Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair

The Puente Hills Landfill was the largest US landfill before it was closed in 2013. From 1957 to 2013, it accepted 130 million tons of trash from the greater Los Angeles area and survived many community attempts to close it. As of 2012, when Humes is writing, it spans 700 acres and is 500 feet high and has its own ecosystem and preservation authority. The landfill even offers popular tours. Methane gas from the landfill generates 40 megawatts of electricity per minute—not as much as if the large waste-to-energy plant proposed in the 1980s had been constructed, but significant nonetheless.

Mike Speiser operates the BOMAG, a tool used to compact 13,000 tons of garbage per day into an underground cell. Speiser then covers the cell with dirt, which makes Puente Hills a sanitary landfill. The airtight cells preserve their contents and generate energy for local residents. Humes explains that in thousands of years archaeologists will exhume the contents of Puente Hills to learn about our civilization. Underground landfills like Puente Hills replaced uncovered dumps in the second half of the 20th century. Landfills produce a toxic substance called “leachate,” which excretes from trash and must be contained by barriers, drainage systems, and dams to prevent groundwater contamination.

Garbage crises have been declared with frequency throughout history. Humes laments that the crises usually involve the question of where to put our trash rather than why we produce so much trash and how to produce less. He says, “this is the wrong question to ask, at least if the goal is to permanently end the crisis rather than simply postpone a day of reckoning” (27). The United States will one day deplete its usable landfill space.

In the early 20th century, New York City streets were littered with manure, sewage, and garbage. Sailors claimed they could smell the city’s stench six miles at sea, and pigs roamed the streets scavenging food scraps. Such a state was common of urban areas before landfills. Humes explains, “The modern landfill’s roots can be traced back to a City Hall regime that initially refused to use them: the corrupt Tammany Hall administration” (40). Garbage either wasn’t collected or was dumped into the ocean, where it migrated to the Jersey Shore. The population was exploding, and residents grew dissatisfied with the city’s waste. Other cities faced similar issues. Some built piggeries to consume their waste, a practice that only helped eliminate food scrap waste and was eventually discontinued because it spread disease.

New York City employed several tactics to successfully remedy its garbage problem. Newly elected Mayor William Strong appointed Colonel George E. Waring as garbage czar. Waring converted the city’s street cleaners, who were known as a corrupt group that subsisted off bribes and collected little garbage, into a 2,000-member sanitation army nicknamed “White Wings.” The White Wings dutifully cleared the streets of debris and occasionally roughed up litterers. With cleanliness also came health improvements. The muckraking journalist Jacob Riis wrote of Waring, “His broom saved more lives in the crowded tenements than a squad of doctors” (44).

Waring also implemented a garbage collection program that emphasized recycling, reduction, and recovery. He didn’t pioneer recycling, but he institutionalized and regulated it. He required sorting of household waste, and New York City practiced sustainability decades before it became fashionable. He produced $2.47 in recovered materials from every ton of garbage ($64 in 2010 when adjusted for inflation). Since Waring’s White Wings revolution, it has been local government’s responsibility to dispose of waste and maintain clean streets.

Waring solved New York City’s garbage crisis so successfully that public outrage subsided and Tammany Hall regained power in the next election. Tammany Hall received the message and did not let the city’s streets return to filth. It kept the White Wings but dismissed Waring and most of his other initiatives. The city transitioned to using its waste to fill “undesirable” marshlands, building the Corona Dump, which eventually became a golf course, then a park, and is now the area called Flushing Meadows—where the 1964 World’s Fair was held and the New York Mets baseball team plays. Ocean dumping resumed and continued until the US Supreme Court ruled New York City liable to New Jersey for damages.

Los Angeles adopted Waring’s incineration policies, encouraging residents to burn trash in their backyards. These backyard incinerators led to smog and health risks, but Los Angeles continued the practice until 1957, when the Puente Hills Landfill opened. Residents resisted the change because for decades they had been told incinerating their trash was a civic duty. When told otherwise, they reacted in obstinance. 

Our disposable economy creates “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” (60). Most of the trash Speiser observes at the Puente Hills Landfill isn’t really trash—it consists of useful materials discarded for no apparent reason. Some products wear—through planned obsolescence, many are designed to wear—and some are simply discarded. Landfills hide this waste from the public, letting us forget we produce it. We’re encouraged through advertisements to consume more and produce more waste. Businesses communicate this as a virtue and extend credit so we can buy more, replacing our useful products with ones deemed better. Sometimes we’re told we should make the choice to waste, like when automobile manufacturers convince us to upgrade every few years; sometimes we aren’t given a choice, like in the packaging of our food, supply chain waste, and planned obsolescence of our now necessary consumer technology.

This conundrum is the result of admittedly deliberate efforts on the part of business executives and advertising agencies to persuade consumers to discard good things in favor of more desirable replacements. This mindset runs counter to human instinct, but decades of coercion have instilled the modern American ideal that consumption is a virtue and thrift a derision. Humes explains that the amount of consumer debt we see today “was once unthinkable, even shameful […] consumers continuing to pay, sometimes for years, for purchases after they become trash” (69).

In 1957 journalist Vance Packard accused industry elites of manipulating the public into embracing waste and cautioned the future effects of such consumerism in his book The Hidden Persuaders. The public dismissed Packard’s warnings. Aided by advancements in plastics technology that facilitated lower costs and production increases, the rise of disposable products, and advertising campaigns like the infamous “litterbug” and “crying Native American” campaigns, whose purpose was to shift the blame for pollution to individuals so industry could avoid costly changes to their business practices, waste soared in the second half of the 20th century. Disposable products replaced longer-lasting products and “introduced a number of synthetic and potentially toxic waste materials into our refrigerators, medicine chests, cupboards, oceans, town dumps, natural habitats, and our bodies” (74). The costs of a disposable economy are “external” in that businesses don’t bear those costs. Because society, not individual businesses, must pay the costs of disposing of and recycling these materials, businesses encourage this behavior.