This Is Paradise
This Is Paradise
By Jeanne Marie Laskas
Two centuries of heedless gorging and historic wastefulness has left us with an intractable environmental problem: What do we do with our trash? More specifically, what do we do with the 250 million tons (that’s five pounds per person per day) of pizza bos, beer bottles, shredded lettuce, old refrigerators, and half-eaten burritos that we throw away each year?
at dawn The landfill looks nothing like what most people picture when they imagine a landfill. Nothing messy, nothing gross, nothing slimy, no trash anywhere at all. It looks, perhaps disappointingly, like an enormous, lonesome construction site, a 1,365-acre expanse of light brown dirt filling canyons reaching innocently toward the horizon—buried trash from yesterday and several thousand other yesterdays. The scale of the thing alone boggles the mind, and to stop and ponder the fact that forty years of trash forms a foundation 400 feet deep is to simply grow fretful with some unnamed woe about America’s past and the planet’s future.
The first truck to arrive is no. 4272, a seventy-three-foot-long tractor-trailer, driven by Herman Snook, 67 years old, wiry, chewing a toothpick. He is quick to point out that he, too, thinks the landfill looks nothing like a landfill, and he believes it doesn’t smell like one, either. He allows that he may have just gotten used to the odor. (He has.) When fellow truckers arrive, pulling up next to Herman, the ground—so deep with trash—is so soft it bounces.
At six o’clock, the truckers are allowed to start dumping, and so Herman pushes a red button inside a panel on his cab. The back end of the trailer rises obediently and 79,650 pounds of debris comes thundering out, most of it wood and plaster and nails and shreds of wallpaper. Beside him a truck is dumping decidedly more organic garbage, pungent indeed, and way down the row, off¬ to the side, a guy is pouring a truckful of sludge, sterilized human waste, black as ink.
The Puente Hills Landfill, about sixteen miles east of downtown Los Angeles, serves 5 million people in seventy-eight California cities, one of six landfills operated by the Sanitation Districts of L.A. County. Every day 13,200 new tons of trash are dumped here. That’s enough to fill a one-acre hole twenty feet deep.
In five years, on November 1, 2013, the landfill will be out of room, and all that trash will have to go somewhere else.
Herman gets a broom, sweeps his trailer clean, then heads back to South Gate Transfer Station, twenty miles away, for another load. He will make five trips in a day, stopping only once to eat Oodles of Noodles and cheese crackers and a cookie. On the ride home, he eats a green apple. He is careful to note that he is just about the only one of his entire eighth-grade graduating class of 1954 who has not yet retired. “Why would anyone retire from a place like this?“ he asks. “I enjoy the sunrise. I enjoy being part of nature.“ Having spent more than a week at the landfill, by now I am getting used to hearing workers here, from the highest to the lowest ranks, speak like this. Concerning the landfill, they are all pride and admiration and even thanks. It seemed, at first, like crazy talk.
A landfill, after all, is a disgusting place. This is a 100-million-ton solid soup of diapers, Doritos bags, phone books, shoes, carrots, watermelon rinds, boats, shredded tires, coats, stoves, couches, Biggie Fries, piled up right here o¬ the 605 freeway. It’s a place that brings to mind the hell of civilization, a heap of waste and ugliness and everything denial is designed for. We tend not to think about the fact that every time we toss out a moist towelette or an empty Splenda packet or a Little Debbie snack-cake wrapper, there are people involved, a whole chain of people charged with the preposterously complicated task of making that thing vanish—which it never really does. A landfill is not something we want to bother thinking about, and if we do, we tend to blame the landfill itself for sitting there stinking like that, for marring the landscape, for o¬ffending a sanitized aesthetic. We are human, highly evolved creatures, remarkably adept at forgetting that a landfill would be nothing, literally nothing, without us.
In America we produce more garbage per person than any other country in the world, 250 million tons a year. In urban areas, we are running out of places to put all that trash. Right now, the cost of getting rid of it is dirt cheap, maybe $15 a month on a bill most people never even see, all of it wrapped into some mysterious business about municipal tax revenue. So why think about it?
Electricity used to be cheap, too. We went for a long time not thinking about the true cost of that. Same with gas for our cars.
The problem of trash (and sewage, its even more o¬ffensive cousin) is the upside-down version of the problem of fossil fuel: too much of one thing, not enough of the other. Either way, it’s a matter of managing resources. Either way, a few centuries of gorging and not thinking ahead has the people of the twenty-first century standing here scratching our heads. Now what?
The problem of trash, fortunately, is a wondrous intellectual puzzle to scientists and engineers, some of whom lean, because of the inexorability of trash, toward the philosophical. The simple conundrum—the intrinsic disconnect between human waste and the human himself—becomes grand, even glorious, to the people at the dump.
“nobody knows we’re even even here,“ Joe Haworth is saying, as we make our way around the outside of the landfill, winding up and up past scrubby California oaks, sycamore trees, and the occasional shock of pink bougainvillea vine. He is driving his old Cadillac, a 1982 Eldorado, rusty black with a kerry-edwards sticker on the bumper. He wears a Hawaiian-print shirt, a straw hat, and wire-rimmed glasses, and the way he leans way back in the driver’s seat suggests a simple, straightforward confidence. “People driving by on the highway think this is a park,“ he says.
The outside of the landfill, the face the public sees, reminds me of Disney World, a perfectly crafted veneer of happiness belying a vastly more complicated core. The western side, facing the 605, is lush green and deep blues, a showy statement of desert defiance, while the eastern face is quiet earth tones, scrubby needlegrass, buttonbush, and sagebrush; the native look on that side was requested by the people living in Hacienda Heights, a well-to-do neighborhood in the foothills of the dump. They wanted the mountain of trash behind them to blend in with the canyons reaching toward the sunset. A staff¬ of fifty landscapers do nothing but honor such requests. The goal: make the landfill disappear by making it look pretty.
“No matter what you do with your trash, nature has to process it,“ Joe is saying. “Okay? Think about it.“ We are making our way up to a lookout point where we can get an overview of the action of the trash trucks and bulldozers and scrapers, a good show and a good place to sit and think. “Look, we’d be up to our eyeballs in dinosaur poop if nature didn’t have any way to run this stuff¬ around again.“ He has a way of putting things. He loves this. He is 64 years old, a retired PR guy, an environmental engineer, a Jesuit-trained fallen Catholic whose enthusiasm for waste management is oddly infectious. I have come to regard him as the high priest of trash.
“Instead of being up to our eyeballs in dinosaur poop,“ he says, “we’re made of dinosaur poop. You know? And other chemicals. We got garbage in us. There’s a carbon cell from Napoleon in your elbow somewhere. It’s nature running things around again, a continuous loop. It’s all done by bacteria breaking it down into carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, okay? Think about it.“__
I tell him I’ll add it to my list, which keeps getting longer, the longer I’m here. Joe retired from the landfill a couple of years ago, but he comes back to consult, to visit, to help Donny, his assistant who took over his job, and to sit and marvel. He entered the refuse world back in the 1960s, when people first awakened, as if from a lazy daydream, to the notion that trash not only matters but trash is matter, and matter never leaves. You can burn it. You can bury it. You can throw it into the ocean. You can try to hide it, but it still exists in some form: ash, sludge, gas, particulate matter floating in the air. “It all comes back to the idea of the cycle,“ he says. “We’re going to keep reusing the same stuff¬, so let’s reuse it responsibly so we don’t choke on it.“
He gives me an example. “See those pipes?“ he says, pointing as we cruise up the landfill. “Those mothers are gas.“ The pipes are fat and prominent, about two feet in diameter, and a constant source of crazy wonder. Eighty miles of pipes encircle the landfill, sucking out a deadly mix of methane, carbon dioxide, and other gases continuously produced by the fermenting trash. The pipes are connected with seventy-five miles of underground trenches and to a network of 1,400 wells. The methane mix is highly explosive and smelly and in the past has been an environmental nightmare. As trash continues to ferment, the methane is unstoppable. And so the pipes—a landfill miracle, a technology pioneered by Sanitation Districts engineers—deliver the methane to the Gas-to-Energy Facility. The methane feeds a boiler, creates steam. The steam turns a turbine. The turbine generates eight-eight megawatts of electricity—enough to power about 70,000 Southern California homes.
Before I started hanging out at the landfill, I had no idea we could generate electricity from trash. “Most people don’t know this,“ I say to Joe.
“Oh, a lot of people know it,“ he says.
No, they don’t. I’ve checked. I’ve consulted folks back home, regular trashmakers, average citizens going through cartons of Hefty bags, who think little beyond “Gotta take the trash out“ when it comes to the final resting place of their garbage. “People don’t know we power homes with landfill gas,“ I say. “Don’t you think people should know this?“
He looks at me, weary. “Why do you think I’ve been busting my ass at this for thirty years, lady?“
He blinks, removes his glasses, takes out a handkerchief, and wipes them clean. “That’s what I did,“ he says. “I did nothing but tell people about what we do here. Now, how much time does society have to listen? Well, the answer to that is, society’s interest level is pretty low. It doesn’t necessarily want to know where its waste goes. It’s embarrassed by its responsibility in this arena.“
Joe parks the car and we get out. We stand and peer down into the landfill, at trash, the very stuff¬ Herman and his fellow truckers dumped earlier this morning. From this distance, the open landfill is a giant brown 500-acre bowl. Trash is dumped in as many as three dumping areas, or “cells,“ daily. Each cell is about the size of a football field, and every hour an additional 1,200 tons of trash is put into it. Against the backdrop of brown, a cell of trash is a shock of red and green and yellow and white, a smash of crawling color. A team of thirty heavy-equipment operators dances madly over the pile. Huge bulldozers, ten feet tall, equipped with seventeen-foot blades, push and sculpt the trash into rows. Then the mighty Bomags, 120,000-pound compactors with 130,000 pounds of pushing power, smash and crunch and squish the trash, forcing out air, forcing it tighter and tighter to save space. All of these machines crawl impossibly close to one another, backward, forward, over steep hills of trash, clinging lopsidedly to edges. From up here, the sounds are all roar and backup beeps, echoing around the bowl.
After a cell has reached daily capacity, the scrapers move in, the biggest machines of all, three-three feet long, sixteen feet high—the wheels alone are nine feet tall. Scrapers are dirt movers. They haul dirt from enormous piles and dump it a foot thick over the cell of trash, sealing in odors, rats, bugs, concealing the leftovers of a yesterday everyone is more than ready to be done with.
By day’s end, there will be no trace of trash anywhere in the landfill.
The next day, the process repeats. Cell by cell, the garbage spreads across the landfill floor until it hits the far side, the edge of the bowl, and a new layer, or “lift,“ is begun.
A parade of water trucks spray the dirt with reclaimed sewage water to control dust, and a team of paper pickers runs madly on foot to catch anything the wind might pick up and try to carry away—the worst o¬ffender being plastic grocery bags that can take o¬ like kids’ balloons. A chemical odor retardant is sometimes used when things get too bad, or again if the wind conspires, and there are a lot of seagulls waiting on a nearby ridge. Seagulls are a landfill nuisance because they fly away with food scraps and, as is their reputation, fight each other over them midflight, often losing them, and soon a lady has a half-eaten hamburger splashing into her backyard pool. For a time, engineers were utterly confounded by the seagull problem, firing off¬ cannons to scare them away, piping in the sounds of hawks and owls—but the gulls got so used to the sounds they would stand on top of the cannons and inside the speakers. The solution was elegant and simple: tall, portable poles placed at intervals over the working face of the landfill, with nylon fishing line stretched between them. The lines disrupt the gulls’ unique spiral landing pattern; the birds give up before even trying. “I guess they’re too stupid to walk on in under the wires,“ Joe says with a shrug.
A more urgent and literally more pressing concern than birds in any landfill is leachate, the liquids that might ooze out. People are not supposed to throw away paint thinner or nail polish or batteries or transmission fluid or motor oil, but plenty do, plenty of it comes in on trucks, and plenty of it gets smashed and smushed, mixing with rainwater into a toxic cocktail that, if it escapes the landfill and gets into the groundwater, could be deadly to nearby communities. And so a twelve-foot liner of clay, plastic, sand, and other barrier materials covers the walls and floor of the landll—a diaper on the largest scale imaginable designed to absorb and seal in wetness. Seventeen miles of pipes carry the leachate into collection areas, where a team of field engineers monitors it. One of the ways a landfill engineer anywhere in the world earns bragging rights is if he can pour himself a glass of the leachate from his landfill and drink it.
All of this—the operational area of Puente Hills—is invisible to the public, thanks to earthen berms that rise ten feet above the working face. The scraper drivers keep adding to the top of the berm as the landfill fills, constantly building the fortress wall.
For their part, the scraper drivers refer to the berms as “visuals.“ Some of the most fun you can have on a scraper, they have told me, is steadying your 155,000-pound machine over the tip of a visual barely wider than the span of your tires. Once in a while a scraper will fall off¬, sometimes sliding one hundred feet down or sometimes hanging there, half on and half off¬, until a crane can be summoned to rescue it. A driver who falls o¬ a visual will get called “Tipsy Toes“ or “Tipper“ until the next guy does it and earns of the torch of shame.
A bulldozer or Bomag driver who manages to roll his machine over into the trash will likewise have to endure the name “Flipper.“
“You should go down there,“ Joe says. “You should go down there and ride in the trash, get a feel for it.“
mike “big mike“ speiser is the most famous Bomag driver at the landfill, and some say the world. This is only incidentally because he looks, as much as a person can, like a Bomag. He is proudly boxy, enormous, and bald, and he appears as though he could crush the trash without the assistance of machinery. He is 45 years old and has impressive tattoos: a Grim Reaper, a skeleton with a dagger through the head,
liz, speiser, a skull with flames shooting out, and a skull with horns and a bullet hole in its head. “Like the Devil got shot in the head or something,“ he says. “Basically.“
He is a shy man who blushes when he smiles, and he is known for being a gentleman. He is famous because he won first place on compactors—a test of agility and speed—in the 2002 Solid Waste Association of North America’s International Road-E-O in Cocoa Beach, Florida. “He is the best in the nation,“ a few of the operators have told me. Mike does not himself brag about the honor, but he does allow: “I am very, very good at this.“
Mike and I stand at the edge of a cell of trash in motion, Bomag chugging, ready to roll. He climbs the ladder to the cab and off¬ers his hand to help hoist me up. “The air conditioner works nice, and it’s a pressurized cab, so it keeps the smells out.“ He shows o¬ the air-ride feature of the cushioned seat, apologizing that there is only one. He takes the controls while I hunch behind him and hang on to his shoulders. We crawl slowly, as if in a tank, toward and into the cell of trash, about thirty feet deep. We are high above with a marvelous view of smeared paper plates, Target bags, egg cartons, Green Giant frozen peas, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, all manner of Hefty and Glad bags splayed open to reveal the guts of everyday American life. E¬ffortlessly, we climb over a mattress and a TV and a tricycle and a rocking chair and soda bottles and deodorant, until pretty soon the eye refuses to di¬fferentiate the trash, refuses to register nonsense the mind can’t begin to place in anything close to a meaningful narrative. We go rolling through an acre of garbage, mounds and mounds of it cracking and turning to mush under the teeth of the Bomag.
“No doubt, we make a lot of trash in America,“ Mike says. “No doubt. And this is a tiny piece of one day, in one landfill. But I don’t tend to think about that. Mostly I just think about not getting run into by a dozer.“
We sink in, climb out, sink, climb. Mike keeps moving forward, pushing trash toward the edge of the cli¬ff formed by the day’s massive pile.
“You’re getting close to the edge,“ I tell him.
He starts talking about smoothing and grabbing and peeling, but the only words I can understand are diving over the vertical, which we are about to do. We are about to free-fall over a cliff of trash. I make the point that this is scaring the shit out of me.
“A lot of guys I train cry their first couple of weeks,“ he says.
He assures me that the Bomag is extremely agile. He says the only worry, really, is tree stumps. “One time I was coming over a vertical, and on the way down I hit a stump about the size of a car. I started sliding down the slope sideways. You just kind of hold on and gun it and try to get o¬ of it. That was the only time I really had a pucker butt.“
We fall over the ledge and sure enough, the Bomag clings to the trash like a squirrel, and we begin our descent down, about thirty feet down, into more trash, where there are six or seven bulldozers zooming about, backward, forward, pushing trash, sculpting the cell.
I ask him who’s in charge here, who has the right of way, who yields to whom. He says everyone more or less figures it out as they go along. He says it’s part of the fun. He talks about riding dirt bikes when he was 5. “Experiences like that prepare you. You learn the limits of motion.“ Any kid who grew up with dirt bikes and four-wheelers would obviously love a job like this, he says, adding that he considers himself blessed.
Like so many of the people I meet at the landfill, he tells me he enjoys nature, being outdoors, solitude. We head back up the cli¬ff of trash to square o¬ for another dive down, and he whistles. Then he invites me to join him for lunch later. “I mean, if you want.“
Between the leachate, the methane, the enormous equipment, the rotating cells, the seagull lines, the bougainvillea vine, all the landscaping, all the field engineers, all the chemistry, I’m thinking: This is awfully complicated. This is a lot to go through so we can continue living irresponsibly, or in denial, as if our trash has some magical way of just vanishing. At one point, I confess to Joe Haworth that I have no idea where, back home, my own trash goes after it leaves the end of my driveway, gets hauled o¬ in a green truck while my dogs stand on the porch and bark stupidly at it. I have no idea whatsoever, and I certainly have no sense of my trash having a destiny of such complexity and such bother.
This, Joe tells me, is a preferable situation to when trash was simple. Throughout most of history, trash was a linear concern, the end of a simple four-beat pattern: You dig up raw materials, make something with them, use the something, and when the usefulness is over, you throw the thing away. One, two, three, trash. One, two, three, trash. One, two, three, trash. The piling of trash became a concern as soon as there were enough people clustered in one place to notice it. The city of Athens organized the first municipal dump in the Western world in 500 b.c. Citizens were required to dispose of their waste at least one mile from city walls. This was an oddly forward-thinking plan, especially when you consider that, zooming all the way up to the eighteenth century, most Americans were simply throwing their trash out the window into the street—though trash-related diseases such as the bubonic plague, cholera, and typhoid fever had been known to alter the populations of Europe and influence monarchies across the world.
Burning trash became a big deal in the late 1800s, with the invention of municipal incinerators as well as the practice of putting a match to the stuff¬ in one’s own backyard. Burning trash was wonderful, magical, because it made it seem to disappear.
For a while, Americans blithely dumped trash into the ocean—but then, stinky, ruined beaches and clogged harbors prompted the Supreme Court to ban that practice in 1934. Even so, it’s worth noting that a plastic soup of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States—about 500 nautical miles o¬ the California coast, past Hawaii, and almost as far as Japan.
Joe Haworth grew up in downtown Los Angeles, and he remembers burning trash as a boy. “Everybody had a backyard incinerator,“ he tells me. “I remember looking at the wax melting off¬ the milk carton thinking, Oh, that’s really cool. We put the ashes in a bucket, and the city would haul the ashes away. You’d separate the food scraps. They’d be taken to the pig farms. Then we had a mayor, Sam Yorty, saying, Hey, if we throw all this stuff¬ together, we can make it easier for the housewives, make it simpler for them; let’s put it all in one big can and haul it away. Sam Yorty was elected, and housewives were banging trash lids together saying, Bless you, Mayor Sam! Yup. Look up Sam Yorty. Y-o-r-t-y.“
And so, the urban landfill, which in the beginning was a dump on the edge of town. When the pile got too high, someone would light a match to it and make room for more. And more. And more. Volume became an absurdly huge problem, with the dawning of the baby boom and the quantity of trash exploding in the crazed TV-dinner consumerism following World War II. Burn all that trash in a crowded place like Los Angeles and you contribute to the most famous smog problem in the world. In 1959 the American Society of Civil Engineers published a standard guide to sanitary landfills. Instead of burning trash, the idea was to bury it. To guard against rodents and odors, the guide suggested compacting trash and covering it with a new layer of soil each day.
And so, the modern era of trash.
Joe Haworth and his college buddies were studying civil engineering at Loyola Marymount University at the time. Joe had not yet had his trash awakening, although he and his engineering friends, infected by the idealism of the time, the dawning of the environmental movement, were getting excited about…sewage.
“The whole nation’s plumbing was coming apart,“ he tells me. “It was literally going to pieces. It was like the mayor’s idiot son ran the local sewage treatment.“ There was no thinking. There was just expediency: Dump the crap into the river. In the big-picture tradition of the Jesuits, a professor at Loyola was urging Joe to do something with his life. The professor told him about sanitary engineering. He said there was a future, something big, bigger than anyone could imagine, and a chance to do something good.
There was no EPA yet. There were virtually no federal laws concerning pollution. Oil tankers were regularly dumping crankcase into oceans, air pollution was literally killing people—ninety-six in just four days in New York City, and in Ohio the Cuyahoga River burst into flames five stories high from floating chemicals.
And so, the awakening. In 1962, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, a cry of ecological radicalism meant to awaken a public lazily dependent on the chemical control of nature. The book ignited the first serious public dialogue about the dangers of pesticides and other chemicals. Ed Muskie, the famously cranky U.S. senator, championed a national environmental policy, pushing the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act—much of the work born of his disgust over the polluted rivers in his native Maine.
In 1970, President Nixon created the EPA.
The modern environmental movement was nothing without sharp young minds capable of inventing change. Funds became available, traineeships at places like Stanford, Cal Tech, MIT. The best and brightest, including Joe, got free rides to study trash. Joe went to Stanford. “A lot of us felt the obligation to go into public service,“ he says. “This was exciting stuff¬. We were thinking up all-new ways of helping nature play catch-up after a couple of pretty messy centuries.“ It was, he says, a thrilling time to be a sanitary engineer, even as the title gradually morphed into “environmental engineer.“ In fact, these guys would go on to change the paradigm, inventing systems that would begin to provide relief to a planet choking on its own debris.
Joe never set out to be a PR guy. He was more or less called. So much was happening, so many innovations. His colleagues didn’t have the knack for putting multipart engineering concepts into the vernacular, but Joe had it in spades. And so he created the information office and became a mouthpiece.
Using landfill gas to generate electrical power—that was a good example. He remembers those early days with the fondness of an old man thinking of his first kid. It happened at Palos Verdes, one of the Districts’ older landfills, which was adjacent to a handsome neighborhood where a woman was complaining about her dead roses. She blamed the landfill; surely something disgusting was emanating out of that dump. She was right. Inspectors found that methane, the explosive gas they normally simply flared to get rid of, had migrated from the landfill into the neighborhood.
“So we said, ‘Whoa, we gotta do something,’ “ recalls Joe. “So we dug a trench near her roses, put gravel in it. We figured, well, that stu¬ff will just come up through the gravel because that’ll be the easiest road for it to travel. When that didn’t work, we put a pipe in, started to suck the gas out. Then our guys said, ‘You know what, we’re burning this stu¬ff now just to get rid of it. That’s a pretty good-looking flame. I wonder if that would work in an engine.’ So our guys then began to run it through an internal combustion engine. And it ran the engine.“
It was one of those eureka moments: Use landfill gas to generate electricity! To a young environmental engineer, it was the most elegant example imaginable of closing the loop, reusing everything, making something useful out of, literally, garbage.
Currently, about 425 landfills in the United States produce landfill gas (LFG), generating about 10 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year. This is a green fuel, off¬setting the use of 169 million barrels of oil per year or 356,000 railcars of coal. According to the EPA, the carbon reduction is the equivalent of removing the emissions from nearly 14 million vehicles on the road or planting nearly 20 million acres of forest.
And so all those complications of trash—the methane, the leachate, all the enormous equipment, all the landscaping, all the chemistry—have really nothing to do with enabling an irresponsible public intent on ignoring trash. That’s our own deal, our own psychology. In real-world terms, the complications of trash are the human inventions and human interventions intent on closing the cycle to restore nature’s severed loop.
“What is pollution?“ Joe says. “Pollution’s just the wrong stuff¬ in the wrong place at the wrong time. Any other time, it’s a resource. Think about that.“
when i enter the lunchroom with Big Mike, he lags behind, tells me to go ahead in and get started. By now I know the dynamics of “second lunch,“ at noon, and I wonder where Big Mike will sit.
I head down to the table with Steve, Wes, Patrick, Jamie, the happy loudmouths of second lunch. I tell them that I drove on the Bomag with Big Mike today and also rode on a rig with Herman, who, I note, seemed like such a happy, contented guy. This remark brings jeers. Herman? Herman, they say, used to be such an old crank. Especially when he drove the water truck. His truck was no. 6601. He would hide it. He was like, “That’s my water truck! You better not touch it.“ He had his cowboy hat. You better not touch his hat! They crack up over the memory of Herman’s hat. Oh, that’s a good one. They are all gossip and cackle. I tell them they sound like girls. The lunchroom is stark and temporal, a large white double-wide with tables and bulletin boards and newspapers and buzzing fluorescent lights.
Big Mike sits in the center of the action, chewing, smiling, never saying anything. He usually eats at eleven thirty.
Second lunch is almost all “dirt,“ the men who run the scrapers and push dirt. First lunch, at eleven thirty, is almost all “rubbish,“ the men who push rubbish with the dozers. The dirt crew is very gabby about the rubbish crew. They say rubbish is aloof, boring, and miserable. Dirt, they say, is happy, hilarious, and loving. I am trying to understand the source of these distinctions.
Each day they seem excited to have a visitor in the lunchroom and like schoolkids talk at me all at once. “We are the biggest landfill in the nation,“ one of them declares. “Did anyone tell you that? We are number one.“ They tell me again and again of Big Mike’s win at the Road-E-O. “We are number one.“ Mike waves.
“We have awesome equipment,“ says one.
“We have eighteen D9s.“
“We have two D8s.“
“Compactors? We’ve got five of those.“
“And two D10s—120,000 pounds each.“
“We have a D11 out at our Calabasas landfill, which is even bigger than that one.“
“I personally don’t think I’ve ever seen a D12. To be honest with you, I don’t think Caterpillar even makes them anymore.“
“They don’t.“
“We have the biggest machines in the world.“
“We are number one.“
Steve Utley, a scraper driver, tall, gangly, with long blond curls, holds court at the corner table. If he is the leader of this group, it is because he can withstand constant jabbing and ridicule, mostly about his hair, with its history of bad cuts, bad bangs, Farrah Fawcett layers. Lately, the guys have been encouraging Steve to get a mullet. They have off¬ered to pay him to do it. Steve emphatically refuses, but the image brings delight to Jamie, to Joe, and to Patrick, and somehow morphs into a discussion of the possibility of Steve one day making porn, mullet porn. There is no logical sequence to the evolution of this riff¬, but it takes on a life of its own, until soon midgets enter the story and the idea of Steve making midget mullet porn. The laughter is uproarious, and one guy spits out his Mountain Dew, and there is stomping of feet and pounding of tables until the lunchroom trailer shakes, like a ship of drunken pirates.
All of these men are lifers, most having worked their way up from paper pickers. Steve has been here for twenty-three years, Tony for nineteen, and Patrick for fourteen. For a heavy-equipment operator, getting a job with the Sanitation Districts is considered a ticket to paradise, given the benefits and good pay—about $80,000 a year before overtime—the steady year-round work, and the fact that trash is recession-proof. Most of the crew lives far east of the landfill, sixty, seventy, eighty miles away in the California desert, commuting more than two hours each way because this is L.A. and nothing is affordable. Because of the distance, and because they have to maintain squeaky clean driving records in order to keep their jobs, they are not the sort of guys who leave work and hang out together in bars. They vanpool together, watch movies. They spend their days alone, pushing dirt from here to there, and so aside from their time together in the van, all they have is the lunchroom.
They tell me that any of these operators can run any piece of equipment in the yard. All of the dirt crew has at some point run rubbish and vice versa, and even dirt has to concede that rubbish is more fun.
“Crushing things,“ says one. “The biggest thrill at this entire landfill is crushing things.“
“Crushing boats. Just to destroy a boat. Or a trailer or something like that. That’s probably the biggest thrill that I can think of.“
“I crushed a mobile once. What was neat about it was I didn’t know it was there, but when I came up to it, I kind of tagged onto the corner of it and I must have hit it just right, because when I hit it the whole thing just flattened.“
“Awwww!“
For all the joy in crushing things, the facts of the matter sometimes give these guys pause. “You’d be amazed at what gets thrown out,“ one says. “Stuff¬ that could be donated. We could write a book about the American way of waste.“
“Companies throw stu¬ff away because of tas. Like brand-new running shoes. These companies cut all their surplus shoes up so nobody can get them. But they would be perfectly fine. They could donate them. They could do something with them.“
“When I first started here, for like probably two or three weeks these big semitrailers were just dumping piles of brand-new computer typewriters. Piles! Sometimes there would be three trucks next to each other, dumping brand-new computer typewriters. Never been opened. Still in the box.“
“Waste. Waste. Waste. Sure, it bothers you, but what can you do about it?“
“There was a Sears that closed down. And they had their big sale. Then whatever didn’t sell came into the landfill. Brand-new. Brand-new! Other customers would be here dumping, then run over and pick up brand-new chain saws.“
Salvaging is strictly prohibited at the landfill. This may sound like some picky rule, but the truth is, people who are stupid enough to dive in among the dozers to grab something sometimes end up dead. Private citizens who dump here are provided a separate dumping area away from the action of the machines, but that doesn’t stop them from walking over to the working cell and trying to go for the grab.
“We’ve had people crushed.“
“You can’t see them. You literally don’t know they’re there. No one is supposed to be there.“
“Remember that lady that got crushed?“
“Oh yeah.“
I make the point that with all this drama, rubbish sounds a lot more…interesting than dirt. Why do they suppose the rubbish crew is so miserable?
It is, they say, a body thing. Most of the rubbish crew is in pain, or used to be in pain, or is fighting it. Typically, a man moves over to rubbish only when his body can no longer take dirt. Rubbish is soft. Dirt is hard. A man who spends eight or ten hours a day five days a week on a D10 pushing dirt is a man with jangled bones, achy joints, herniated disks. Most of the rubbish guys are old, nearing retirement, with a history of back and neck operations. “Going over to rubbish is more or less being put out to pasture,“ one says.
There are exceptions. Big Mike drove a scraper for just two years before his back got destroyed. He had surgery, a whole year in bed, and then of course he returned to have a terrific career in rubbish on his Bomag, number one in the U.S.A.
But usually, dirt means you’re still young. Falling o¬ visuals, straddling one, Tipper and Tipsy Toes. Dirt is the good old days.
These days are, of course, numbered. In five years, the Puente Hills Landfill closes. A Waste-by-Rail program will take over. Instead of being dumped here, the trash will be put in sealed boxcars and delivered 200 miles west to the new Mesquite Regional Landfill in Imperial County, a super-landfill said to last a hundred years.
A skeleton crew of maintenance workers and field engineers will keep the Puente Hills infrastructure working, will monitor the leachate, maintain the gas wells and the power plant that will continue to transform methane into electricity for about thirty years. But there will be no more trash, no more trucks, no more verticals to crash over, and no more radical dirt moves on a D10. Most of the rubbish crew will be old enough to retire, while the dirt crew will get absorbed somewhere within the enormous Sanitation Districts organization.
None of the guys in the lunchroom will admit to the possibility of ever missing this dump, this history, these good old days, but they scheme together about their bosses getting permits to open more space in the canyons, more space for trash, more time for Puente Hills.
“It’s a pipe dream,“ one says. “Sooner or later, you just have to face the fact that this place is going to close.“
when the landfill closes, it will be capped, sealed, covered in layers and layers of stone and clay and soil, planted, and turned over to the Los Angeles County Department of Parks and Recreation, a place for people to play. Plans have been in the works for well over a decade: Every time a truck dumps a ton of trash, a dollar goes into a Habitat Authority fund. The goal of the fund is to maintain a wildlife corridor more than twice as large as the fill area. Already miles of hiking and horseback-riding trails traverse this land and even the landfill itself, separated from daily operations.
Joe and I have been driving around the landfill, looking at flowers and discussing how the landscape guys get them to grow. “See those pipes?“ he says, pointing this time to small irrigation pipes snaking all over the ground—nothing so surprising to see in an arid landscape made lush. But these pipes, explains Joe, carry reclaimed wastewater from the Sanitation Districts’ nearby sewage-treatment plant. “Reuse everything,“ he says. “Keep it in the cycle.“ He parks at a fence, up at the top of the landfill, just beyond the horse trails, where there is a strawberry farm. It’s on land adjacent to the landfill, rows and rows of fat green plants ready for picking. The farm also depends on recycled wastewater for its irrigation. “Isn’t that neat?“ Joe says. He and others keep talking about this recycled sewage with a shrug. No big deal. This is just the way things work. Sewage water feeding strawberry plants. It has taken me a while to accept the notion that this, in fact, is the way things work.
“Oh, just think about it,“ Joe says. “What is a sewage-treatment plant? It’s an apology to nature for putting too many people in one place. Nature isn’t designed for us to live the way we do. Nature designed it more like the Native Americans had it, where, when the neighborhood started to smell, you picked up your tepee and went over there. There was some basic human rule that said you go thataway. Primitive societies knew that nature would ultimately reclaim all that organic material so they could come back in a few years.“
Nature, he points out, gave us rain, streams, rivers, and the ocean to finish the job of digestion. “This is just a straight environmental-engineering calculation,“ he says. “Just about everybody in this country has one cubic foot of digester somewhere out there finishing the job that he or she couldn’t complete. Your guts start the process and nature completes it. Now, where is that going to happen? If you let our sewage from this L.A. area with 10 million people float into the ocean, you would have one really beat-up ocean. So what do we do? We take the processes that occur in an ocean or a river and we do it in tanks. The same bacteria that work in nature, basically a big bacterial soup that emulates what goes on in the ground or in a river, does the whole thing in a tank in a more concentrated fashion. So instead of taking ten days in a river, we do it in eight hours inside a tank.“
There is something vaguely utopian about all of this. A beautiful landfill blooming with pink flowers, wastewater feeding strawberries, eight-eight megawatts of electricity out of garbage and sludge, hiking trails over trash. It would seem we were talking about an entirely di¬fferent planet, not our own supposedly doomed one—where the sky is falling, where because of our gluttony, we are in danger of making one final grand mess of the place, if not melting it or blowing it up. Those are all certainly viable outcomes. But there is more to the story: There are people on this very same planet having a rousing good time fixing the place, people motivated by the thrill of repair, the simple joy of invention, and an urge to do good.
The more time I spend at the landfill, the more I get the sense that I’m in a diff¬erent dimension, listening to more highly evolved beings that, somehow, nobody ever noticed.
Nearly all of the engineers I meet boast about the MRF, how huge it is—large enough to house three 747s—how the design is environmentally-friendly, with recycled materials used throughout the project, from structural and reinforcing steel to ceiling and floor tiles.
Joe Haworth would like to highlight his own contribution: an observation deck where the public can come through and watch. “I insisted on this,“ he says. “I said we have to be able to show people what’s happening to their trash.“ He’s dressed today in a green flowered shirt, khaki shorts, and tennis shoes. He is excited to be here, like a man greeting a newcomer in his fancy new mansion. The observation deck is sleek and futuristic, a long glass corridor, dimly lit by runway-style floor lights. Below us, the action of the MRF: Trucks pull in one end of the enormous building, dump garbage. Dozers move the garbage to the sorting floor, where bulky valuables, wood, carpet, and large chunks of cardboard are pulled out. This is commercial garbage intended for recycling—a minuscule fraction of L.A. County’s trash—but to Joe and his cronies it represents a beautiful outlook for, one day, all our trash. After the big stuff¬ is picked out, the trash is sent via conveyor to an automated picking system and finally to the picking line, where teams of sorters—women wearing safety glasses and bandannas and surgical masks—pick, Lucille Ball–style, through the trash. One grabs paper, one grabs clear plastic, one aluminum, and so on. The separated materials are baled and stacked, awaiting purchase.
“Isn’t that neat?“ Joe says.
I tell him I find it completely depressing. I feel like Ebenezer Scrooge and he’s the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come pointing to where I’m headed: a world in which a whole lot of poor people have to pick through my garbage so the planet doesn’t su¬ffocate. I sink, as perhaps anyone would, into recycle guilt.
Americans recycle about one and a half pounds of the five pounds of trash they produce each day—a national recycling rate of 32 percent. This is actually not horrible when you figure that, twenty years ago, it was just 16 percent. San Francisco has a recycling rate of 69 percent, the best of any American city.
The goal, in the larger and perhaps mythical sense, is 100 percent. Zero waste. The goal is to stop thinking of waste as a problem and to start thinking of it, simply, as the result of a design flaw in manufacturing: We should be reusing everything. “It’s about closing the loop,“ Joe says. “And maybe that starts with us first just getting hold of our gluttony. You know, we still have remnants of that old reptilian brain that tells us to just keep getting more, more, more in order to be happy. You know, a guy gets his first BMW, expects to be happy. Then he’s o¬ff skiing with Bob, who has a better BMW. Damn. He was supposed to be happy! It didn’t work. So now he needs a 4,000-square-foot house. You know the story.“
I tell him I don’t see Bob and his buddy slowing down anytime soon. We are a nation of consumers. We can’t seem to stop ourselves. We don’t seem to even want to stop ourselves.
He does not see this as a uniquely American or even modern phenomenon. “We’re not smart enough yet,“ he says. “We’re young. You can argue how long Homo sapiens have been around, but the guess is something like 150,000 years. We are amateurs at this. We have just barely gotten here in terms of the clock of the earth. And we have our physics way ahead of our psyche. We know how to make a lot of stu¬ff. But the notion of responsibility? We’re slower on that. The idea that you’re supposed to leave the world better than the way it was when you showed up? We’re onto it, but we’re not nearly there. We need to be able to take the next step and realize that the world’s ideas are bigger than just a bunch of stuff¬.“
The more he talks like this, the more optimistic he becomes: People will get smarter, more conscientious, more in tune with the needs of the next generation; chivalry will spread throughout the world!
I apologize for not seeing it. I confess that I don’t see this recycling thing really kicking in where I come from, where many people regard recycling as a quaint, retro 1990s fad. Rumor has it that there’s a paper glut, that no one knows what to do with all those plastic soda bottles other than make some silly belts out of them, that all this stuff¬ just ends up in landfills in the end, so why bother?
“In the early days of recycling, maybe,“ he says. “Paper goods were mid at probably a pretty low grade where the guy had it for six months in his yard, it got wet and turned into a huge spitwad. But the higher the cost of disposal goes, the more inventive people become.“ It costs $29 a ton to dump here at Puente Hills. It will cost $60 a ton to haul trash by rail out of the Los Angeles basin. “People get really creative at $60 a ton,“ he says. We talk about thriving markets in China—wastepaper is America’s number one export by volume to China. The ships that bring all those toys and TVs in from China now return full of our old paper, which they use to pack more goods made in China. And as for making new paper, 36 percent of the fiber that goes into new paper now comes from recycled sources. “And now there are rug companies that will actually lease you a rug,“ Joe says. “If someone spills on the little square, they pop up the square. The company takes the square back, they shave the fuzz o¬, they melt the plastic, make new fuzz, put it back on. Yeah. Isn’t that crazy? And it’s being done because of the disposal costs. It pushes backward.“
I ask him if there is any squashing his optimism.
He shrugs. “People are basically good-hearted until put in a very bad corner,“ he says. “We just have to keep giving them reasons to be good-hearted—the opportunity to be good-hearted.
“Look, environmental consciousness is not a religious thing. It doesn’t have holy precepts that say you can’t touch a plastic bag or you’re a horrible person. It’s more: ‘Get a grip and find a balance.’ Life’s organic. It’s smelly and gooey. Get past it. It’s just science. I think as we get more people reconnected to science through recycling, we get them to understand the magic of this planet.“
We head downstairs to see the action of the MRF up close. I stand behind a pregnant Hispanic woman pulling dirty empty soda bottles out of a heap of garbage rolling by so fast on the conveyor belt she nearly misses a perfectly good twenty-ounce Sierra Mist.
She catches my eye and I don’t quite know what to do with my shame, and so, stupidly, I smile and give her a thumbs-up.
Joe invites me to dinner. He says we have to stop home and pick up Shelly, his wife. We get back into his old car, and as we crawl on the crowded 605 he gets to talking about the afterlife, whether there is one, whether there isn’t. “Nature certainly seems to be hinting at it,“ he says. “As much as I can be cynical about that sort of thing. You know, I’m more about that Marxist thinking that religion is the opiate of the masses—calm the people down so that the kings can get away with murder. But nature says, Wait a minute now, it’s all cycles. Nature does not seem to be telling us that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel and then we all go boop. The spiritual world could be just a part of the cycle that we don’t yet understand.“
He opens his window to get some air. We sit and stare into traffic.
“Of course, my wife swears that she was here before as a Spanish guy. She remembers water coming in through the portholes, the whole bit. But she’s odd, anyway.“
We stop at the house and Shelly won’t let us in because it’s too messy for company, and so we sit in the backyard and sip Pinot Grigio and I marvel at the odd assortment of stu¬ff in the yard and on the porch, a little crooked fake Christmas tree and an empty pond and little ceramic dwarfs. Shelly is as tall as Olive Oyl, with a handsome face and a jet-black mane, and she chain-smokes and speaks the same crazily observant language as her husband. The two get tangled in notions, in thinking about what it would be like if there were no more people on earth, in trying to remember names of species of lizards, or names of saints, until one of them has to run inside and get a book to look it up.
At one point, when Joe is inside trying to find his encyclopedia of movie actors, she turns to me and says: “Did you notice anything funny about landfill people? They’re the most ethical bunch of people. So many of them were Jesuit trained, so maybe it goes back to that, where doing your best for the common good is a paramount principle. But they approach their jobs in the most ethical way. They’re taking the worst two things we have—trash and sewage—and turning them into golf courses and wonderful things.
“Isn’t that weird? It’s like a cause for these people. I’ve noticed it from the beginning, having to go to all these dreadful conferences and things. I used to think, These should be our politicians. We should only elect people trained in landfill maintenance.“
Joe comes back out. He didn’t find the encyclopedia. Instead, he’s carrying a journal article that reminded him of something funny. “No one knows where water came from,“ he announces. “Some people think it came in as dirty snowballs, as asteroids. They’re not positive water started here. It may have come from space.“ He sits down, sips his wine, ponders. “We know all the molecules came from space. Ask any nuclear scientist about the origins of the bigger molecules: Carbon and nitrogen and oxygen and all the stuff¬ that makes up life—they were all hydrogen to begin with. They came out of the fusion process that takes place in the center of suns. We’re stardust, literally. We are atomic waste!“ He slaps the table, laughs harder than he has all day.