Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash (19 page)

“Decadence now!” he says again, then adds darkly, “Now or never.”

A
LTHOUGH
R
ATHJE
is retired and his Garbage Project gone, with no one in the university research world interested in assuming his place as archaeologist of trash, Rathje’s garbology legacy nevertheless continues. And it is doing so with a somewhat more hopeful note than the retired garbologist allows himself.

The renaissance comes in the person of Sheli Smith, one of the first students to take part in the Garbage Project—a Moldy Oldy, as the veteran students of trash call themselves. It had been Smith who stumped a game show panel that couldn’t guess she was a garbologist, who silk-screened the project members’ first official T-shirts (emblazoned with the image of a hand reaching inside a garbage can), who braved the derision back when Rathje’s colleagues considered him crazed and embarrassing, and when they all referred to the project as
Le Projet du Garbage.
Even picking through trash sounds more dignified in French, she says.

After graduating from the University of Arizona in 1976, Smith went on to specialize in underwater archaeology. This took her as far from the desert trash sorting scene in Tucson as can be imagined, as she plumbed sunken cityscapes in the Mediterranean and shipwrecks in the Caribbean. But her work at the Columbus-based Past Foundation finally brought her full circle three decades later, when the head of the local Solid Waste Authority had sought the help of foundation anthropologists. He wanted to design an educational program that could help kids understand and rethink the way society creates waste. He had no idea he had stumbled on a founding member of the Garbage Project—he had never even heard of it when he asked if anyone there knew something about waste. Smith had given him a big grin and said, “Funny you should ask …”

Smith led the ensuing effort to create a school syllabus for an interdisciplinary garbology class project. It started as a public school pilot with one hundred high school students. They studied their own trash, their cafeteria food waste, the history of garbage, and wound up the class with an insider’s tour of the local landfill. The students ended up fascinated and engaged by the hands-on excursion into a world of trash they never really considered before—it had been “in sight, out of mind,” as Rathje likes to say. The students were also horrified by this world, as when they calculated that their little school cafeteria wasted sixty-five pounds of perfectly edible food every day. Then they calculated it would take twenty household composters to handle that load.

“They were stunned. It changed their behavior,” Smith says. “They stopped wasting so much food. They demanded the school stop wasting so much.”

Based on this success, the garbology program was expanded, reaching first the entire school district, then much of the state’s schools. Now it’s gone viral. The curriculum, available as a free download, is being picked up for use in classrooms all over the country—adopted, modified, localized. The thing about garbology at that level, Smith says, is that it lets anyone—kids, teachers, parents—understand their own footprint, as well as their friends’. And once that’s understood, it’s possible to do something about it. Garbology makes it possible for a student to go beyond thinking about saving the world, and actually doing it. It’s within their power to make a difference.

High school students took it on themselves to renegotiate recycling deals, bringing in more money for their school after they studied their trash flow and calculated the value of their cans, paper and bottles. Third-graders voted to impose a twenty-minute rule of silence at mealtime—because if they concentrated on eating instead of talking, there would be less waste.

“Third-graders did that—it was
their
idea!” Smith says with wonder. “If I had suggested that, they’d think I was some crazy old lady. This is what Bill Rathje made possible. This started with him, and it’s still making a difference. It gives you hope for the future.”

PART

3

THE WAY BACK

If it can’t be reduced, reused, repaired, rebuilt, refurbished, refinished, resold, recycled or composted, then it should be restricted, redesigned or removed from production.

—
BERKELEY ECOLOGY CENTER

What the hell was I thinking?

—
BEA JOHNSON,
on her pre–zero waste lifestyle

The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

—
STEVE JOBS

9

PICK OF THE LITTER

N
IKI
U
LEHLA LACED UP HER STEEL-TOED BOOTS
, pulled on her Day-Glo yellow vest, donned her hard hat and thrust her long fingers with the short, unadorned nails into heavy-duty work gloves—the non-optional fashion statement of the San Francisco Waste Transfer and Recycling Station, aka The Dump. Properly armored, she could begin her day.

She ventures out from her workstation and into the chaotic heart of the dump, an open, drive-in-and-drop-off area known as the PDA—the Public Disposal Area. There she begins searching the piles of twisted metal, scrap wood, broken pictures, crumpled boxes, cracked knickknacks and discarded papers that people had hauled to the PDA from their basements, attics and garages. Something was hidden there, something she needed, lurking within this residue of modern life.

She flipped open a box here, turned over a legless chair there, scanning with a practiced eye the treasures untreasured by luck or death or poverty or time or boredom or age. All of these objects had stories to tell, or so she imagined, but not just any story would do. Ulehla was looking for something particular and unique in those mounds. She was looking for Dante’s
Inferno
.

And in fairly short order, she found what she needed, or a piece of it, at least. It came in the form of a stump—a twisted, smallish knob of leathery wood, more shrub than tree, pulled from someone’s yard and carted to the dump along with a pile of graying weeds, dried and thorny whips of bougainvillea and crackly brown palm fronds. The stump stood out for her, despite its gnarled condition. It looked like a bird of sorts, perched amid the old papers, the yard cuttings and the mélange of junk. It had a bulbous, beaky head-like projection with a small knot set in the middle like a squinting eye staring straight at her. Winking at her, really. “Okay,” she murmured to herself. “I need a bird.” She hefted the stump in her gloved hand and considered the possibilities. It didn’t look like just any bird, she saw. Its cracked visage hinted at the dreaded Harpy herself—half woman, half avian, the tormentor of lost souls in Dante’s second ring of Hell.

Ulehla tossed the Harpy stump into a shopping cart and moved on. There were other things to find, objects to sculpt and paint and bring to life in this loud, odorous place, filled with the roar of diesel engines and the grating beep-beep-beep of big trucks backing up with more loads of trash, more material, more stories. This place was Niki Ulehla’s supply house, her crafts store, her inspiration and her muse, for such is the life of a garbage dump artist-in-residence.

She wanted to use trash to create a cast of marionettes to reenact the
Inferno
. This is how she proposed to show the world that exquisitely sculpted works of art could not only be brought to life, but could be crafted from materials that had been abandoned as worthless, unworthy waste. Trash would have a use in her vision, a greatness even, waiting to be tapped.

Tapping that source by redefining waste is the purpose of San Francisco’s garbage dump artist-in-residence program. That concept’s allure persuaded Ulehla to put her jewelry design business on hold to compete against dozens of other artists for a coveted four-month residency at the dump, where the full-time artistic mission is to expose and exploit the endless uses and potential for the stuff we call garbage. This is the most visible aspect of San Francisco’s campaign to put an end to waste and become America’s most sustainable and least trashy city. If the
Inferno
could rise from the city dump, Ulehla figured, anything was possible.

She reached into her cart and fingered the stump, imagining how she would carve and paint it, then bring it to life. Then she sighed and renewed her search for the rest of the cast. She had a mere four months to create her art and plan her show, or there would be, quite literally, hell to pay.

T
HE ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE
program at the San Francisco dump—insiders use the acronym AIR—started back in 1990 as a Southside San Francisco oddity planted a few miles from the airport near the old Cow Palace arena. It has evolved into an unlikely San Francisco icon, frequently copied but outlasting all imitators. Art critics and Bay Area glitterati frequent the AIR shows and receptions, while schoolkids tour “the dump with the art studios” almost daily. A hundred or more applications for the coveted residencies are always on file. There are two artists at the dump at all times, there for four-month stints, for a total of six a year. They are drawn not just from the ranks of promising no-names and up-and-comers, but also established, successful artists eager to make their mark by facing the creative challenge of painting, sculpting, carving, collaging, weaving, welding, writing, photographing, dramatizing and filming trash. Composer Nathaniel Stookey’s work
Junkestra
was performed by the San Francisco Symphony with instruments he constructed out of trash. Andrew Junge built a super-realistic life-sized Hummer out of the dump’s endless stream of discarded plastic foam; the sculpted car went on to tour the country. San Francisco’s central Recycle Center on the waterfront, meanwhile, made an architectural centerpiece out of artist Hector Dio Mendoza’s towering seventeen-foot-tall pine tree constructed entirely out of junk mail—a trunk made of drug ads, branches built from credit card offers, and leaves consisting of shredded catalog pages.

The only artistic discipline not yet represented in the dump oeuvre is dance, though not for lack of trying. Every year for the past decade a Bay Area dancer-choreographer has proposed staging a modern dance extravaganza at the dump’s most grotesque and busy location, The Pit, which is a warehouse-like structure behind the PDA dominated by a twenty-foot-deep, football-field-sized indoor swimming pool of garbage. An entire day of San Francisco’s non-recycled, uncompostable trash is piled there, crushed by bulldozers, then shoveled into enormous trucks to be hauled to a remote landfill, clearing the way for the next day’s incoming refuse tide. It is a loud, stinking, dangerous place, filled with an ever-shifting whirlpool of debris and heavy machinery twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No one has figured out how to bring dancers and an audience into the facility with any reasonable measure of comfort or safety.

“Not yet, anyway,” says the art program’s director, Deborah Munk. Her job description requires her to be open to even the most outlandish artistic possibilities, which she embraces with abandon, as evidenced by the gown woven out of multicolored newspaper delivery bags she wore to the premiere of
Junkestra
. “The Pit is closed two days a year, Christmas and New Year’s,” she muses. “Maybe we can work something out someday …”

The artist-in-residence program was the brainchild of Bay Area activist, artist and environmentalist Jo Hanson. She had bought and renovated an old Victorian in San Francisco’s Lower Haight District in the early 1970s, then became a local hero when her one-woman crusade to sweep the trash-strewn street outside her new home grew into a citywide anti-litter campaign. She started to incorporate trash into her art and installations, specializing in using “street-crushed metal” as raw material for her sculptures. Then she started organizing teach-ins and bus tours of illegal dumping sites, hoping to persuade San Franciscans to get greener. In 1990, Hanson visited the Sanitary Fill Company’s waste-transfer facility out near the Cow Palace to see where all the litter she collected ended up, and was fascinated by the variety and richness of the materials being thrown away. She felt like digging around then and there for raw materials for her art. Instead, Hanson suggested that the trash company consider sponsoring artists at the dump with stipends, studio space and pick of the litter. They could simultaneously advance the arts and educate the public about waste, while also garnering some positive publicity. If her street-sweeping campaign had taught her nothing else, it was that the news media cannot resist a quirky story about garbage.

Hanson’s timing couldn’t have been better. A year earlier, California had adopted landmark legislation requiring local governments throughout the state to divert 50 percent of their waste from landfills. Few communities were anywhere close to that goal. With the ambitious trash-to-energy plans of the eighties dead, recycling was embraced as the waste solution of the future. San Francisco, like most other cities in the state, was just beginning to respond to this mandate by ramping up curbside recycling. City officials and the waste companies they hired were desperate to get public buy-in for the concept, and for the long-unpopular chore of separating their recyclables from regular trash. A splashy, high-profile resident-artist program sounded like a great way to further the cause in a town that took pride in both its environmentalist heritage (John Muir, Sierra Club, David Brower) and its support for the avant-garde. Promoting trash art hit all the sweet spots.

More than one hundred artists later, the Sanitary Fill Company, since rebranded with a more eco-friendly name, Recology, continues to support the program with a level of enthusiasm rare in the world of corporate waste management. Director Munk thinks this may have something to do with Recology’s own unusual backstory, which dates back to the chaotic independent scavenger guilds that ruled the Bay Area trash business a century ago and that swarmed across the trashed landscape of the city after the massive San Francisco earthquake of 1906. These scrappy, battling trash haulers personified early on the ethic of reuse, repurpose and recycle that are now the rallying cries of modern urban environmentalism—not out of a desire to be green but because in those pre-plastic, pre-disposable-economy years, there was good money to be made from the wood, leather and metal scavenged from the garbage. Emphasizing that part of trash history in its company slogans and reports gives Recology the opportunity to stake a claim as one of the nation’s recycling pioneers. It’s an accurate claim, to be sure, though the company history omits some of the more unsavory practices of those same early scavengers, such as their penchant for wretched, open-air dumps and trash burning. These many small scavenger companies eventually consolidated into two main city contractors by the 1920s: the Scavenger Protective Association and the Sunset Scavenger Company, both of them employee-owned trash and landfill operations that split the city’s garbage, one taking most of the residential areas, the other focused on the business and financial districts. The two city licenses for scavenging granted back in those days are still in effect, though the companies went through several incarnations, name changes, a merger into one corporation called Norcal Waste Systems, a variety of scandals, near bankruptcy and a bribery indictment. Finally Norcal reinvented itself in the new century as a champion of green practices, recycling and the quest for zero waste. In 2009, it completed the transformation by renaming the company Recology (a blending of “recycling” and “ecology”).

As of 2011, Recology had contracts for resource recovery and waste services for fifty communities in California, Oregon and Nevada, though San Francisco remained its biggest turf and headquarters home. With 2,100 employees and $351 million in annual revenues, it is one of the ten largest employee-owned companies in the country, and the largest by far in the U.S. waste industry. It’s also the biggest organic composter, turning yard waste and garbage from San Francisco’s five thousand restaurants (220,000 soggy tons a year) into 150,000 cubic yards of compost that’s widely used by the vineyards of Napa and Sonoma Valleys. For San Francisco, that means twenty lumbering trucks that used to haul the stinking, rotting garbage to the landfill are taking it to the composter instead, ultimately returning the food that farmers grow back to farmers in another form—a classic closed loop that brings the natural process of decay back to the human world in a way that landfills never can.

San Francisco boosted these efforts in 2009 by becoming the first major city to collect household food waste at the curb in separate bins along with green waste for composting. Recology was assigned the task to carry out this mandate with specially designed two-compartment trash trucks to keep the organic waste separate on board. It’s one of the main reasons San Francisco was able to claim the mantle of green waste leader of American cities in 2010.

City ordinances make the composting mandatory, with violations punishable by whopping fines of $1,000 for each misplaced pile of potato peels and watermelon rinds. Critics of Bay Area progressive politics raised the specter of trash cops snooping through household trash. But so far the toughest response to violations of San Francisco’s new garbage etiquette has been by Recology garbagemen, who leave behind a note on offenders’ trash cans with a reminder about properly separating waste into the correct blue (recyclables), green (organics) and black (rubbish) bins.

The company did, however, get a court injunction against a small army of independent recyclers who were sneaking at night into neighborhoods ahead of Recology’s trucks and pilfering the most high-value recyclables in the bins. This was hurting Recology’s ability to make recycling pay for itself, and driving down the percentage of trash San Francisco could claim it was diverting from landfills, despoiling its green credentials.

Recycling may seem like small change, but it’s a huge part of Recology’s business model. Recycling theft became big business, too, especially during the economic downturn, with California unemployment hovering at 12 percent since 2009. In an affluent city like San Francisco, poaching recyclables was netting the robbers—and costing Recology—an estimated $2 million to $5 million annually. The injunction authorized police to make arrests and imposed penalties of $1,000 and six months in jail for each instance of poaching; the organized gangs of trash thieves soon moved on to easier hunting grounds. (Reflecting the national scope of the trash poaching, a number of other cities, from Sacramento to New York, have adopted comparable measures against recycling thieves.)