Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash (16 page)

Many electronic items went to ports where they were loaded aboard ships, then left cell coverage and were never heard from again. The distances that electronics and hazardous waste traveled were significantly longer than all other waste categories—the first time this was documented in a systematic way.

Trash Track, according to Offenhuber, has started to point out some major inefficiencies in the waste stream by bringing transparency to the normally invisible removal stream. It raises serious questions about the efficacy of current recycling efforts, which all too often send certain kinds of waste great distances, expending fuel and energy that could be conserved if more waste and recycling was handled locally. One example: There are only thirteen facilities in the world certified to recycle cathode-ray tubes—the now-outdated tube-style TVs and computer monitors that are still very common and are chock-full of hazardous materials. All thirteen of those facilities are in China. This is the sort of recycling that makes little sense as a strategy for sustainability.

The use of large numbers of volunteers transformed the project into a kind of “citizen science” effort, Offenhuber says, and that gave it unexpected power. People got invested. They came to the library to follow the course of a sneaker or a cell phone. Schools were excited at the classroom discussions the project engendered. There was even talk of developing a kind of “Trash Track in a Box” for educational use—a self-contained, prepackaged Trash Track kit. A number of companies contacted MIT about replicating the experiment to track their own waste, and the technology company Qualcomm, which worked on the last generation of trackers for the project, has come out with a commercial version of the device for sale to businesses and communities interested in exploring their own removal chain.

Offenhuber thinks anything that gets ordinary citizens involved in understanding and bringing transparency to the fate of their trash represents an important step forward. He sees urban planning in the twentieth century as dominated by a paradigm he calls “infrastructure as an invisible black box,” which not only keeps regular people in the dark, but leaves them feeling helpless about doing anything to make it better. A twenty-first century of smart trash, an Internet of things, can turn that around, he says. Each trash trajectory arcing across the country smashes the invisibility that has long masked our trash and its disposal—along with the illusion that our trash is handled efficiently.

Recycling in particular has long served as a balm and a penance—a way of making it okay to waste, the assumption being that if something is recycled, then the energy and materials are not being lost, and our disposable economy of abundance doesn’t really seem so wasteful after all. But the meandering, inefficient and sometimes purposeless paths for our garbage revealed by Trash Track puts the lie to those old assumptions. There is no penance for being profligate when the waste-management system itself can be so unpredictable and, at times, incredibly wasteful. When a printer ink cartridge can make multiple transcontinental trips before finding its way to a recycler, it creates a footprint that’s more environmental disaster than savior.

The meandering maps and trajectories revealed by Trash Track have provided part of the answer to the second big waste question that must be answered in order to wrestle the 102-ton legacy into submission: How is it possible for people to create so much waste without intending or realizing it?

For one thing, it seems, our waste doesn’t go where we think it goes. We aren’t counting, mapping or directing it well. The idea that there is a waste-management “system,” it seems, is more illusion than reality. At best there is a chaotic hodgepodge of potential trash destinations that eludes both control and detection in ways that would never be tolerated in other industries and supply chains. This revelation suggests that the second big question should be modified slightly: How can we ever put an end to waste if we can’t even keep track of it?

Smart trash provides an inkling of the power over waste that could be achieved with a little more garbage brainpower.

P
ERHAPS THIS
future is on its way. The SENSEable City Lab is trying to scale back its scattershot attack on trash by narrowing the focus in a follow-up project called “Backtalk.” This time the tracking is aimed at one specific type of trash: e-waste. The goal is to find ways to shorten the journeys this growing and often hazardous type of electronic trash is taking, and to examine just how much of it ends up exported to toxic salvage yards abroad. Estimates run from 20 to 80 percent of U.S. e-waste gets offshored for disposal, with dire health and environmental consequences on the receiving end.

“Watching the path our trash takes was fascinating and surprising,” says Tim Pritchard, “and sometimes disappointing. Seattle is a community that’s made a lot of progress on sustainability, but this has shown us how far we have to go … The clock is ticking. If we don’t embrace a different way, as awkward as it may seem, there will be fairly dire consequences.”

8

DECADENCE NOW

T
HE BUCKET AUGER CHEWED DEEP INTO THE
ground, a three-foot-wide steel cylinder with three-inch jagged teeth bristling from its business end. The “bucket” part of the bucket auger is a yawning, spinning maw that grinds through earth as if it were made of marshmallow. Mounted on a telescoping pole, it’s capable of burrowing a hundred feet down, then retracting and bringing up huge chunks of whatever lies beneath, bucketful by bucketful, a whirling sand toy on steroids. The bucket auger’s torque is so powerful that it has chewed right through a wrecked and buried car, engine block and all.

Pulled up and upended with a hiss of hydraulics and grinding of gears, the bucket disgorged a blend of dirt and plastic and old newspapers, many of them yellow and brittle but surprisingly readable. There were cans, yard clippings and several hot dogs, a bit dingy but intact—the queasy power of preservatives at work, perhaps. And there was a white ceramic bowl of some brown stuff which, when its dirty crust was scraped away, revealed something bright green inside. There were chunks of something still visible in the mix.

“Hey! I think it’s guacamole!” archaeologist Bill Rathje shouted to his crew of student volunteers, dabbing his finger in the stuff.

It was guacamole. The chunks were avocado slices, still green. And the nearby newspapers allowed the perishable treat’s age to be inferred: twenty-five years. The guacamole had last seen daylight a quarter century ago and yet, while not exactly edible, it seemed fresher in appearance than it would have looked after just a few days sitting in Rathje’s kitchen sink. It had been preserved—unintentionally and, to all but Rathje and his crew, unexpectedly.

Because that’s not how landfills were supposed to work. Or so it was said.

The bucket augur is a tool for drilling wells, for water and oil, but it’s also how Rathje, founder of the Garbage Project, spent decades exploring the inner space of landfills, about which many knowing assumptions have been made over the years—and which Rathje, time and again, proved mistaken.

He is the world’s first garbologist, and his work uncovered just how poor an understanding we have of our own waste.

“Most people don’t really know their trash,” says Rathje, a broad, deep-voiced archaeologist who has been labeled the Indiana Jones of refuse. “But through their trash, we sure do know a lot about them.”

T
HE IDEA
for a Garbage Project—for a systematic and unprecedented deep analysis of modern waste using the same skills, tools and modes of inquiry archaeologists employ to understand the ancient world—began with a simple student project and training exercise in the early seventies at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Rathje, a Harvard University–educated archaeologist who specialized in the study of ancient Mayan ruins, was then a young professor on the Tucson campus, long a hotbed of archaeological discovery due to the wealth of ancient Native American sites throughout the region. He wanted to introduce basic archaeological methods to the students in his anthropology class through a series of independent study projects. Two of the students came up with the idea of fact-checking some typical cultural stereotypes with physical reality—which they proposed to accomplish by comparing the real-world trash collected from two homes in an affluent area of Tucson with the trash from two homes in a poor part of town. Would the two sets of families differ in unexpected ways? Or would they be unexpectedly similar? Would the real-world detritus produced by the test subjects (their identities protected by the archaeologists’ dusty equivalent of doctor-patient confidentiality) confirm cultural clichés, or shatter them?

This idea appealed to Rathje on a number of levels. For one thing, he’s a natural contrarian, so the idea of using trash to upturn stereotypes and commonly held assumptions was beyond delicious. “Cut the crap!” and “Bullshit!” are favored expressions of his, reserved for what he considers to be galling misstatements about garbage by the uninitiated. (Over the years he has been particularly incensed by persistent claims and extensive media coverage of the supposed evils of disposable diapers, which he says create “barely a blip” in the average landfill, while distracting the public from genuine and larger garbage problems, such as the proliferation of phone books, most of which are unwanted and, to this day, mostly get landfilled instead of recycled.)

The other thing Rathje liked about the student garbage study was its embrace of the gritty realities of genuine archaeology, which, for all its seeming romance, its air of exotic locales and lost civilizations, really boils down to rooting around in dead people’s trash. Really, really old trash, certainly, long stripped of its smells and general ickiness, but trash just the same, the true object of archaeologist lust because it represents the unvarnished story. The monuments, stone tablets, formal histories and burial chambers that describe the glories of dead civilizations are all well and good, but they tell the story that the kings and scholars wish to communicate, the idealized version, the version that the victors in a war get to tell rather than the stories of the conquered. In garbage, though, there are no half-truths, no spin, no politics. Conquerors may plunder the riches and thereby the historical record, but no one plunders trash. The accrual of what a people ate will be there, master and slave, worker and lord alike, an honest tale of crusts, rinds, bones and seeds. How they lived, what they wore, where their trade routes reached, even how and who they worshipped—all of that, and so much more, is contained in the record of their garbage, the unbiased arbiter and keeper of the inner life of any civilization. What we say about ourselves, observes Rathje, is never as honest or as revealing as what we throw away. This is why archaeologists crave trash, why Washington’s outhouse at Valley Forge was a major dig (the general and future president threw all kinds of things in there—then trash, now illuminating artifacts), and why it was not such a stretch for a professor of ancient Mayan culture to approve his students’ plans to look for similar truths in Tucson’s trash.

Based on the garbage recovered, the two students concluded that, income (and conventional wisdom) notwithstanding, the two sets of families consumed similar amounts of steak, hamburger and milk. The poor families, however, bought more household cleansers and spent more on goods related to child education. As fascinating as these differences were, the tiny sample size made it impossible to draw any sweeping conclusions. But it did suggest a new, potentially fruitful subject of study: using trash to gauge all sorts of contemporary behaviors, and to see if that trash trail squared with our societal assumptions, or revealed the myths we live by.

This was new territory. Detectives and journalists had been known to root through garbage from time to time, looking for stories and scandals in those pre–paper shredder days. But a scientific inquiry into the patterns and context of trash as real-time cultural artifacts, evidence of consumer behavior and window onto society’s soul had never been attempted in any sustained way. During World War II, the Army tasked a pair of enlisted men with marketing experience to gauge soldiers’ satisfaction (or lack thereof) with military mess by analyzing the food that was thrown away by mess halls. The results: too much food was being prepared in mess tents throughout the Army; staggered mess calls resulted in more clean plates than single, long lines that allowed the food to get cold for many soldiers; most of the soup, kale and spinach got trashed; and there was no such thing as too much ice cream. Menus and meal preparation were soon adjusted (less spinach and kale), and the Army began saving 2.5 million pounds of wasted food a day—the first modern practical benefits of the study of garbage or, as it has come to be known, garbology. Despite the rousing success, the Army discontinued its study of food waste (and garbage in general), and the thread wouldn’t be picked up again until Rathje spotted the opportunity three decades later in Tucson. “We were,” Rathje recalls, apologizing with unconvincing sincerity for the pun, “breaking new ground.” In 1973, Rathje, several of his colleagues and his students expanded the garbage-study concept and the amount of trash to be analyzed, and the Garbage Project was born.

The conceit was simple: If we use the same archaeological tools and techniques previously employed on Egyptian pyramids, lava-encrusted Pompeii and the painted caves of Lascaux, what can we learn about American civilization from its garbage? What is the secret story of trash?

The archaeological team did not go out on “digs” at the beginning. Instead, the “artifacts” were delivered to the Garbage Project, which is to say, the university arranged to have the city sanitation department dump piles of garbage from specific census tracts on a campus maintenance yard six days a week. Then Rathje and his team of student volunteers surveyed and cataloged the mess, wearing rubber gloves, surgical masks and gowns, bagging and tagging the garbage on sorting tables, trying to figure out how to categorize a marshmallow. (Answer: as “candy.”)

Before they could figure out what it all meant, though, they had to develop from scratch an entirely new language of trash. They went so far as to create a sort of Rosetta stone of aluminum can pull-tabs (this was back in the day when the tabs were designed to detach from beverage cans). It turned out there was a surprising variety in these little bits of metal that could identify beverage type, age and manufacturer simply by the shape and heft of the tab, and the Garbage Project remains to this day the one and only forensic authority on the subject. Meanwhile, an entire numbering system evolved over time to catalog the rest of the garbage: 001 was beef, 003 was chicken (the Garbage Project’s nemesis, for nothing smelled worse than rancid uncooked chicken), 090 was powdered baby formula, 139 was a plastic container, 149 was auto supplies. There were 190 separate codes in all.

After the garbage was categorized, counted and compared, the unexpected and counterintuitive findings began almost immediately.

First, there was the matter of food waste, a major component of everyday trash. Food waste was rampant, though that wasn’t news. What was surprising was that the amount of waste seemed to rise during times of shortages and high costs. This was particularly easy to spot when it came to meat, which gets trashed with unusually good documentation along for the ride—the meat packaging used at markets includes the type of meat, its cost, its packaging date and its weight. Comparing that to the actual meat discarded in the same batches of trash provides a reasonably accurate measurement of carnivorous food waste.

In that first year of the Garbage Project, a blight decimated feed crops, which drove up the cost of raising beef cattle, which in turn caused a sharp and well-publicized increase in the cost of red meat to consumers. In some areas, there was a shortage of popular cuts of beef, amid a great deal of media coverage about the turmoil in the beef cattle industry.

Common sense might suggest that such scarcity, high cost and feverish press would lead to a reduction in food waste, as families sought to stretch their food dollars and get every meal they could from each costly purchase. But the opposite was true. Beef waste during normal times hovered around 3 percent, the Garbage Project volunteers found. But during the shortage months, wastage tripled to 9 percent.

Rathje eventually hit on the explanation for this counterintuitive behavior. When shortages occurred (or were even discussed in the news media), consumers purchased more beef than normal. As hoarding exhausted supplies, they also tended to purchase cuts of meat that they normally did not buy and that they did not necessarily know how to prepare well. The combination of overbuying and bad cooking led to extra waste, with more raw, spoiled meat and more uneaten (and apparently unappetizing) cooked meat showing up in the trash than was the case during normal market conditions. Consumers, when asked, thought they were being sensible and economical, when their trash told a different truth: They were being more wasteful than ever.

In a similar vein, the Garbage Project discovered that well-publicized special collection days that sanitation departments set for collecting hazardous household waste—varnishes, paints, cleaning compounds, old motor oil, oven cleaners and other nasty chemicals that are not supposed to go in ordinary landfills, yet often do—had the unintended effect of leading to more, rather than less, improper disposal of toxics. City sanitation departments have in modern times labored to keep these toxic home products out of regular garbage landfills because of the environmental hazards they pose, which is why special collection days and locations are set for them. The Garbage Project analysts, who wanted to examine the effect of these toxic collection days, found that on the day after these special hazardous waste pickups, the regular trash stream had twice as much hazardous waste improperly tucked inside it as normal.

The explanation was simple enough: Alerted by the publicity about the hazards of such materials, people rounded up all those nasty cans and bottles of sludge and dried paint that had sat forgotten, gathering dust in their garages, cellars and sheds. Then for one reason or another, they had missed the special collection time. Chagrined but also motivated by the publicity to get rid of the stuff, they had just tossed it in their regular trash bins and covered it with orange peels and plastic debris. Once again, the Garbage Project had shown that a well-meaning trash policy based on assumptions about human behavior had generated the opposite result as was intended. Instead of cleaning up toxins, the special collection days were making things worse. Rathje suggested the best way to avoid future disasters would be to make many more frequent toxic pickups, or create a dedicated drop-off site that the public could easily access as needed.

An interesting Garbage Project aside: The trash from poorer neighborhoods could readily be identified by their hazardous materials, which were dominated by car care items, oils and additives; the toxics most common to middle-class neighborhoods were weighted toward paints, stains and varnishes—the substances related to home improvement; affluent neighborhoods, apparently focused on lawn care, had toxic trash dominated by pesticides, fertilizers and weed killers. The project developed a surprisingly accurate formula for calculating the relative income and demographics based on these kinds of trash distinctions.