it’s where they’ll
sort the trash, save and sell the good stuff¬, and then send only the
unusable junk out on the expensive trip on the railways.
Nearly all of the engineers I meet boast about the MRF, how huge it
is—large enough to house three 747s—how the design is
environmentally-friendly, with recycled materials used throughout the
project, from structural and reinforcing steel to ceiling and floor
tiles.
Joe Haworth would like to highlight his own contribution: an
observation deck where the public can come through and watch. “I
insisted on this,” he says. “I said we have to be able to show people
what’s happening to their trash.” He’s dressed today in a green flowered
shirt, khaki shorts, and tennis shoes. He is excited to be here, like a
man greeting a newcomer in his fancy new mansion. The observation deck
is sleek and futuristic, a long glass corridor, dimly lit by
runway-style floor lights. Below us, the action of the MRF: Trucks pull
in one end of the enormous building, dump garbage. Dozers move the
garbage to the sorting floor, where bulky valuables, wood, carpet, and
large chunks of cardboard are pulled out. This is commercial garbage
intended for recycling—a minuscule fraction of L.A. County’s trash—but
to Joe and his cronies it represents a beautiful outlook for, one day,
all our trash. After the big stuff¬ is picked out, the trash is sent via
conveyor to an automated picking system and finally to the picking
line, where teams of sorters—women wearing safety glasses and bandannas
and surgical masks—pick, Lucille Ball–style, through the trash. One
grabs paper, one grabs clear plastic, one aluminum, and so on. The
separated materials are baled and stacked, awaiting purchase.
“Isn’t that neat?” Joe says.
I tell him I find it completely depressing. I feel like Ebenezer
Scrooge and he’s the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come pointing to where
I’m headed: a world in which a whole lot of poor people have to pick
through my garbage so the planet doesn’t su¬ffocate. I sink, as perhaps
anyone would, into recycle guilt.
Americans recycle about one and a half pounds of the five pounds of
trash they produce each day—a national recycling rate of 32 percent.
This is actually not horrible when you figure that, twenty years ago, it
was just 16 percent. San Francisco has a recycling rate of 69 percent,
the best of any American city.
The goal, in the larger and perhaps mythical sense, is 100 percent.
Zero waste. The goal is to stop thinking of waste as a problem and to
start thinking of it, simply, as the result of a design flaw in
manufacturing: We should be reusing everything. “It’s about closing the
loop,” Joe says. “And maybe that starts with us first just getting hold
of our gluttony. You know, we still have remnants of that old reptilian
brain that tells us to just keep getting more, more, more in order to be
happy. You know, a guy gets his first BMW, expects to be happy. Then
he’s o¬ff skiing with Bob, who has a better BMW. Damn. He was supposed
to be happy! It didn’t work. So now he needs a 4,000-square-foot house.
You know the story.”
I tell him I don’t see Bob and his buddy slowing down anytime soon.
We are a nation of consumers. We can’t seem to stop ourselves. We don’t
seem to even want to stop ourselves.
He does not see this as a uniquely American or even modern
phenomenon. “We’re not smart enough yet,” he says. “We’re young. You can
argue how long Homo sapiens have been around, but the guess is
something like 150,000 years. We are amateurs at this. We have just
barely gotten here in terms of the clock of the earth. And we have our
physics way ahead of our psyche. We know how to make a lot of stu¬ff.
But the notion of responsibility? We’re slower on that. The idea that
you’re supposed to leave the world better than the way it was when you
showed up? We’re onto it, but we’re not nearly there. We need to be able
to take the next step and realize that the world’s ideas are bigger
than just a bunch of stuff¬.”
The more he talks like this, the more optimistic he becomes: People
will get smarter, more conscientious, more in tune with the needs of the
next generation; chivalry will spread throughout the world!
I apologize for not seeing it. I confess that I don’t see this
recycling thing really kicking in where I come from, where many people
regard recycling as a quaint, retro 1990s fad. Rumor has it that there’s
a paper glut, that no one knows what to do with all those plastic soda
bottles other than make some silly belts out of them, that all this
stuff¬ just ends up in landfills in the end, so why bother?
“In the early days of recycling, maybe,” he says. “Paper goods were
mixed at probably a pretty low grade where the guy had it for six months
in his yard, it got wet and turned into a huge spitwad. But the higher
the cost of disposal goes, the more inventive people become.” It costs
$29 a ton to dump here at Puente Hills. It will cost $60 a ton to haul
trash by rail out of the Los Angeles basin. “People get really creative
at $60 a ton,” he says. We talk about thriving markets in
China—wastepaper is America’s number one export by volume to China. The
ships that bring all those toys and TVs in from China now return full of
our old paper, which they use to pack more goods made in China. And as
for making new paper, 36 percent of the fiber that goes into new paper
now comes from recycled sources. “And now there are rug companies that
will actually lease you a rug,” Joe says. “If someone spills on
the little square, they pop up the square. The company takes the square
back, they shave the fuzz o¬, they melt the plastic, make new fuzz, put
it back on. Yeah. Isn’t that crazy? And it’s being done because of the
disposal costs. It pushes backward.”
I ask him if there is any squashing his optimism.
He shrugs. “People are basically good-hearted until put in a very bad corner,” he says. “We just have to keep giving them reasons to be good-hearted—the opportunity to be good-hearted.
“Look, environmental consciousness is not a religious thing. It
doesn’t have holy precepts that say you can’t touch a plastic bag or
you’re a horrible person. It’s more: ‘Get a grip and find a balance.’
Life’s organic. It’s smelly and gooey. Get past it. It’s just science. I
think as we get more people reconnected to science through recycling,
we get them to understand the magic of this planet.”
We head downstairs to see the action of the MRF up close. I stand
behind a pregnant Hispanic woman pulling dirty empty soda bottles out of
a heap of garbage rolling by so fast on the conveyor belt she nearly
misses a perfectly good twenty-ounce Sierra Mist.
She catches my eye and I don’t quite know what to do with my shame, and so, stupidly, I smile and give her a thumbs-up.
Joe invites me to dinner. He says we have to stop home and pick up
Shelly, his wife. We get back into his old car, and as we crawl on the
crowded 605 he gets to talking about the afterlife, whether there is
one, whether there isn’t. “Nature certainly seems to be hinting at it,”
he says. “As much as I can be cynical about that sort of thing. You
know, I’m more about that Marxist thinking that religion is the opiate
of the masses—calm the people down so that the kings can get away with
murder. But nature says, Wait a minute now, it’s all cycles. Nature does
not seem to be telling us that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel
and then we all go boop. The spiritual world could be just a part of the cycle that we don’t yet understand.”
He opens his window to get some air. We sit and stare into traffic.
“Of course, my wife swears that she was here before as a Spanish guy.
She remembers water coming in through the portholes, the whole bit. But
she’s odd, anyway.”
We stop at the house and Shelly won’t let us in because it’s too
messy for company, and so we sit in the backyard and sip Pinot Grigio
and I marvel at the odd assortment of stu¬ff in the yard and on the
porch, a little crooked fake Christmas tree and an empty pond and little
ceramic dwarfs. Shelly is as tall as Olive Oyl, with a handsome face
and a jet-black mane, and she chain-smokes and speaks the same crazily
observant language as her husband. The two get tangled in notions, in
thinking about what it would be like if there were no more people on
earth, in trying to remember names of species of lizards, or names of
saints, until one of them has to run inside and get a book to look it
up.
At one point, when Joe is inside trying to find his encyclopedia of
movie actors, she turns to me and says: “Did you notice anything funny
about landfill people? They’re the most ethical bunch of people. So many
of them were Jesuit trained, so maybe it goes back to that, where doing
your best for the common good is a paramount principle. But they
approach their jobs in the most ethical way. They’re taking the worst
two things we have—trash and sewage—and turning them into golf courses
and wonderful things.
“Isn’t that weird? It’s like a cause for these people. I’ve
noticed it from the beginning, having to go to all these dreadful
conferences and things. I used to think, These should be our
politicians. We should only elect people trained in landfill
maintenance.”
Joe comes back out. He didn’t find the encyclopedia. Instead, he’s
carrying a journal article that reminded him of something funny. “No one
knows where water came from,” he announces. “Some people think it came
in as dirty snowballs, as asteroids. They’re not positive water started
here. It may have come from space.” He sits down, sips his wine,
ponders. “We know all the molecules came from space. Ask any nuclear
scientist about the origins of the bigger molecules: Carbon and nitrogen
and oxygen and all the stuff¬ that makes up life—they were all hydrogen
to begin with. They came out of the fusion process that takes place in
the center of suns. We’re stardust, literally. We are atomic waste!” He
slaps the table, laughs harder than he has all day.
jeanne marie laskas is a GQ correspondent.
Article is reprinted courtesy of GQ magazine.
