Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash (2 page)

It’s tough to overcome an addiction when you can’t even admit how big a problem you’ve got.

And that 102 tons is just what Americans personally toss in the garbage can and haul to the curb—the trash in our direct control. Counting all the waste transported, extracted, burned, pumped, emitted and flushed into the sewage system by and on behalf of each American man, woman and child, as well as what’s tossed out by U.S. industry in order to make the products Americans consume, the total waste figure for the nation reaches 10 billion tons a year. This raises the per capita garbage calculation considerably. By such an all-waste accounting, every person in America stands atop more than 35 tons of waste a year—or a staggering average lifetime legacy of 2,700 tons. No wonder America, with 5 percent of the world’s population, accounts for nearly 25 percent of the world’s waste.

Then there’s the wallet issue. Trash is such a big part of daily life that American communities spend more on waste management than on fire protection, parks and recreation, libraries or schoolbooks. If it were a product, trash would surpass everything else we manufacture. And guess what? It
has
become a product—America’s leading export.

That’s the secret behind the story of Zhang Yin, another sort of hoarder, one who is admired rather than pitied. In 2006, she became at age forty-nine China’s first woman billionaire. In 2011, she was both China’s top female manufacturer and America’s biggest exporter
to
China (of either gender). Her export: America’s garbage. In both East and West, she is the queen of trash.

Zhang is also the personification of the American Dream in the twenty-first century, a Horatio Alger for a disposable economy. Fleeing the Tiananmen Square massacre and democracy movement crackdown of 1989, she left China for the Los Angeles suburb of Pomona, where she started running a scrap-paper company out of her apartment. The entire workforce at first consisted of Zhang and her new husband, a Taiwanese immigrant trained as a dental surgeon. They would drive around the Los Angeles Basin in an old Dodge van, visiting landfills and their sorting and recycling stations, begging for scrap paper. Learning English as she built the business, Zhang cut a series of deals to secure a steady source of the waste paper at a bargain price. There was no shortage of material. Then, as now, paper waste was one of the main components of trash dumped at landfills. American businesses considered much of the material worthless.

China, on the other hand, had a chronic paper and pulp shortage, having deforested huge swaths of the country during the drive to industrialize in the late fifties and early sixties—“the Great Leap Forward,” as it was called. In the nineties, as manufacturing ramped up and China joined the global economy in earnest, there was enormous demand for cardboard to package and box the goods that China had begun to produce. The scrap paper Zhang amassed was just what the Chinese factories needed—they’d recycle all she could send them. Because cargo ships were coming to America from China full and returning mostly empty, Zhang was able to negotiate bargain-basement shipping costs to her native land.

Soon she had deals with recyclers and brokers all over Los Angeles, New York and Chicago to fill the voracious demand. “Chinese manufacturers were desperate for scrap paper,” she recalled years later. “I’m an entrepreneur … All I did was help fulfill a need.”

That’s probably a bit too modest. The daughter of a Red Army officer imprisoned during China’s Cultural Revolution, she managed to see an opportunity that American entrepreneurs had missed. She filled China’s paper needs so thoroughly that, beginning in the year 2000 and every year since, her company, America Chung Nam, has been the top U.S. exporter to China in number of cargo containers shipped—and the largest scrap-paper company in the world, an empire of trash built from scratch. She used the earnings—and America’s scrap—to launch what is now China’s largest cardboard manufacturer, Nine Dragons Paper; by 2010, she was worth $4.4 billion.

Zhang is a big part of a simple but rarely acknowledged fact about America’s place in the twenty-first-century global economy: Trash has become one of the most prized products made in the USA. Not computers. Not cars. Not planes or missiles or any other manufactured product. It’s our mountains of waste paper and soiled cardboard and crushed beer cans and junked electronics that the rest of the world covets.

In 2010, China’s number one export to the U.S. was computer equipment—about $50 billion worth.
⁹
America’s two highest volume exports to China were paper waste and scrap metal, a little more than $8 billion worth of bundled old newspaper, crushed cardboard, rusty steel and mashed beverage cans sold at rock-bottom prices. Zhang’s America Chung Nam exported more than three hundred thousand cargo containers of scrap paper to China in 2010. Overall, the fastest-growing category of goods exported to China is “Scrap and Trash,” increasing 916 percent between 2000 and 2008.
¹⁰
Chinese manufacturers promptly develop new and aggressively priced consumer products made from this waste, which they then sell back to American consumers at great profit, so we can trash it all again in a year or two and send it back once more for pennies on the dollar. Waste, it seems, is becoming one of our greatest contributions to the global economy.

Somehow, without ballot or poll or any explicit decision by presidents or legislators or voters to do so, America, a country that once built things for the rest of the world, has transformed itself into China’s trash compactor.

This sobering economic reality is mirrored by a telling observation from, of all sources, America’s astronaut corps: There are only two man-made structures large enough to be clearly visible and identifiable from earth orbit. First, there’s the mighty Great Wall of China in the East, symbol of a past power risen again. And in the West, there’s a newer thing, the grimly named Fresh Kills, recognizable above all other things American.

Fresh Kills is the world’s largest town dump, the recently shuttered repository for a half century’s accumulation of New York City garbage.

A
NY ATTEMPT
to understand the 102-ton legacy—and what can (or should) be done about it—has to begin with answers to three very basic (yet rarely posed) questions. As it happens, these are the same three questions extreme hoarders such as the Gastons must confront if they wish to change their trash-laden circumstances:

First there’s the most obvious of inquiries: What is the nature and cost of that 102-ton monument of waste?

Next comes the soul-searching question: How is it possible for people to create so much waste without intending to do so, or even realizing they are doing it?

Finally, there’s the “what next?” question: Is there a way back from the 102-ton legacy, and what would that do for us … or to us?

Problem, investigation, solution: It’s the classic three-act construction that the human brain has been hardwired to prefer—and as good an organizing principle as any for a book about trash. Three sections, three broad questions, each equally important, but it’s the third piece of the story, the quest for a way back, that is key. That’s the question that allows the 102-ton story to become a voyage of discovery, offering the possibility that all those tons of garbage might be a choice rather than an inevitability—and an opportunity as well as a bane. That’s the question that offers the possibility of a happy ending to the story of trash.

Oddly enough, it’s the hoarders, once again, who can help show us the way back. The Gastons understood far better than their neighbors that our prevailing definition of waste is all wrong. They saw that putting something in the trash is not really a matter of disposing of waste, of something with no value. Trash to them is the physical manifestation of
wastefulness
. The hoarders’ response to this essential insight—that trash is really treasure squandered—is twisted and unhealthful, but their instinct to place value on garbage is sound and sane. Of course, the more constructive response would be not to hoard, but to find ways to avoid the wasteful accumulation in the first place. That’s the great challenge, the holy grail that has so far eluded mankind, dating all the way back to the first town dump and anti-littering law in ancient Greece. The upside of this picture: There is a small but growing number of businesspeople, environmentalists, communities and families who see in our trash the biggest untapped opportunity of the century.

These trash optimists range from the city of Portland, which may be the least wasteful city in America, to TerraCycle, the business champion of “upcycling” (the reuse/repurpose opposite of recycling), to the trash artists of San Francisco and the trash czar at Harvard University who each year turns the stuff students abandon in the dorms into one of the biggest and most successful yard sales in America. And there’s the Johnson family, who proved they could live an outwardly normal year and yet produce only a mason jar full of trash.

Bea Johnson, a Marin County, California, artist who set her family of four on this quest, wonders what would have happened if the massive infrastructure America has constructed to deal with trash had been predicated all along on avoiding waste and recapturing its value, rather than transporting, burying and occasionally recycling its epic quantities. Would America still be evolving into China’s trash compactor? Would there even be a 102-ton legacy? “What would life look like then?” she muses. “What would it mean for the economy, for the entire world?”

Johnson (you’ll read more about her trash epiphany later) is the opposite of a hoarder—she’s all about avoiding the accumulation of things, particularly disposable things, and living the uncluttered life. Or as she calls it, the unwasteful life. She says people, even friends, question her sanity, but the Johnson family has discovered that generating less waste translates into more money, less debt, more leisure time, less stress. When they give gifts, they don’t give things—they give experiences. No wrapping paper required. She says they’ve never been happier.

“When you stop wasting, everything changes,” she says. “There is a way back. And if it can work for a family, it can work for a country. It could be the answer we’ve all been waiting for.”

AN AMERICAN ANNUAL WASTE SAMPLER

  5.7 million tons of carpet sent to landfills—all of it could be recycled, but mostly it’s not

  19 billion pounds of polystyrene peanuts (Styrofoam) dumped—never degrades, impossible to recycle

  35 billion plastic bottles