It’s hot, dirty, and has suddenly become a national obsession.
Why America has Become Obsessed with Garbage
Among Washington power brokers, it’s considered a more titillating topic than sex or Trident missiles, while Wall Streeters and major manufacturers are cashing in on our fears and guilt about it. The pope believes that it “lays bare the depth of man’s moral crisis” and, in a Vatican first, has devoted an entire papal proclamation to it, while the Mafia has actually gone to war over it.
America is having a bizarre love-hate affair with garbage. Not since the original Earth Day 20 years ago has garbage — and the environmental problems it’s spawned — dominated our national consciousness as overwhelmingly as right now. In a recent Gallup poll, the environment unexpectedly appeared as a top public concern-the first time in more than a decade that it has achieved that rating — while the percentage who viewed the environment as so important that it should be protected regardless of cost rose from just 45 percent in 1981 to 80 percent in 1989. More than 75 percent of those surveyed now describe themselves as environmentalists, while an astonishing 98 percent claim to be doing something to save our planet, with recycling emerging as the most common tactic.
President Bush says he’s also an environmentalist. Unlike his predecessor Ronald Reagan, who once claimed that trees are a source of air pollution, Bush said during his 1988 campaign that he’d like to be remembered as “the environmental president.” Though he’s dropped his opposition to elevating the Environmental Protection Agency to Cabinet-level status and offered legislation to strengthen the Clean Air Act, a recent poll showed that 62 percent of Americans consider the President’s record on the environment more talk than action — and perhaps rightly so. When Bush gave an environmental award to a North Hollywood, California, high school student, Allen Graves, for his community recycling program, Graves inquired as to whether the White House recycles. The President’s rather revealing reply was, “I don’t know.”
Over the past months, garbage has acquired a gruesome glamour, thanks to its sudden media celebrity. During a span of just four months, it was twice featured on the cover of Newsweek — while in January 1989 Time portrayed a plastic-shrouded globe with portentous cover copy proclaiming “endangered earth” as the “Planet of the Year.” Popular publications as diverse as the soberly intellectual Atlantic and the glitzy, albeit defunct journal Taxi coincidentally ran stories detailing the new discipline of “garbology” — the study of what others throw out. Along with its usual diet, beauty, and exercise articles, Self magazine once included two pages of “pollution solutions,” while Omni devoted 16 pages of its September 1989 issue to an “activist’s primer” on how we can “save the planet.”
Not surprisingly, Hollywood is equally caught up in the trashy trend. Television and movie producers seem to share the attitude of Ann, the character from the hit film sex, lies, and video-tape, who confesses to her psychiatrist: “I started thinking about what happens to all the garbage. I mean, where do we put all of it?” Warner Bros., the makers of Batman, have signed a deal for the story of another crusader against evil — that of pollution-fighter John Cronin, of New York’s Hudson River Fishermen’s Association.
On a lighter note, “Murphy Brown,” the popular TV sitcom, ran an episode last season that depicted Brown’s hilarious efforts to switch to an “environment friendly ” lifestyle in order to win a bet. In December 1989 singer Olivia Newton-John hosted a holiday special on the environment titled ‘’A Very Green Christmas.” For those interested in serious but upbeat coverage of the solutions to our environmental problems, Turner Broadcasting System offers a weekly half-hour series called “Earth-beat.” CBS News has taken the concept one step farther by airing daily, 60-second environmental news spots under the title “Earth Quest.”
‘The ultimate title in the genre is How to Shit in the Woods. “Good throne reading,” commented one writer. “And the pages can be recycled on the spot.”’
Then there’s the mini-boom in the publishing of garbage books, including Rush to Burn: Solving America’s Garbage Crisis?, an investigation of the pitfalls of incinerators; Complete Trash: The Best Way to Get Rid of Practically Everything Around the House; and The Planet of Trash: An Environmental Fable, aimed at children under 12. The ultimate title in the genre is How to Shit in the Woods: An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art. “Good throne reading,” comments New Republic writer Peter Pringle, “and the pages can be recycled on the spot.”
For truly trashy journalism, however, there’s a magazine bluntly titled Garbage, which was launched in September 1989 with sellout sales. The first magazine on this topic slanted to the general public, its premier issue attracted some 226,000 readers-352 percent higher than the prepublication estimates of 50,000. Conceived by Patricia Poore, the Brooklyn-based publisher of Old House Journal, its prompt success defied conventional magazine-publishing taboos. “The experts I spoke with predicted it would never sell with a disgusting title like ‘Garbage,’ ” Poore recalls. “Magazine consultants suggested that a salable name would be something like ‘Ecology Today.’ I said, ‘Oh puke, it sounds like a 1970s granola magazine.’ ‘Garbage’ is sexy and it attacks taboos with a certain dark humor.”
Poore deftly exploits the shock value of her subject matter. With the January-February 1990 issue, she probably made magazine history with her choice of cover art — a photograph of a lavender 1950s-style industrial toilet shot against a blue sky so that it appears to be flying in midair, perhaps searching for someone’s backyard to land in. A cover caption boldly commands readers to ponder just what happens ‘’After the Flush.”
Garbage is happy to drag its readers through the sewers — and worse. A monthly feature, “The Garbage Dictionary,” introduces a foul new vocabulary that includes “black mayonnaise,” with appropriate citations — such as its appearance in the August 1988 issue of Newsweek in this context: “What is happening underwater… is not for the squeamish. Scuba divers talk of swimming through clouds of toilet paper and half-dissolved feces, of bay bottoms covered by a… sediment… appropriately known as black mayonnaise.”
Where else but in Garbage can readers learn about “beach whistles,” the ubiquitous plastic tampon applicators that blight our shorelines? Trash trivia buffs can discover that the term originated with a Cape Cod, Massachusetts, artist, Jay Critchley, who began sculpting with tampon debris ten years ago to publicize the problem. His most memorable creation? For the 1986 Statue of Liberty centennial, he made — and wore — a pink-and-white Lady Liberty outfit, painstakingly pieced together out of 3,000 tampon holders.
If wearing tampon applicators reclaimed from ocean-dumped sewage weren’t revolting enough — even for the presumably worthy cause of making a powerful fashion statement against pollution — Garbage magazine writer Janet Marinelli grimly reports: “Rumor has it that kids are just as creative in their use of discarded applicators. Some mount them on sand castles, some wear them as finger puppets, and others use them (literally) as whistles.”
This is strong stuff, Patricia Poore admits. “We go straight for the jugular in our reporting because we want to shock people. We confront our readers by saying, ‘Here is your garbage; here is your sewage.’ We show them how there’s no ‘away’ in throwing away or flushing away waste, and we might as well stop pretending that there is. The fact that this stuff is so disgusting, and taboo is what makes our message so powerful. When we start telling people about their own shit, it hits home a lot harder than hearing the vegetarians and do-gooders talk about some abstract danger to the environment or saving endangered species. Not everybody cares if a rare bird goes extinct, but they sure as hell care if their kid picks up a used tampon applicator at the beach and puts it in his mouth. That’s why we emphasize the ‘danger to the quality of our life’ issue and the aesthetic problem of waste.”
Along with practical pieces on such topics as kitchen designs for efficient recycling, natural pest control, dealing with toxic trash at home, and composting, Garbage’s regular features include a centerfold pictorial called “The Disposable Decades” and “Keepers,” a socially conscious guide to shopping, which lists such products as solar radios, nontoxic paint, organic baby food, and “altruistic” mutual funds. Then there’s “Garbage Index,” where the reader can learn how many razor blades we discard each year (2 billion); the number of cubic centimeters of liposuctioned human fat disposed of by plastic surgeons during 1986 (27 million); the largest single component of solid waste in landfills (newspapers); and the percentage of recycled newsprint used by The New York Times (five to ten percent), the Los Angeles Times (the recycling champ with 83 percent), and The Washington Post (a most environmentally unfriendly zero percent).
“In the Dumpster” is a critique of industry excesses, such as Campbell’s “Souper Combo,” a microwaveable soup-and-sandwich meal. The grilled cheese sandwich comes on a polystyrene tray wrapped in polyester film, while the soup is in a polypropylene soup bowl covered with polyester film. Both rest on a second, larger tray of polystyrene foam and are encased in a paperboard box. “Six layers of packaging to hold 11 ounces of food you can eat in two minutes. Now that’s obscene,” remarks Poore.
Are you wondering what becomes of those six layers of unpronounceable packaging? Some of them may well be mounted on the walls of the world’s first museum of garbage, the Hackensack Meadowlands Development Commission Environment Center, which opened in October 1989. Appropriately located next to a vast, now closed landfill where 50 years’ worth of New Jersey’s garbage is entombed, the museum represents “a serious educational effort combined with a unique and amusing approach,” reports Environment Center spokesman Bob Grant, who expects the museum to attract 18,000 visitors in its first year, many of them children on school trips.
Walking into the museum is like tunneling through a dump: The visitor is immediately surrounded by whimsical, fascinating, and ultimately grotesque garbage. There are dismembered dolls; gigantic, rusting camshafts from strange machines; used tires of every conceivable size; a three-foot-tall plastic Santa with a crack running across his jolly face; an inflatable life raft; a single white sneaker; crushed cans and cigarette packs; bottles and old newspapers by the score; a two-foot-long yellow plastic car for Barbie dolls; and hundreds of other odd artifacts of civilization. There is also a note of subtle irony — a crumpled copy of Newsweek with a cover story on “Trash TV.”
Inside the dark, winding tunnel of trash, visitors may feel a claustrophobic sense that their garbage is closing in on them. In a poignant reminder that future generations are also hostages to our environmental crisis, a sweet, childish voice recites the appalling statistics: Every single day we throw out 32,000 tons of plastic, enough aluminum cans to build 30 jet planes, 38,000 tons of glass, 23,000 tons of newspapers, and 400,000 old rubber tires. Each American generates over a half ton of garbage a year.
Nearby dioramas dramatize our garbage dilemma. One displays the evolution of packaging — which comprises 50 percent of what we throw out each day by volume — starting with a hand holding out freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, escalating to a paper bag from the bakery, and ultimately exploding into an extravaganza of plastic trays, paper cups, and a colorful outer bag printed with possibly toxic inks, covered in a litter of coupons and media advertising for the product. Another exhibit shows how various objects will look after 100 years in a landfill, ranging from some shockingly recognizable plastic to a gelatinous black sludge of organic materials. Children can play recycling and composting games as museum teachers speak about the environmental evils of polystyrene burger boxes and single-serving juice packs made of fused paper, plastic, and foil. Is the apparent success of the museum a sign that the waste stream has become truly mainstream? Yes and no, replies spokesman Bob Grant. “America has suddenly discovered the garbage problem, but most people have absolutely no idea of the magnitude of the crisis,” he explains. “Unless something drastic is done, within the next five to six years we’ll face a public-health emergency that will make typhoid look like the common cold, because we will have nowhere to take our garbage. Our nest is going to be unimaginably foul when all the landfills are closed — and they’re disappearing fast. New Jersey had 25,000 acres of active landfills in 1969; today it has just 17 acres. The state is in such desperate shape that it must ship 1,000 truckfuls of garbage per day to out-of-state landfills 300 miles away. But what happens when those are gone, too?”
“Unless something drastic is done, within the next few years we’ll face a public-health emergency that will make typhoid look like the common cold, because we’ll have nowhere to take our garbage.”
In the past five years, U.S. landfills have been closing at a rate of almost one per day, with just 6,000 dumps remaining to take in the 128 million tons of garbage Americans produce every day. By 1993, 2,000 more will be stuffed to capacity and closed. Still others may be forced to close next year when more stringent Environmental Protection Agency regulations for landfill safety take effect — the E.PA. believes that right now “very few” municipal dumps satisfy these standards. Ironically, our response to the growing garbage glut has been to spew out ever increasing quantities of waste — we are tossing 80 percent more trash than we did in 1960, and the E.PA. projects that the current rate of 3.5 pounds per person per day will hit an all-time high of 4. 1 pounds by the year 2000. We’re already the most wasteful country on earth, producing double the garbage per person that West Germans or the Japanese do, and triple what Indians or Nigerians discard. The trashiest group of all, however, are residents of California, who choke the waste stream with 65 percent more garbage than the average American does.
What makes this garbage crunch so problematic, observes Grant, is “the public’s selfish attitude — the NIMBY [not in my backyard] syndrome. People seem to be saying to the government, ‘I want to make as much garbage as I like, but you’d better find a magic box to make it disappear because I am definitely not going to let you put it anywhere near me.’ The politicians play along because they know it would be suicide not to. If someone proposes a realistic solution — such as building a modern waste-to-energy incinerator — people react as if child molestation or serial killing were being advocated. They prefer to send 1,000 diesel — burning trucks every day on an air-polluting 600-mile round-trip to landfills in other people’s backyards — and not think about that day in the very near future when those 1,000 trucks will be sent out on a one-way trip to nowhere, like Long Island’s notorious garbage barge.”
Even in areas where landfills or incinerators have been erected in spite of severe community opposition, local residents typically don’t diminish their own production of garbage. Grant adds, “You would think their consciousness of the problem would be heightened, but it’s not. People simply refuse to believe that the enemy is us — and our wasteful habits. Instead, they seize on trendy, boutique approaches to trash — and feel virtuous because they ask for paper bags at the grocery store instead of plastic ones.”
Plastic bags comprise less than one-tenth of one percent of the solid waste generated in the United States, and in Grant’s view offer the ecological advantage of being totally inert in landfills, instead of degrading into hazardous leachate as paper bags do. The “paper-bag people,” as Grant labels them — who include the 400,000 member General Federation of Women’s Clubs — argue that paper is superior because it’s made from renewable resources and doesn’t create toxic pollution during its manufacturing, as plastics do. Consumers are divided on the issue: 50 percent opt for plastic and 50 percent for paper.
While the great paper versus plastic dilemma is avoided entirely by some conscientious consumers who tote their own reusable string bags to the supermarket — and thus avoid having to discard the 143 grocery bags a year the average American receives — the stuff that is inside those bags poses a far weightier problem. According to Garbage magazine, food packaging comprises 30 percent by weight and 50 percent by volume of our household garbage, while other sources find that between 11 percent and 33 percent of the food we buy winds up in the trash can. This means that as much as 67 percent of the contents of the typical bag of groceries is future garbage.
Food packaging — which according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture cost consumers $32.3 billion in 1988, or eight cents out of every dollar we spend at the grocery — is creating moral dilemmas and an environmental angst for “green,” or ecologically aware, consumers. “First you have to memorize all the unpronounceable ingredients that may cause cancer and scrutinize the label for them, then you have to avoid all the products made by companies you’re boycotting for political reasons, and now you’ve got to feel guilty about buying anything in a plastic wrapper,” laments an upscale housewife from Westchester, New York. “It’s fear and loathing on the supermarket trail, trying to find the politically correct food.”
The first awards for environmental winners or sinners of food packaging were offered — with considerable media hype — by Washington Citizens for Recycling in Seattle, an environmentalist group. While cardboard egg cartons were commended for being “reusable, recyclable, and even compostable,” the rigid plastic eggs housing L’Eggs panty hose were condemned: “With such an image-over-sense approach, L’Eggs is clearly our Cadillac with fins.” The brand manager for L’Eggs, not unexpectedly, disagreed, claiming that 63 percent of the plastic eggs were reused in home crafts projects. Kudos for “Minimal Elegance” went to General Electric light bulbs’ slim cardboard box, but the best “food package” of all is the ice cream cone, which the group rated a “delicious alternative” to polystyrene dishes and waxed-paper cups.
Some food packages have become such blatant symbols of waste that 18 states and dozens of cities have passed laws to ban them. Single-serving juice packs, with their unrecyclable, fused layers of aluminum, paper, and plastic, became illegal for sale in Maine as of September 1990. Packaging industry officials insist such packaging is crucial to delivering a safe, tasty product. “Each layer has a specific technical function; there are no frivolous layers,” Edward Klein, of Tetra-Pak, a juice-box producer, told The New York Times, adding that juice-box makers are now working on ways to recycle the boxes into particleboard and ceiling tiles.
Other companies are becoming equally creative now that their products are being banned. Since nearly 100 communities have restricted polystyrene use — a ban that Portland, Oregon, enforces with a “cop” who patrols retail food vendors in search of the offending material — the McDonald’s chain is energetically searching for new uses for old burger boxes. One hundred McDonald’s restaurants in New England provide separate garbage cans for polystyrene, which is sent to newly launched recycling centers where it’s made into plastic pellets. These can be reincarnated into cassette boxes, Rolodex file holders, and yo-yos. Optimistically envisioning a future where entire McDonald’s restaurants will be built from old burger boxes, Ray Thompson, a spokesman for Amoco, the maker of the boxes, told Newsweek, “This material has many, many uses. It only makes sense to enrich our waste stream with more polystyrene.”
Ironically, McDonald’s switched to polystyrene packaging ten years ago to please environmentalists who then maintained that the paper boxes it used were causing forests to disappear and creating paper mill pollution. When the concern over damage done to the ozone layer by polystyrene production emerged, the chain became a leader in eliminating harmful chlorofluorocarbons from polystyrene production. In another environmentally motivated move, McDonald’s now pumps syrup for sodas directly out of delivery trucks into its restaurants’ tanks, thus eliminating the need for 68 million tons of packaging per year. Despite such efforts, as well as the current push to reuse polystyrene containers — which those in the industry claim make up just one-quarter percent of the nation’s garbage — McDonald’s is still in the no-win situation of being seen as a national symbol of waste.
More challenging still may be the dilemma faced by the makers of disposable diapers, who have recently become victims of their own successful marketing. Sales have soared from around $150 million in 1966 to $3.5 billion in 1988 — with 85 percent of parents using disposables exclusively. Even environmentalists confess to a strong preference for disposables. E.PA. official Priscilla Flattery, who recycles newspapers, spurns plastic grocery bags, and lectures on environmental ills, confided to The Wall Street Journal recently that she’s well aware that 16 billion plastic diapers are discarded each year, but that’s what she uses for her two-year-old son. “Disposables are just too convenient and too easy,” she admitted. “I’ve never even bought any cloth diapers.” Officials from several other environmental groups also admitted to use of disposables.
How do you recycle a dirty disposable diaper? Now that two states — Vermont and Nebraska — will soon be out-lawing disposables, diaper-makers are devising new marketing pitches to attack the problem of consumer guilt. Procter & Gamble, the leading disposables maker, piloted a diaper-composting project in St. Cloud, Minnesota, and a recycling program in Seattle. Once a week, 1,000 Seattle households will have their used disposables picked up and taken to a recycling center, where they’ll be disinfected and turned into such products as boxes, home insulation, garbage bags, and flower pots (one wonders if they come with built-in fertilizer). American Enviro Products, launched in June 1989, shipped 30 to 35 million of its biodegradable disposable diapers. (But on October 16, 1990, American Enviro agreed, under pressure from the New York State attorney general, to stop claiming that these diapers were good for the environment.)
Procter & Gamble is also attacking the perception that its diapers are environmental enemy No. 1 with a new study that shows that cloth diapers have drawbacks, too: Their manufacture and use require three times as much fuel as disposables, while contributing nine times as much air pollution. The study, which was sponsored by the company, also found that disposables consume seven times more raw material and create 90 percent more waste than cloth, concluding that neither diaper was an environmental winner.
Garbage guilt may be what’s motivating the recent surge of interest in “biodegradable” plastic — a product so useless that even those who manufacture it describe the material as a “joke.” Spurred on by legislation that in certain communities restricts or bans the use of plastic which isn’t recyclable or degradable, makers of plastics have devised an idea that sounds good: a new type of plastic that has cornstarch added to it. Insects and bacteria will eat the cornstarch, the theory goes, causing the plastic to fall apart into pieces that can be consumed by microorganisms, resulting in plastic that disintegrates in four to seven years. The problem? “You can’t make plastic nutritional for bugs,” Gordon Dancy, vice-president of Sonoco Products Company, a major manufacturer of plastic bags, explained to the Standard Star.
Not only bugs reject biodegradable plastic — so do six environmental groups who urge a consumer boycott of the material. Jeanne Wirka, an E.PA. official, told The New York Times, “These plastics are being sold as a way to reduce waste and that is a hoax.” Insiders in the degradable plastics industry don’t deny the accusation. Jack Hogan, group vice-president of Spartech Corporation, a manufacturer of the material, revealed to Newsweek, “Our company is responding to our customers who are forced to do this [use degradable plastics] because of legislation. But you and I will be part of history when they degrade in landfills.”
“I welcome competition from anyone who’s sincerely concerned about environmental issues, but it’s scary to hear the crisis presented as the latest hustle for businesses to make a quick buck.”
With equal frankness, a spokesman for Mobil Corporation, the makers of Hefty bags, admits that his company doesn’t mind making a buck off people’s misguided belief that such bags actually help the environment. “We are putting them out there because that is what people are buying right now,” he told The New York Times. Cynical comments such as these may have inspired the threat of legal action against the firm from attorneys general in eight states. Recently, Hefty removed the word degradable from its label “in response to mounting confusion regarding the definition of degradability.”
Perhaps we should all be grateful that the so-called “biodegradable” plastics don’t really degrade, environmentalists say, as the hazards of the toxin-laden plastic dust that would result if they did are unknown. Furthermore, a degradable plastic is useless for recycling into other products.
Along with outlawing objectionable food packaging, many states are trying — with varying degrees of success — to instill a new garbage ethic by legislating recycling. Currently, 30 states have passed laws to encourage residents to recycle, while ten states have made recycling mandatory. Although a recent poll reported that 78 percent of Americans claim to recycle, the evidence suggests that most of us are no more truthful about our garbage habits than we are about our income or weight. When Berkeley, California, tried to promote recycling with a weekly “Eco-lotto,” awarding a prize of $250 to a randomly selected household whose trash contained no recyclables, the jackpot hit $4,500 before a winner was found.
Other areas have gotten better results by employing the stick rather than the carrot: The town of Islip, New York, pays a “garbage girl” to check trash cans and levy fines on those who fail to comply with recycling regulations. The most effective tactic of all seems to be that of Seattle, which began a “pay as you throw” program in 1988, where residents are charged $13. 75 to have four cans of nonrecyclable garbage picked up per month, and $9.00 for each additional can. Recyclables, however, are collected for free — with the result that the city’s trash volume promptly dropped by 25 percent, saving $2 million in trucking costs and dumping fees. Even this effort-which is far superior to our national recycling rate of just ten percent of the 160 million tons of trash we produce each day — pales next to the rates achieved by the Japanese, who now recycle more than 50 percent of their trash, or Western Europe at 30 percent.
Why don’t we recycle more? The problem, says anthropologist William Rathje, founder of the Garbage Project and father of the new science of garbology, is that we’re being asked to acquire a bothersome new habit for purely altruistic reasons. Other than a clean conscience, there’s no obvious reward for spending our time peeling labels off cans, sorting old bottles by color, collecting smelly food debris for composting, testing containers for ferrous-metal content, or lugging household hazardous waste to designated drop-off points (as fewer than ten percent of Americans do). Furthermore, news reports make such heroic measures sound pointless — there’s a one-millionton mountain of recycled newspapers already searching for a market and buyers for our recycled glass and plastic are equally elusive.
And as Rathje reported in The Atlantic, those with high levels of income, education, and environmental concern are no more likely to recycle than the rest of us. “The only reliable predictor is the price paid for the commodity at buy-back centers. When prices rose for, say, newsprint, the number of newspapers found in local garbage suddenly declined,” he concluded, basing his findings on a study he did of 9,000 loads of refuse from various neighborhoods in Tucson, Arizona, between the years 1973 and 1980. The motivating power of money is further evident in the enviable success rate of recycling deposit-return aluminum beverage cans — last year 33.3 billion were turned in, nearly 50 percent of that year’s production. Nickels can definitely add up, as the case of a Palm Beach, Florida, man illustrates: Ninety-one-year-old Sam Hailey has collected 944,000 cans in the past 12 years, worth $47,200. Another energetic can picker, John-Ed Croft, plans to pay the $11,485 he owes in back taxes by amassing 229,799 cans and delivering them to the I.R.S.
A curious mythology of garbage has evolved from the mistaken notion that landfills are largely populated by discarded plastics, dirty diapers, and polystyrene burger containers. In reality these items are minor environmental offenders, as Rathje discovered when he began excavating landfills such as New York’s gigantic Fresh Kills, which when completely full will be the largest man-made object on earth — surpassing the 3.6 billion cubic feet of the Great Wall of China. Fast-food packaging made up one-tenth percent of the landfill’s contents by weight, disposable diapers under one percent, while the entire category of plastics was only five percent by weight or 12 percent by volume.
Instead, the real culprit is paper, Rathje observes. Contrary to popular belief, it’s remarkably durable inside landfills — which may be a good thing, since it often contains toxic inks that could leach into our groundwater. Rathje adds, “In all the hand-wringing over the garbage crisis, has a single voice been raised against the proliferation of telephone books? Each two-volume set of Yellow Pages distributed in Phoenix last year — to be thrown out this year-weighed 8.63 pounds, for a total of 6,000 tons of wastepaper…. Dig a trench through a landfill and you will see layers of phone books, like geological strata.” Also omnipresent are newspapers, which form ten percent to 18 percent of landfill volume. Rathje says, “During a recent landfill dig in Phoenix, I found newspapers dating back to 1952 that looked so fresh you might read one over breakfast. Deep within landfills, copies of New York Times editorials about fast-food containers will remain legible well into the next century.”
Another surprising “disposal nightmare” for landfills are the 35.2 million Christmas trees we discard every January — enough to circle the globe twice if laid end to end. Inside landfills these trees can take 30 years to decompose — and combined with other yard waste take up 20 to 33 percent of a dump’s volume. Several cities have come up with offbeat “tree-cycling” plans: To the tune of “Oh Christmas Tree,” Chicago’s sanitation department holds an annual chipping ceremony, then uses the chips on park trails; several Texas towns use Christmas trees as beach-erosion barriers; and Longmont, Colorado, ties them to concrete blocks and sinks them to the bottom of lakes to improve the trout habitat.
With so much attention being focused on our garbage glut, it’s not surprising that at least one entrepreneur has come up with the idea of selling it for a profit. A 23-year-old self-styled “neo-pop artist” named Arthur Gross rummages through the upscale trash cans of Beverly Hills in his quest for such delectable debris as Polo Lounge cocktail napkins or receipts from Cartier. He packages it in a small plastic bag, attaches his own pink-and-green “Beverly Hills Trash” label, and charges $5.00. That’s dirt cheap, according to paparazzi who deal in celebrity garbage. The hottest trash of all is said to be the juicy stuff discarded by Madonna, which included a Christmas card from Bobby Kennedy, Jr., a self-portrait Polaroid the singer disliked enough to chop to pieces, a sports bra, an invitation from Elizabeth Taylor, and a large bottle of baby oil.
“The 35.2 million Christmas trees we discard every January-enough to circle the globe twice if laid end to end — area disposal nightmare: They take up to 30 years to decompose.”
Instead of selling garbage, a new breed of “eco-entrepreneurs” are aggressively pitching potential solutions to the crisis. One of them is Alan Newman, co-owner of Seventh Generation, a Vermont-based mail-order house specializing in ecologically sound products. These items include recycled-paper toilet paper, beeswax crayons, cleaning products made from organic ingredients, and — “the Cadillac of recyclers” — a cart with color-coded trash cans for recycling. The catalog also features solar flashlights and a $2,295 trip to the Costa Rican rain forest. Launched in fall 1988, the company initially found that interest in recycling was “minimal,” says Newman, who went into the business because, as a longtime environmentalist, it seemed like “something I should do, rather than a money-making venture.”
Fortunately for Newman, the explosion of interest in garbage is likely to make him filthy rich. In the first nine months of 1989, the firm attracted a mere 5,000 to 6,000 orders of about $35 apiece. The final quarter of 1989 — which was also when the garbage museum opened and Garbage magazine made its debut — was a dramatically different story. More than 20,000 orders poured in, for upwards of $1 million worth of merchandise — an incredible 500 percent increase in sales.
Mainstream manufacturers and retailers are racing to cash in on our new concern for garbage and its environmental impact, says Newman. “I was recently at a marketing conference where experts were saying that the hottest marketing buzzword for the 1990s is ‘green,’ and that the winning business strategy now is to appeal to ecologically conscious consumers. While I welcome competition from anyone who’s sincerely concerned about environmental issues, it’s scary to hear the crisis presented as the latest hustle for businesses to make a quick buck.”
The selling of the environment has already started. Colgate-Palmolive is testing packs of liquid-detergent concentrate — which are emblazoned with the slogan “Save our planet” — for consumers to refill, rather than discard bulky plastic packages of the product. Such firms as Dow, Du Pont, and Chevron have corporate-image campaigns that tell us how these companies plant trees, build bird perches on utility poles, or put off building pipelines that would interfere with the sage grouse’s mating season.
Wall Street is also profiting from this surge of interest in garbage: The stock of Waste Management, Inc., an incineration and recycling company in Illinois, soared 60 percent during 1989. Barry Mannis, a Shearson Lehman Hutton vice-president who specializes in the waste industry, told Gannett Westchester Newspapers, “Without question, environmental companies are hot investments. Investors [are] aware of trends. And clearly, a major trend in society right now is concern for the environment.”
Is garbage chic another passing fad, like oat bran? “God, I hope not,” responds Barry Newman, co-owner of Seventh Generation. “People can see the problem is real now that there is medical waste and AIDS-contaminated needles washing up on the beaches and barges full of garbage circling the globe looking for a place to dump. It’s clear that garbage will be with us forever. Unfortunately. ”
