Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash Read Online Free PDF

At one point, twenty-two so-called burn units (in addition to the scores of small-scale “toasters” stoked by superintendents in high-rise apartment buildings) operated throughout the city, spewing noxious black smoke into the skies. The haze was so thick at times that Manhattan couldn’t be seen from New Jersey.
    As the small dumps were phased out and incinerators fell into disfavor, the city pioneered other methods of entombing waste. In the newfangled “sanitary” landfills, garbage was covered with a blanket of dirt at the end of each working day. The dirt muffled odors and kept vermin at bay (that is, if it was applied soon enough. In Santa Marta, Columbia, buzzards gorging on unburied trash have become too fat to fly, prompting rescue efforts by environmentalists). New York’s first modern dump was Robert Moses’s Fresh Kills, which opened for business in 1948. Staten Island residents weren’t happy about the abrasive master builder’s plan, but Moses had promised them that the landfill would close in three years and that they’d get a new highway in return for their indulgence. Moses died in 1981, twenty years before the last Fresh Kills-bound garbage barge was tugged out of New York Harbor.
    The more I learned about the history of garbage in New York, the more I saw that it was a history of interim solutions, of reactions to crises political, economic, and social. Even when the federal government stepped in, change was achingly slow. Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1970, for example, but it took until 1994 for New York City to shut the damper on its last municipal incinerators. For more than two hundred years, New York’s garbage has changed hands through cronyism and favors, and landed on the backs of the disenfranchised. Only recently have NIMBY-ism and advocates for environmental justice begun to push back. Sometimes garbage is shunted elsewhere, but always at great cost.
    It’s the same anyplace, really. Whether you live in rural West Virginia or inner-city Chicago, you don’t want other people’s garbage anywhere near your backyard. Yet Americans everywhere are producing steadily more waste. Politicians devise short-term solutions, and waste managers, who own the means of disposal, seem to hold all the cards.
    By the time I began traveling with my trash, Fresh Kills had been closed for two years. I knew that the city’s garbage was now trucked far and wide, but I didn’t know exactly where my stuff went or what happened to it once it arrived. Early one morning, I watched from my third-floor vantage point as a packer truck compacted my peanut butter jars and chicken bones with those of my many, many neighbors. What had been mine was now, unceremoniously, the city’s. It was time to come downstairs, to find out what happened next.

Chapter One
    Dark Angels of Detritus
    O n a cool October morning, I caught up with John Sullivan and Billy Murphy in the middle of their Park Slope garbage route. I watched them carefully, from a slight distance, but still it took me several long minutes to figure out, in the most rudimentary way, what my san men were doing. They moved quickly, in a blur of trash can dragging, lid tossing, handle cranking, and heaving. Though barrel-chested and muscle-bound, they moved with balletic precision. Sometimes Murphy and Sullivan appeared to be working independently, other times they collaborated. Save for the grunts and squeals of the truck, it all happened in relative silence. While Murphy drove to a gap between parked cars, Sullivan slid barrels up the sidewalk to the waiting truck. Sometimes Murphy jumped down to load, sometimes Sullivan did it on his own. Then they switched. The truck moved in jerks, halting with a screech of brakes. Although most sanitation workers stopped for coffee at eight, Sullivan and Murphy kept loading. Upon their return to the garage at ten-thirty, no one voiced the usual san man’s query: “Did you get it up?” Sullivan and