As Edward Humes shows in Garbology, the history of garbage in the United States is often directly connected to the history of politics in the United States. With the industrialization of the U.S. in the late 19th century, garbage and pollution suddenly became a major problem for many people across the country, particularly in urban centers like New York City. Solving these problems often fell to elected or appointed government officials, perhaps most notably George E. Waring Jr., whose sanitation work in New York City set a template for other sanitation efforts in cities around the world. The efforts of government officials like Waring was often directly shaped by, and in many cases hindered by, powerful, well-funded organizations. These organizations ran the gamut from the Tammany Hall political machine (which used its influence to run New York City politics for decades) to the modern plastic and fossil fuel industries (which wield tremendous influence over politicians through lobbying and campaign donations).
Perhaps the political issue Humes covers in the greatest amount of detail is waste-to-energy plants. These plants, which turn normal trash into electrical energy, were a growing trend in the U.S. in the 1970s and went on to become a major part of waste management in other countries like Denmark. Nevertheless, by the 1980s, the U.S. saw increasing resistance to waste-to-energy plants, some of it from locals who opposed having massive, potentially pollution-spewing incinerators in their backyards. While these concerns were valid, many opponents of waste-to-energy didn’t realize that their efforts would have the unintended side effect of creating massive landfills in their backyards instead, like the Puente Hills landfill outside Los Angeles. Ultimately, Humes argues that money and politics have stopped the U.S. from implementing some of the most viable options for managing the trash crisis, including waste-to-energy plants.
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The job of cleaning up New York then fell to Colonel George E. Waring, a Civil War veteran who, before his military service, had worked as the city engineer responsible for reclaiming the swampland that would become New York’s Central Park. Waring had supervised the design of a drainage system that created the park’s famously scenic lakes and ponds while leaving the rest of it dry. He had gone on to engineer an affordable and efficient dual sewer and drainage system for Memphis that kept storm runoff and septic waste separate. This protected the city water supply from contamination, ending almost overnight the cholera and other waterborne epidemics that had beset “The River City” for decades. Reforming New York’s sanitation department seemed a natural fit for this leading sanitation engineer of the day, who harrumphed into office asserting that he wished to be called “Colonel,” not “Commissioner,” throughout his tenure. His workers were required to salute.
It took seven years of failed attempts to finally pass the ordinances to ban incinerators countywide in 1957. The smog had grown so bad by then that it became nearly impossible to dry clothes successfully on outdoor laundry lines without them absorbing a rain of black soot. Complaints about the dirty byproducts of backyard burning finally matched the defenders, and politicians felt sufficiently safe to act: no more burn barrels, no more happy-face incinerators.
His life’s work, like that of the marketing and design industries he helped create and lead, was dedicated to preventing that from happening, to erase thrift as a quintessential American virtue, and replace it with conspicuous consumption powered by a kind of magical thinking, in which the well would never go dry, the bubble would never burst, oil and all forms of energy would grow cheaper and more plentiful with time, and the landfill would never fill up.
This rise of consumerism and the new American Dream launched during television’s golden age was accompanied by another trash-boosting trend—the plasticization of America.
“Someday we might pay customers for their trash, rather than the other way around,” Steiner allows, reflecting on an everybody-wins future in which trash companies pay a bit for garbage as raw material, then make a fortune turning it into the building blocks of the consumer economy. “We’re not there yet, but it could happen. A few years ago, you’d never hear me say that.”
Recycling in particular has long served as a balm and a penance—a way of making it okay to waste, the assumption being that if something is recycled, then the energy and materials are not being lost, and our disposable economy of abundance doesn’t really seem so wasteful after all. But the meandering, inefficient and sometimes purposeless paths for our garbage revealed by Trash Track puts the lie to those old assumptions.
The 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.
TerraCycle, a New Jersey company that has become a leader in “upcycling,” faced a similar, potentially fatal attack from a larger, richer, established rival just as it was getting traction in the marketplace. Its experience would provide a model for Keller as he struggled to survive what he now calls “The Plastic Bag Wars.”
On the garbage front, this city is so far ahead of its American counterparts that it’s like comparing laser surgery to leech craft. This city recycles trash at twice the U.S. average, its residents create less than half the household waste per capita, and the community philosophy holds that dealing with and solving the problem of trash must be a local concern, even a neighborhood concern. When it comes to waste, NIMBY (Not in My Backyard) is not a factor, as shipping trash off to some distant landfill—making it disappear for others to manage—is considered wasteful, costly and immoral. Not that such out-of-sight, out-of-mind garbage treatment is much of a consideration here: only 3 to 4 percent of this city’s waste ends up in landfills, compared to the U.S. average of 69 percent.
This is not some Shangri-la of past or future. It is the Copenhagen, Denmark, of today.
For all his advocacy for waste-to-energy, Nickolas Themelis believes that the most intelligent, most-likely-to-succeed, long-term solution to waste is far simpler than any giant trash-burning generator, and far less costly, yet so much more difficult to achieve: a changed culture.
Waste-cutting is the secret to sustainability, security and prosperity. That 102-ton legacy doesn’t have to be the end of the story. It’s in everyone’s power to make it the starting point instead.
