Read Online Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash by Edward Humes - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Edward Humes
Tags: General, Social Science, Travel, Sociology, Technology & Engineering, Environmental, Waste Management
Ads: Link
categories of household waste for the first time in our trash history. That trend hasn’t changed since 1960.
The age of the plastic bag was upon us.
3
FROM TRASH TV TO LANDFILL RODEOS
N OW AND THEN WHEN THE WIND BLOWS JUST RIGHT and the day’s garbage is still baking uncovered in the Southern California sun, a flock of strange birds can be seen wheeling above the Puente Hills landfill. Upon closer inspection, however, some of these fliers turn out not to be birds, but escaped plastic grocery bags, which are woven like veins throughout every load of trash dumped in every city landfill in America. Sometimes a few break free of the piles of dirty napkins, spent kitty litter and broken glass holding them down, and they scuttle like urban tumbleweeds across the jagged top of the trash cell, then take flight. This is one of the myriad ways plastic trash makes its way into streets and rivers and oceans, and demonstrates the drawback of engineering products with useful lives that last the half hour or so it takes to bring groceries home from the market, but which possess a second life as refuse that can last a thousand years or more.
Flocks of flying immortal bags are a signature element and a unique hallmark of the disposable age of plastic—a trash challenge Waring and his White Wings never had to deal with or imagine. And yet, despite that, and despite the noise and scale and stench (which really isn’t all that bad, except on the days the sanitation engineers “sweeten” the fill with sewage sludge to jump-start methane production), there is a weirdly beautiful aspect to this place, even to the strange plastic flock flapping and twisting above. To perceive this side of the landfill, one need go no farther than the expression on Big Mike Speiser’s face when he considers his workplace. “We accomplish something here every day,” he says. “It can be strange, it can be loud, but we’re proud of this place, proud of what we do. There is a kind of beauty here, or there will be someday.” He gestures at the oak trees planted in the distance on older sections of Garbage Mountain. “Someday all this will be a park.”
It’s clear the BOMAG master takes pride in Puente Hills’s reputation for being a well-run Disneyland of dumps. Even the neighbors who complain about smells and dust and toxic leaks concede that much (which isn’t to say they share Big Mike’s love of the place—they can’t wait for it to shut down). But Big Mike revels in being a landfill ambassador, talking with the press, demonstrating his driving skills for a National Geographic film crew, chatting with tour groups. He has represented Puente Hills in years past at the national trash Olympics, a not-quite-yearly event sponsored by the Solid Waste Association of North America. This is a gathering of heavy equipment operators from the nation’s waste-management departments and companies, who compete in a series of Olympic-style events set up at a host landfill. At this combination rodeo and monster-truck rally, the contestants must perform various feats of “trash-tacular” skill with their big machines: pass through orange cones with only four inches of clearance on either side, navigate an obstacle course, do some precision blade drops and push a load of gravel to an exact location without spilling. Big Mike has several gold medals to his credit. His colleagues have to point this out, as he won’t; he just nods shyly in acknowledgment once the subject is disclosed.
After the competition, the large men of the landfill fraternity—most of them seem to share Big Mike’s mountainous physique—gather to cool off over a cool drink and to swap stories about the weird things that inevitably turn up at landfills. There’s the mounted deer heads with their glassy eyes and broken antlers, the yellowed dentures scattered in the debris, the occasional bowling ball, the coffin (an empty discard), the mannequins (those always give the dump workers a
The age of the plastic bag was upon us.
3
FROM TRASH TV TO LANDFILL RODEOS
N OW AND THEN WHEN THE WIND BLOWS JUST RIGHT and the day’s garbage is still baking uncovered in the Southern California sun, a flock of strange birds can be seen wheeling above the Puente Hills landfill. Upon closer inspection, however, some of these fliers turn out not to be birds, but escaped plastic grocery bags, which are woven like veins throughout every load of trash dumped in every city landfill in America. Sometimes a few break free of the piles of dirty napkins, spent kitty litter and broken glass holding them down, and they scuttle like urban tumbleweeds across the jagged top of the trash cell, then take flight. This is one of the myriad ways plastic trash makes its way into streets and rivers and oceans, and demonstrates the drawback of engineering products with useful lives that last the half hour or so it takes to bring groceries home from the market, but which possess a second life as refuse that can last a thousand years or more.
Flocks of flying immortal bags are a signature element and a unique hallmark of the disposable age of plastic—a trash challenge Waring and his White Wings never had to deal with or imagine. And yet, despite that, and despite the noise and scale and stench (which really isn’t all that bad, except on the days the sanitation engineers “sweeten” the fill with sewage sludge to jump-start methane production), there is a weirdly beautiful aspect to this place, even to the strange plastic flock flapping and twisting above. To perceive this side of the landfill, one need go no farther than the expression on Big Mike Speiser’s face when he considers his workplace. “We accomplish something here every day,” he says. “It can be strange, it can be loud, but we’re proud of this place, proud of what we do. There is a kind of beauty here, or there will be someday.” He gestures at the oak trees planted in the distance on older sections of Garbage Mountain. “Someday all this will be a park.”
It’s clear the BOMAG master takes pride in Puente Hills’s reputation for being a well-run Disneyland of dumps. Even the neighbors who complain about smells and dust and toxic leaks concede that much (which isn’t to say they share Big Mike’s love of the place—they can’t wait for it to shut down). But Big Mike revels in being a landfill ambassador, talking with the press, demonstrating his driving skills for a National Geographic film crew, chatting with tour groups. He has represented Puente Hills in years past at the national trash Olympics, a not-quite-yearly event sponsored by the Solid Waste Association of North America. This is a gathering of heavy equipment operators from the nation’s waste-management departments and companies, who compete in a series of Olympic-style events set up at a host landfill. At this combination rodeo and monster-truck rally, the contestants must perform various feats of “trash-tacular” skill with their big machines: pass through orange cones with only four inches of clearance on either side, navigate an obstacle course, do some precision blade drops and push a load of gravel to an exact location without spilling. Big Mike has several gold medals to his credit. His colleagues have to point this out, as he won’t; he just nods shyly in acknowledgment once the subject is disclosed.
After the competition, the large men of the landfill fraternity—most of them seem to share Big Mike’s mountainous physique—gather to cool off over a cool drink and to swap stories about the weird things that inevitably turn up at landfills. There’s the mounted deer heads with their glassy eyes and broken antlers, the yellowed dentures scattered in the debris, the occasional bowling ball, the coffin (an empty discard), the mannequins (those always give the dump workers a
Similar Books
