Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (29 page)

By then, many cities were already branding their homegrown product: Chicago sold Nu-Earth, Los Angeles produced Nitrohumus, and from Houston came Hou-actinite. Milorganite, which Milwaukee had been selling since long before the regulatory renovation, had its own advertising campaign, which included broadcasts at Brewers games. “Give your grass the all-you-can-eat buffet it craves this time of year,” an announcer sang out. “Milorganite organic nitrogen fertilizer . . . is packed with the nutrient home-run power that grass loves.” (Milorganite buyers were warned against applying the stuff to food-producing soil; in 1982, Maryland scientists found such high levels of cadmium in Milorganite that they banned its sale in their state.) Today, 54 percent of the 7.5 million dry metric tons of sewage sludge that the country disposes of each year is processed, relabeled “biosolids,” and applied to land. The rest is buried in landfills (28 percent), incinerated (17 percent), and “surface disposed” without processing (1 percent).

New York City’s own sludge had no advertising budget: in fact, it was hardly known within the state’s boundaries, though it was processed into tiny balls of fertilizer called Granulite right inside the city limits, in the Hunts Point neighborhood of the South Bronx, by a company known as NYOFCo, the New York Organic Fertilizer Company. I headed uptown one morning, eager to see how this little-known operation handled more sewage than any other pelletization plant in the nation.

Ten thousand people live in Hunts Point, though it is zoned primarily for industry. The neighborhood includes two-dozen waste transfer stations, a raw-sewage dewatering facility, the sewage sludge processing plant that I was about to visit, and the largest produce distribution center in the world. Together, these industries generate more than twenty thousand diesel truck trips per week. In 1980, Hunts Point was identified as the southern tier of the poorest congressional district in the country, and in the 1990s, the neighborhood became even poorer. More than two-thirds of its residents under the age of eighteen live below poverty level. The majority of residents are Latino and black: their asthma rate is the highest in the country.

Early one winter morning, I buzzed at NYOFCo’s security gate and a scarf-swaddled employee on a small plowing tractor waved me into the snowy parking lot. I noted the air’s loamy smell, and then Peter Scorziello appeared from out of nowhere, greeting me in his shirtsleeves in 20-degree weather. He opened the door to a deserted lobby, and I took my first deep breath of what amounted to the ultraconcentrated back end of New York City. The smell wasn’t loamy anymore. “I think of it as a musty, cheesy odor,” Scorziello said.

I considered the comparison for a moment, then rejected it. This wasn’t the aroma of any cheese I’d ever sniffed. Nor was it the ammoniac smell of a port-o-san or the earthier tones of the outhouse. It wasn’t the chicken or cow manure of my childhood garden. Elusive and remote, the name of the scent lingered just out of my reach (unlike the odor itself, which would stay with me for several hours to come).

The second-floor conference room was dominated by a gleaming wood table ringed by metal chairs. In the elevator going up, I’d hoped it would offer some respite from the smell, but no. The odor might even have been worse in here, but Scorziello didn’t comment on it so neither did I. My host was a mild-mannered and down-to-earth chemical engineer with a hesitant beard. He had picked the job with Synagro, NYOFCo’s parent company, from the newspaper’s employment listings just a few months after graduating from college. “It was a job; it paid the mortgage,” he said with a shrug. He started out as a shift supervisor and now, after ten years, managed the plant and its thirty-one employees.

Before New York City had contracted with NYOFCo to pelletize its biosolids, the company trucked untreated sludge, which is known as “cake” and classified as Class B fertilizer, seventeen hundred miles to Colorado, where it was distributed on rangeland. (Class B sludge has a higher pathogen level than Class A and cannot be applied to land that grows food for human consumption.) “It’s just thousands of square miles and one guy spreading it,” Scorziello said, a faraway look in his eyes. I doubted Scorziello was nostalgic for those days, as pastoral as they sounded. Spreading New York sludge on open ranchland left a bad taste in many small-town mouths. When New York quit ocean dumping in 1992, it turned to a company called Merco Joint Venture to handle its Vesuviuses of waste. But the company immediately ran into problems. When it tried to deliver its filled-to-the-gills railcars to Oklahoma, the state banned disposal of out-of-state sludge. When it tried Arizona, the state blocked rail shipments. Finally, after Merco made a donation to Texas Tech University to study the beneficial uses of sludge, a deal to dump in the tiny southwestern town of Sierra Blanca fell into place. According to a Texas Water Commission official quoted in the
Dallas Morning News,
“This thing was pushed to the top of the stack. Giving a $1.5 million grant to Texas Tech helped.” The company never performed an environmental impact statement, nor did it solicit citizen input.

Years ago I visited this desperately poor town, which lies eighty-eight miles southeast of El Paso and was home to just 650 people, about 40 percent of whom were poor. I was in Texas to report a story about the so-called cleanest town in the country, which happened to be just about an hour away (if you drove like a Texan). While “chemically sensitive” people, intolerant to minute amounts of chemical pollutants, flocked to Fort Davis to breathe the pristine mountain air (in homes they wallpaper with tinfoil, to block the possible outgassing of arsenic wood preservatives), residents of Sierra Blanca sucked the rank dust that wafted off Merco’s 81,000-acre dump site. Three times a week, fifty flatcars loaded with minimally treated cake rolled up to the Merco property—usually at night. “It smelled like death with a chemical odor,” said Bill Addington, a local who fought the sludge farm. “A state highway ran through the property, but I’d drive fifty miles out of my way to avoid it because my son threw up when we went through.” Others blamed the sludge farm, the largest in the world, for their rashes and mouth blisters, their asthma and increased allergies, flus, and colds. While I was visiting, less than a year after the start of dumping, an entire colony of Mexican free-tailed bats, which had roosted under a nearby railroad trestle since the 1880s, was in the midst of annihilation, victims of chemical poisoning.

In August of 1994, EPA tests of Sierra Blanca sludge showed levels of fecal coliform at thirty-five times the acceptable rate. Merco was fined $12,800, and the poo-poo train, as residents called it, kept chugging. Disgusted and sickened, opponents in 1997 filed a civil rights complaint with the EPA against the Texas Natural Resources Conservation Commission. The complaint was denied, and Merco won a five-year renewal of its sludge permit—a contract worth $168 million—and permission to up its daily dump from 250 tons to 400. In 1999, the company was again caught violating federal and state regulations by improperly treating sludge for bacteria and pathogens; this time it was advised to mix the cake with lime. Finally, nearly a decade after New York’s sludge had landed in their town, Sierra Blancans got some relief. New York City decided that shipping biosolids 2,065 miles was no longer cost-effective, and it canceled its contract with Merco. Almost immediately, the company declared bankruptcy. The next lucky company to handle the city’s sludge would be Scorziello’s.

In the NYOFCo conference room, we stood before an easel that held a large schematic of the plant. “In May of 1993,” Scorziello said, “we converted from Class B fertilizer to pellets. Now we take in about 575 wet tons a day and send out 138 dry tons, for a total of 210,000 wet tons a year.” Accumulated over the course of a year, the pellets would fill 503 railcars.

“There are very strict rules on how and when sludge can be applied,” Scorziello continued. NYOFCo adhered to those rules through a process of drying and heating. (The regs could also be met by stabilizing the biosolids with lime or by composting them for forty days at high temperature.) The process started when Scorziello’s truck drivers collected the day’s raw material from nearby dewatering plants. On the easel, I traced the biosolid’s path through the plant with my finger: from the receiving floor to a mechanical screw and onto belt conveyors. “It’s like a moist cake at this stage,” Scorziello said. From there, the biosolids fell into a storage hopper and then a mixer. “Now they have the consistency of tapioca.”

Gravity pulled the biosolids into a dryer, where they tumbled around a drum blasted by 600-degree air for thirty to sixty minutes. The pellets then went into a separator can, where a screen sorted them into four sizes. The stuff that was slightly too big (“nonmarketable nuggets,” Scorziello called them) went to a crusher. The stuff that was really too big went to the dump. I asked if these chunks had to go to a specially regulated landfill. “No, they’re not hazardous or toxic,” Scorziello said. “They could be used as beneficial cover, except that then they’d have to pay
me
.” He chuckled. (In fact, sludge sold as fertilizer can be so contaminated with toxins that it can’t legally, under the EPA’s Part 503 rules, be buried in landfills designed for household waste.)

Pellets that were too small were recycled within the system, while platonically ideal pellets whooshed pneumatically through pipes into eight storage silos. Twice a day, a railcar pulled forward on the plant’s eastern side and took on a hundred tons of Granulite. Most of the trains went north toward Albany, crossed the river at Selkirk, and then turned left for Florida, where the sewage of New York City was spread on citrus groves. Other trains made their way to Ohio, to corn and soybean fields.

I asked Scorziello why Granulite wasn’t used in New York. “I think it’s too easy to apply, so road crews working on highway medians don’t get overtime. Spreading composted biosolids takes longer.” (There were other, unstated, reasons the pellets didn’t stay local. Sludge is produced every day, but fertilizer can’t be spread year-round in the Northeast because the ground freezes. NYOFCo, which produced an enormous amount of product, wanted a steady taker. Moreover, northeastern soils tend to have a low pH, and many scientists believe the EPA 503 regulations don’t adequately protect alkaline soils from the leaching of metals.)

I picked up a plastic bag from a window counter. It weighed about a pound and held pellets the size of peppercorns. They looked hard and dry. “Smell it,” Scorziello said. Like a pot smoker sniffing new product, I took a quick whiff. The words
rich
and
loamy
came to mind, but so did
manure
. I shook some Granulite onto my hand, just to see what holding someone else’s highly processed feces felt like. It was no worse than handling raw meat, in the sense that it was so recently part of a living organism.

Scorziello handed me a hard hat, goggles, and a gauzy white smock. “You can leave your jacket here,” he said, then added, “Hmmm. Better leave your fleece vest, too.” We left the conference room through a back door that led to a catwalk overlooking the production floor. It was a little noisy out here but not too bad, with vents and shafts running all over the place. The air smelled strongly of ammonia. We walked downstairs and along a conveyor belt dotted with round elephant piles of dark gray paste. This raw material, as Scorziello called it, was about 74 percent water at this stage. Its consistency was strangely reminiscent of the toxic mudflats that I’d recently paddled around at Fresh Kills. When Scorziello was done with this material, its water content would be down to 4 percent.

Sticking a hollow metal tube into a machine, Scorziello pulled out a sample and passed it from hand to hand. The look on my face prompted him to say, defensively, “It’s not feces.” I supposed, with bacterial pathogens missing, that it wasn’t, but that didn’t change my gut-level reaction.

Scorziello brushed his hands lightly against his khakis, and we climbed up to the control room, where two workers monitored two thousand different manufacturing parameters on a bank of computer screens. We could have continued walking around the production floor or looked out the windows that surrounded this booth, but instead Scorziello offered me a virtual tour of the six identical “trains” that tumbled, dried, and separated the biosolids. Afterward, we clomped back downstairs to the receiving area. “Smells like something’s burning,” I said.

“That’s the reject material,” Scorziello said. A tall pile of dung was steaming away on the tipping floor. Stored for about a month until there was enough to dump, the oversize biosolids got hotter and hotter. The bay doors were open, and I asked about vector control. The EPA 503 regs are quite strict about controlling animals that might transmit diseases from biosolids to humans. He said there were rats in the stuff now and then. And raccoons wandered in the open doors. In the summer there were flies. “It’s annoying, but it’s not swarms,” he said. There were stray dogs in the neighborhood as well. A truck driver had adopted two and named them Pellet and Sludge.

Scorziello was a scholar of smell. The company sent him to odor seminars, and odor engineers made monthly surveys of his factory. Before air was released from the plant, it whooshed through a Venturi scrubber that removed most of the fine dust and ammonia, then through a regenerative thermal oxidizer set for 1,620 degrees Fahrenheit. A continuous monitoring system on the stack told Scorziello what he was discharging at any given moment.

“In 1996, we had some issues,” Scorziello said. “We got all the engineers together and found a problem in the regenerative thermal oxidizer.” To understand the smell, it was necessary to parse it. “The fecal odor,” Scorziello explained, “is a mixture of skatole, valeric acid, and butyric acid.” I knew that valeric acid makes rotten-cheese smell, and butyric acid is the smell of vomit. Later, I looked up skatole and learned that it’s an organic compound found naturally in feces and beets. Because it prevents rapid evaporation, it is also used as a fixative in the manufacture of perfume.