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On the Secret Trail of Trash
by Elizabeth Royte
Book Reviewed by:
My garbage was now in private hands. To get a look at it, I had to call
Mickey Flood, the CEO of IESI, in Fort Worth, Texas, and then Ed Apuzzi,
the company's vice president for business development and legal affairs
in the Northeast region, who decided we should meet at the transfer
station on Election Day, when DSNY wasn't delivering garbage (though
commercial waste continued to pour in). At the appointed hour, I stood
at the building's corner and waited for Apuzzi to show. The sidewalk was
litter free but greasy. A truck had damaged the corrugated metal fence
across the street, and there was a deep pothole on the corner filled
with opaque gray liquid. The building had recently been painted white
with blue trim. Under the company logo—a pine tree—was a phone number to
call with any complaints.
Casually, as if I weren't really spying, I glanced inside the
transfer station. At first, I couldn't tell what I was looking at. Like
a Hollywood soundstage, the walls, floor, and ceiling were painted
black, and there were large floodlights mounted on tracks overhead. But
there weren't many of them, and they shed only a dim light on the hilly
mosaic of garbage that covered half the floor. Higher up, they
illuminated what I at first took for dust motes but realized, when I got
a little closer, were droplets of a powerful perfume, which shot from
nozzles near the ceiling. The smell was sweetly antiseptic. As my eyes
adjusted to the light, I made out large black bags of garbage, small
supermarket sacks of garbage, one of which could have been mine, some
bulk metal pushed off to one side, a rotted board, chair cushions, a
ketchup bottle. But still, the upper contours of the space were
indeterminate. I could have been in a planetarium.
At first the jumble of goods, some ten feet high, appeared
homogeneous to me: it was just a lot of garbage—dirty, ragged, bagged,
loose. But to the practiced eye of a fanatic recycler or a Mexican
pepenador, a professional trash picker, the pile was actually
heterogeneous. It contained metals and textiles, wood and
glass—commodities with value. Save for the preponderance of plastic, it
comprised almost the same materials found in a nineteenth-century
ragpicker's shanty: bones, broken dishes, rags, bits of furniture,
cinders, old tin, useless lamps, decaying vegetables, ribbons, cloth,
legless chairs, and carrion.
Back in the day, all of those items would have found another use.
Today, they were prodded into a rough pile by a worker in a front-end
loader and spilled into a tractor-trailer parked along the far wall of
the tipping floor. Using the backside of its bucket, the loader
awkwardly patted the reeking mass into one solid rectangular cube. The
driver tucked a tarp over the garbage and, with a roar of the engine,
was gone.
While I waited for Apuzzi, I made small talk with Frank Morgante, the
site manager. I asked him if neighbors complained about the station.
"They walk by here and they give us looks," he said. "They look at us
like we're garbage. I want to say to them, 'You want to solve the
garbage problem? Stop eating. Stop living. Then we won't have any more
garbage.'"
A middle-aged man walked by, and I asked him what it was like living
near a transfer station.
"IESI is not a good neighbor," he said. "The place smells and
it's overrun with rats."
From Garbage Land by Elizabeth Royte. Copyright © 2005 by Elizabeth Royte. All rights reserved. No part of this book maybe reproduced without written permission from the publisher.
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