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

start, arms or heads poking up out of the cans and Hefty bags). And there are the real bodies, too—because what better place could there be to dispose of the evidence of a serious crime? Puente Hills has had its share: the skull found in the suitcase, the body rolled up in a rug, the rumors of ritual crimes in adjacent Turnbull Canyon, the bloody Santeria shrine found nearby. Then there was Robert Glenn Bennett, who disappeared February 16, 1983, from his maintenance supervisor job at the sanitation district’s water reclamation plant next to the landfill. The fifty-one-year-old never showed up for a part-time bartending gig that Wednesday night after he finished at the plant; witnesses said he argued earlier with a gardener on his staff, who was angry at being denied a promotion. The gardener had a record of minor drug, theft and vandalism offenses, of threatening fellow employees and of exposing himself on the job. Blood matching Bennett’s type was found in the parking lot and on a dump truck, and the gardener, John Alcantara, became the immediate prime suspect. But despite an extensive and unpleasant search of mounds of garbage at the landfill, which police detectives figured to be a likely place for Alcantara to have stashed both body and murder weapon, no evidence could be found linking him to Bennett’s disappearance (or, for that matter, to prove conclusively that Bennett was dead). Twenty-five years would pass before the case would be solved and Alcantara would be convicted of the murder. A witness finally came forward and told police that Alcantara confessed to shooting Bennett in the head, dismembering his body, and then, as the police always suspected, the body had been buried at the adjacent landfill. That’s one of the darker legacies of Puente Hills: What’s left of Robert Bennett remains there to this day, hidden beneath thousands of tons of trash in the Main Canyon section of the landfill, the oldest and deepest zone of Garbage Mountain.
    These are the stories that everyone asks about, the weird, the dark and the unusual discoveries mixed in with the refuse. But that’s not what’s revelatory about any landfill’s contents, Big Mike says. The truly thought-provoking part of the business as he sees it is the endless tide of ordinary, everyday stuff streaming into the place, items that are not really trash at all: the boxes of perfectly new plastic bags, still on the roll, tossed because the logo on them was outdated. Or the cases of food that turn up from time to time, perfectly usable and brand-new, yet discarded as if they had no use. Clothes of all types, some worn and torn but others seemingly pristine, are common. There are whole cans of paint (a forbidden, toxic item in landfills, though they arrive mixed in the household trash, difficult to detect), trashed because someone didn’t like the custom color that, once mixed, could not be returned to the paint store. And there is the furniture—tons of it, much of it ratty and too far gone, but a surprising amount of it perfectly serviceable, at least until those chairs and couches and coffee tables meet Big Mike’s BOMAG, the great democratizer of trash. Finally, poignantly, there are the old letters and photo albums, the vintage costume jewelry and ancient report cards in their brown manila envelopes. They are accompanied by sagging cardboard boxes labeled “important papers,” though they aren’t important to anyone anymore. This is the material that gets thrown away after someone dies. This is the world in which Big Mike plays king of the hill, and he sees what few people see, the fate of our most precious possessions, and how quickly, how easily, they become redefined as trash, deservedly or not. Someday, they might be treasures again, when the landfill reaches a great age and the broken but often still identifiable items within it become artifacts awaiting an archaeologist’s pick and brush. But that process takes a very long time,