Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash (22 page)

Lauren DiCioccio is the perfect complement to Rodriguez, her energy contained versus his constant motion. “I sit,” she says, laughing. “I pretty much have to.”

DiCioccio chose the extremely time-consuming fine work of embroidery, sewing and textiles for her residency. Her art depicts in fabric the common, and sometimes uncommon, objects she pulls from the trash heap—photo albums, cookbooks, a torn baseball, a dead mouse (okay, she concedes, she didn’t actually bring the real version of that back to her studio), a box of Kodacolor film, a postcard sent airmail. They are life-sized and compellingly realistic, yet whimsical cloth versions of reality. She particularly likes paper objects—newspaper pages, letters and maps, for which she painstakingly sews printing, handwriting, even the blue lines of ruled loose-leaf paper. These familiar objects, she says, are “obsolescing” right before our eyes, being replaced by digital and virtual alternatives, or simply falling from favor. Capturing them with embroidery imbues them with a kind of poignancy. She usually leaves long threads dangling from her sewn objects, as if their place in the world, their very reality, is unwinding and coming apart before our eyes. People want to touch DiCioccio’s art, which is an art-lover’s no-no, of course. But there’s something so personal, so playful yet bittersweet, about her work that visitors just can’t help themselves. She’s good-natured about it, saying that those urges show that she has succeeded in her work, and tries to channel the enthusiasm by putting several pieces in a touchable display—with gloves next to them for art fans to put on first, to avoid dirtying the objects.

“I have had a total crush on this program ever since I heard about it,” DiCioccio says. “I had to come here. I loved the idea of being able to see a portrait of the lives of the city of San Francisco in the things that people throw away. I’m drawn to nostalgia, even when it’s other people’s.”

She was especially drawn to one object, a pair of hand-tinted photos of a man and a woman. They’re probably husband and wife, though that’s just a guess—there were no captions or notations on the back. The pictures were joined in a double-paned leather frame hinged like a book. The hand-tinting, a technique common in the fifties and sixties, now a nearly lost art, was beautifully done, and the faces seemed to glow as if illuminated. They were smiling, he more broadly than she. Clearly, the photo display had been a beloved keepsake, until one day, it was not, and the trash heap claimed it. “I can’t stop looking at it. It has a homely quality, and yet they’re just so beautiful. Clearly this was somebody’s treasure. I can’t stop thinking, How did it end up here?” DiCioccio’s rendition with needle and thread somehow captures the sadness and mystery of that transition, its threads hanging.

“One of the interesting things to me is when you go out there and you find these things, and you realize this person has probably died, and this was probably what was in their top bureau drawer,” DiCioccio says. “These objects
are
that person in a way, it’s their spirit. And I’m rooting through some very personal, bittersweet, touching things, and trying to bring new life to them—to rediscover the human qualities in these disposable things … If we can do that, it’s not trash anymore, is it?”

W
HEN ARTISTS-IN-RESIDENCE
first arrive at The Dump, they invariably fret that they’ll never find the things they need for their work: that particular piece of wood, metal or plastic, that just-right shade of paint, that certain thread or cloth. But the fears are almost always unfounded. The flow and variety of materials in the trash are always far greater than any of them quite believe—until they actually start wading into the stuff, and they realize the house cliché is uncannily true:
If you need it, it will come.

One artist needed an array of nuts and bolts to assemble his 3-D collages, and thought for sure he’d have to resort to the hardware store. But then someone showed up at the PDA with the contents of a home workshop, jar after labeled jar of screws, nuts, nails and washers of every size and shape, labeled and lovingly organized, thousands of them. Those baby food, mayonnaise and pickle jars of hardware have served successive artists for years. Someone else needed thread and needles, and really, how likely was it those small essential elements would turn up? How would they ever find those proverbial needles in this stack of garbage and mess? And then there they were, not one but two sewing boxes from different “donors,” crammed with old, good thread, old-school wooden spools, grandma’s sewing kit transformed into trash, and then transformed again into art and the tools for art. Sooner or later, what the artists need always shows up—cloth, glue, rubber, paint. Paint, rather shockingly, shows up by the hundreds of gallons, so much so that Recology sends truckloads of it overseas to developing countries to paint schools and clinics, as well as offering it free to any locals who want to come down and pick it up. There’s still plenty left over for the artists. Who knew so much good paint ends up as trash, oftentimes cans of it barely used or never even opened?

Here the waste becomes another kind of abundance, and the artists become scavengers, archaeologists, miners and collectors—fascinated and horrified by useful things that somehow have been relegated to the trash pile. Recology has an entire side of a huge warehouse reserved for stuff that’s too good to throw away—furniture and appliances that are usable, sometimes even gorgeous, that people have hauled to the dump. Recology redirects thousands of such pieces a month to a network of thrift stores—unless the artists get to them first.

The fact that galleries of art, and important milestones in the careers of professional artists, can be constructed out of ordinary trash reveals much about the artistry of the residents, Munk says.

But it reveals even more about our wasteful ways, and how readily we attach the label “trash” to perfectly good and frequently beautiful things. How much of our trash, how much of our 102-ton legacy, is really and truly trash? At San Francisco’s artist-in-residence program, they’ll tell you: not nearly as much as you think.

T
HE
I
NFERNO
performed by trash puppets was, Deborah Munk recalls, a rousing success. People were fascinated by the drama, which featured neither dialogue nor narration, but just the expressive gestures and interactions of the carved trash-marionettes. Niki Ulehla is more modest, saying only that she needs to work on the show a bit more and would like to try again in a year or two. But she allows that the audience appeared to enjoy the performance.

Her puppets are eerily, absurdly lifelike. A twitch of the controller—that x-shaped wooden cross that lets a puppeteer direct the limbs of a puppet—and Ulehla can make Harpy walk. Not bounce along in cartoon simulation of walking, but truly walk, an evil, ominous shuffle appropriate to a tormentor from Hell. She apprenticed in the Czech Republic, where puppetry and marionettes are still a vibrant art form, and for ten years she has been honing the technique she learned there. Her puppetry gives her a special credibility with the five thousand schoolkids who troop through The Dump every year to see where the trash goes—and what the artists can do with it. This, Ulehla says, was her favorite part of the artist-in-residence experience.

“I guess the small part that I was able to play here was to show by example that there’s an alternative to putting something in the trash. There’s an alternative to buying more materials. We can do better with our resources. We can bring new life to what we thought was disposable.”

As she is telling me this, in an endearingly shy and reticent way, Niki Ulehla is playing with Harpy, making her creation shuffle and turn and peer up at me. With one eye wide and the other slitted in a rakish wink, the malevolent puppet does not share its creator’s shyness. “When you spend time here, it’s so obvious. So much of the trash really isn’t trash. It’s staring us in the face.”

10

CHICO AND THE MAN

N
OT TOO MANY PEOPLE WHO HEAD TO THE LANDFILL
with a pile of weeds, deadwood and yard waste end up coming home with a new business, a new mission in life and a new super-villain alter ego. But that’s Andy Keller and ChicoBag’s story, one of those apocryphal origin tales about a regular guy’s green awakening that just happens to be true—and that also thrust him into the middle of a war between bag manufacturers and a growing list of cities that want to ban the plastic bag for good.

Keller used to be in the software trade, selling enterprise-grade code for a company in San Francisco. His employer let him telecommute from his home in Chico, California, in the Sierra foothills north of Sacramento, where you can get a lot of house, even if it is a fixer-upper, for the price of half a condo in San Francisco. But in 2004, his company was bought out by a European conglomerate that wanted him back working in the mother ship. It was too far to drive every day, so Keller had a choice to make. Should he stay with a company that would likely be downsizing once it finished cracking down on telecommuting? Or stay in Chico and find something else to do?

At age thirty-one, single, with no family to put at risk by being out of work, he decided to take a severance package instead of moving. Then he finally started the long-postponed fixing of the fixer-upper, beginning with the landscaping. He had to figure out what he’d do next, and thinking about it while digging in the dirt outdoors seemed a good choice after years of pounding keyboards. At the end of the day, he had a huge load of yard waste with no place to put it, which led to his first-ever trip to the local landfill.

The first thing about the dump that hit him was the odor—nasty, he thought, but unsurprising. Then there was the sight of a mound of the day’s trash piled high. Impressive, awful even, but again, no surprise. And then he saw the plastic bags, flashes of white blowing around the landfill, catching on tractors, on gears, on fences. Birds were pecking at them. They seemed to be everywhere, in and around the trash pile, the most identifiable item in the landfill. That, for some reason, did surprise him. Prior to that moment, he had not thought of those handy-dandy filmy white grocery bags as any sort of problem. They were so thin, so light, he hadn’t really given them a thought. But their footprint seemed magnified now by their dramatic presence in the landfill.

It struck him so hard that, by the time he was driving away from the landfill, he was thinking that he ought to start avoiding those bags in the future, maybe start using those cloth reusable bags some shoppers brought to the market. On the ride home, the trash by the side of the road he had barely noticed before now seemed much more visible. He saw quite a few plastic bags in the mix of litter.

By the time he got home, he didn’t just want to cut plastic bags out of his life. He was thinking this impulse could translate into his new job—creating a good alternative to disposable plastic bags. Of course, there were alternatives already being used by a minority of shoppers, even in those days before communities had curtailed, taxed or banned plastic shopping bags. The problem was, Keller had never really liked those reusable shopping bags. They were bulky, they didn’t fold up well, they were so inconvenient that people were forever forgetting them at home or leaving them in the car. They had never really enticed him before, and he guessed others felt the same. A sensible product with great environmental benefits had been stymied by poor design. So what if he designed a bag that
was
convenient? That could fold up so small that you could keep it in your pocket or your purse and never leave it behind again? It hit him like an adrenaline rush, he would later recall: the solution to his unemployment, to his entrepreneurial yearnings and to an environmental and natural resource problem.

He’d make a better bag.

The next day he went to a thrift store and bought an old sewing machine, purchased the lightest, thinnest cloth he could find at a fabric shop, set up shop on his kitchen table and started making prototypes. Then he raced back to the thrift store and bought a better sewing machine—one that actually worked—and spent days sketching, cutting, sewing, then returning to sketch a different design, and starting over.

Keller wasn’t your average software salesman (or your average thirty-something guy in any profession) in that he had a number of low-tech, traditional skills his peers tended to lack, sewing chief among them. This was a direct result of his parents declining to give him an allowance. By age twelve he was a full-fledged entrepreneur, always scrambling to make money—cutting lawns for a dozen clients, taking on handyman work in the neighborhood, painting, cleaning yards and selling homemade Santa hats he figured out how to make on his mom’s sewing machine.

The shopping bag prototype he settled on was rough and inexpertly sewn, but it was a proof of concept, a template to begin manufacturing for real: a bag that folded up into a pocket-sized sack that closed with a drawstring. He named it, and the company he formed, ChicoBag, patented his invention and financed the launch with an $80,000 line of credit on his house and a credit card that soon maxed out at $5,000.

The business grew slowly but steadily over the next several years, with the original ChicoBag, made of woven polyethylene plastic, selling for $6 retail. Once the business was established (and competitors in the $100 million reusable bag business came out with their own pouched grocery bags), Keller began to expand the company’s product line bit by bit, moving into daypacks, duffels, messenger bags and mesh bags for produce, each offering a variety of material choices, including hemp and recycled polyethylene. The original $6 bag, for example, has a greener counterpart made with 97 percent recycled materials for $9.60. The higher price demonstrates the difficult economics of recycling, which is one big reason why there is such a big disparity between what
could
be recycled and what actually
is
recycled.

Manufacturing is done by contractors in Vietnam and China, with some detailing work in the States, which means ChicoBag products have a carbon footprint from transoceanic travel that homegrown products would not carry (though the homegrown versions would carry an untenably larger price tag). Keller says he doesn’t try to hide this fact the way some companies do by having final assembly in Guam so a “made in America” label can be slapped on legally.

“That’s the reality of manufacturing in America,” he says. “Mostly, it’s not in America. And even if we did make the bags here, we’d have to import the fabric from China, because that’s where it’s all made.”

ChicoBag’s pitch is that a reusable bag, even made from virgin rather than recycled materials and imported from China, is vastly superior ecologically to the disposable alternative. For the average American, that alternative amounted to five hundred or more plastic bags made of petroleum thrown in the trash each year.
¹

By 2011, the company had expanded from Keller and his kitchen table to thirty employees and $5 million in annual revenues. ChicoBag had 14 percent annual growth in 2010. Competition is fierce in the reusable bag business—there are twenty rival bag makers in California alone, and they’re all wrestling over the mere 5 percent of Americans who choose them over disposable plastics. Keller’s business plan focuses on three revenue streams to keep the company moving: retail sales, custom orders (bags bearing the logos of nonprofits, universities, conferences and businesses) and educational sales.

It’s this last part of the business, where salesmanship meets green advocacy, that gets to the heart of Keller’s decision to go into business for himself making bags that, when rolled up, look like lumpy little Hacky Sacks. This is also the part of the business that almost ended the business and made him public enemy number one for the makers of plastic bags.

It started simply enough: Keller approached schools and suggested they rethink their community fundraisers by selling an eco-friendly, useful product—namely ChicoBags emblazoned with a school’s name and slogan—instead of selling candy and cookie dough in an age of childhood obesity. Quite a few schools took him up on the offer.

As part of this growing school side of his business, and also to promote the virtues of reusable bags over disposable plastic, Keller began passing on educational information about plastic’s footprint, waste and cost. He made school visits and suggested that students bring to class all the plastic bags they could find at home, tie them together, and see how far around the school building the chain stretched—a feat that usually left students and teachers alike stunned by their immense consumption of bags.

Then he did a few simple calculations for them and showed that if every American did that with all the grocery bags we use in a year, the chain would circle the earth. Not once, but 776 times.
²

Next he started carrying around five hundred single-use bags (grocery bags, produce bags and other disposable sacks) jumbled together in a big ball to represent the average American’s yearly plastic bag habit. It was big enough for him to crouch down and hide behind, then jump up and startle passersby. He called this a “Candid Camera moment” that got people to laugh, then ask what he was doing. That was Keller’s opening to explain how that ball encapsulated what he saw on his first-ever visit to the landfill—and how it also represented the average American’s plastic bag use for one year. The five-hundred-bag figure was a conservative estimate, he’d say. The real number was probably higher. Counting just one-use grocery shopping bag, Americans were collectively consuming 102 billion bags a year.
³
The count goes up to more than 150 billion when all types of plastic bags are included. And since every five hundred bags represent the petroleum equivalent of a half gallon of gasoline, that meant our disposable plastic bag habit was costing us 150 million gallons of gas a year.
⁴
It was all so wasteful, Keller would say, and yet so avoidable.

“The reaction I would get,” Keller recalls, “was almost always:
Oh my God, I had no
idea.
”

Eventually, he came up with his super-villain alter ego, Bag Monster. Instead of five hundred bags in a big ball, he made a costume out of them and wore the five hundred bags himself, becoming a roly-poly elastic Medusa festooned with streamers of plastic, his face the only visible human element (often contorted into wild expressions that gave him more than a passing resemblance to actor Jim Carrey). Bag Monster loved plastic bags and urged everyone to become one. The effect was disturbing, hilarious and irresistible. Schools loved him, requesting visits and demonstrations. Then green conferences and other venues and events started asking to borrow the costume. Keller made up several of them and started a free Bag Monster lending program after perfecting the costume design. (First-generation Bag Monster consisted of bags sewn to a graduation gown, which got hot and sweaty fast, after which Bag Monster got a bad case of BO. This was because the costume couldn’t be washed—the bags would just shred in the laundry. Second-gen Bag Monster consisted of Velcro strips with bags sewn on, which were then stuck on a jumpsuit. The strips of bags could be taken off and set aside, allowing the jumpsuit to be laundered, vastly improving Bag Monster’s personal hygiene.)

Demand was so great Keller ended up fashioning a hundred Bag Monster costumes. To go with them, he developed a ream of informational materials on single-use plastic bags, the history of plastic and the positive impact reusable bags could have. He put all this information on the company website as well as a separate Bag
Monster.com
site to promote the end of single-use bags. Then he launched a nationwide Bag Monster tour of twenty cities where officials were considering a plastic grocery bag ban. He drove around in a van emblazoned with a life-sized picture of his alter ego and a sign pleading with citizens to: “Help Stop the Bag Monster!” The tour culminated in August 2010 with Keller and ninety-nine friends—each wearing one of the one hundred Bag Monster costumes—descending on San Francisco en masse. They marched from the major Bay Area chocolate and chowder tourist spots of Ghirardelli Square to Fisherman’s Wharf and back. Then they held a press conference touting a statewide ban of single-use plastic bags, which the California Senate was debating at the time. The
New York Times
interviewed Keller. The TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) Conference invited him to speak.

And that’s when the trouble started. Bag Monster, it seemed, had gone too far. And the plastic bag makers, whose spending on lobbyists in Sacramento alone dwarfs ChicoBag’s annual profits—decided to fight back. Three plastic bag makers filed a lawsuit and launched a public relations campaign intended to reveal Keller’s environmental message as nothing more than deceptive advertising and self-serving propaganda. It was time, the makers of plastic bags decided, to muzzle the monster.

HISTORY OF THE PLASTIC BAG

1957:
  Plastic sandwich bags are introduced to replace wax paper.

1958:
  Plastic dry-cleaning bags replace brown paper.

1959:
  After eighty children suffocate by plastic dry-cleaning bags, California tries to ban them. Industry lobbyists succeed in killing the ban in favor of a product warning label.

1961:
  The Keep America Beautiful antilittering campaign is launched with disposable-product industry funding, placing the blame for trash and pollution on consumer litterbugs rather than on manufacturers.