Read Online Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash by Edward Humes - Free Book Online

convenient, they had been told, it was a civic duty, a way of avoiding costly trash collection services, taxes and bills. They did not want to give up their burn barrels and piles of smoking rubbish, and they let their elected officials know it. The thinking was that a bit of soot and smoke in the backyard couldn’t possibly be as big a problem as massive refineries, factories and freeways full of cars. Besides, where would all the trash go? What would it cost? Who would pay? Public sentiment clearly tilted in favor of letting officials address the perceived bigger smog culprits first, the smokestacks and the tailpipes, while leaving those deceptively small backyard burners alone. And so the incinerators would not go gently.
    Neither did the million filthy, soot-covered smudge pots that orange growers and other farmers employed to protect crops from freezing overnight, burning old crankcase oil, discarded tires—anything cheap and combustible, which always meant dirty and toxic. It took years to convince them to switch to cleaner devices and fuels, due to the prevailing and utterly false belief that the smoke “helped hold the heat” close to the ground. Incinerator manufacturers fought back to protect their interests, too, at one point trying to make their products appear more cuddly by marketing sheet metal incinerators shaped like little houses and featuring smiling faces painted beneath stovepipe chimney “hats.”
    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. Jail and a five-hundred-dollar fine awaited illicit burners, and Smokey Joe was finally toast.
    As predicted, the home incinerator ban led to greater volumes of trash in need of disposal, which meant new trash hauling services by both government and industry arose to meet that need. And the garbage had to go somewhere once it was picked up, too. A web of dumps ringing the basin soon opened to accommodate the new and rapidly growing river of trash—growing because Los Angeles was growing, with bean fields and orange groves converted on a daily basis to postwar, GI-Bill-financed suburban housing tracts. Along with the real estate boom, trash became a growth business as never before.
    One place in particular drew Los Angeles’s new mounds of garbage—the area surrounding the eastern L.A. County foothills bordering the San Gabriel Valley. Strategically located in an area with ample open land, it straddled a confluence of major highways and lay near several populous communities—the ideal mix of convenience and seclusion for trash disposal. There was not a single large repository for garbage opened then, but a profusion of small, privately owned garbage destinations. They were open dumps, like the vast majority in America at the time, where refuse was tossed and piled and, in many locations, burned. In short order this area of L.A. bore a nickname worthy of Fitzgerald: the Valley of the Dumps.

    Demand for dump space began mounting then, not only in Los Angeles, but also nationwide. Bans on incinerator and backyard burn piles were only part of the reason. Another trash multiplier had arrived right around the same time: the rise of America’s new consumer culture and the disposable economy ushered in with it. A new tidal wave of trash began to crest then, combining the old refuse that once had been burned with a new flow of disposable trash, containers and short-lived products never before seen. Consumption and garbage became more firmly linked than at any other time in history, with the disposal of products and their packaging displacing other