Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash by Elizabeth Royte Page B
Authors: Elizabeth Royte
Tags: General, Social Science, Sociology, Political Science, POL044000, Public Policy, Environmental Policy, Rural
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after all. Sanitation workers wanted civilians to own up to their mess, to take responsibility for their discards, to show some respect for those who dealt with their waste on a daily basis. I was in complete concordance. But I found that from the moment my trash left my house and entered the public domain—where no higher authority than the US Supreme Court had determined it was open for general inspection—it became terra incognita, forbidden fruit, a mystery that I lacked the talent or credentials to solve. I was left to imagine the worst: that the Bethlehem landfill was casually strewing the waterways and roadways with litter, or commingling municipal solid waste with leaking barrels of hazardous chemicals, or disposing of second-rate starlets. (Bodies did show up in landfills from time to time, and they weren’t necessarily mob whack jobs. Seeking warmth and safety, the homeless sometimes slept in Dumpsters, and they sometimes got crushed by garbage trucks.)
By now, I was asking everyone I knew in the waste business if they could get me into a landfill: the folks at the company that handled the city’s metal recyling; my contacts at DSNY; the manager of my former recycling facility; my Gowanus paddling partner, who knew someone whose family ran tugs in the harbor. In my desperate state, even that seemed promising. But nothing came of these probes.
I continued to cogitate. The popular conception of “bads” aside, I knew that the ordinary discards of residential life were hardly inert, that burying things under several feet of dirt didn’t bring their influence on the environment to a screeching halt. When organic matter decomposes, it creates methane and carbon dioxide, both greenhouse gases. As it filters up through layers of buried garbage, methane can pick up carcinogens like acetone, benzene and ethyl benzene, xylenes, trichloroethylene, and vinyl chloride. These compounds are borne on the breeze into nearby homes and offices.
Just as jurisdiction over trash moved from the public realm to the private, its environmental impact moved from the local—right here in my kitchen—to the general. On its own, my trash might be harmless to me, but combined with the output of several million others, it could be lethal to many. A 1998 New York State Department of Health study found that escaping landfill gases contributed to an estimated fourfold increase in bladder cancer and leukemia rates in women who lived within 250 feet of thirty-eight upstate landfills. Researchers at Imperial College in London reported in 2001 that children of parents living near landfills in England tended to have a higher rate of birth defects than the general population. (Neither study could prove a direct cause-and-effect relationship between exposure and disease or defects, though both called for further study.)
In a few months I’d visit a medium-size landfill in Dixon, California, and study a schematic of its man-made stratigraphy. Directly underneath the “operations layer”—a foot-deep blend of soil and dried sewage sludge that underlay the trash—was six inches of gravel, followed by a layer of geotextile fabric, and then another bed of gravel (to collect and remove leachate). Next came a high-density polyethylene geomembrane, a geosynthetic clay liner backed with another layer of high-density polyethylene geomembrane (forty millimeters thick—the height of forty stacked dimes), a twelve-inch layer of compacted clay, six inches of compacted soil, a six-inch capillary break, and then, at the superbottom, a compacted subgrade of sand. The liners had tough-sounding trade names like Bentomat, Bentofix, Claymax, Geolock, and Geoflex. I’d asked Greg Pryor, who was giving me the blackboard tour, if the whole shebang keep the groundwater and soil safe.
“We get 99.3 percent protection,” he said with pride.
“Do you aim for 100 percent?” I asked.
“You’ve got to look at cost. We pay $210,000 per acre to build landfills
By now, I was asking everyone I knew in the waste business if they could get me into a landfill: the folks at the company that handled the city’s metal recyling; my contacts at DSNY; the manager of my former recycling facility; my Gowanus paddling partner, who knew someone whose family ran tugs in the harbor. In my desperate state, even that seemed promising. But nothing came of these probes.
I continued to cogitate. The popular conception of “bads” aside, I knew that the ordinary discards of residential life were hardly inert, that burying things under several feet of dirt didn’t bring their influence on the environment to a screeching halt. When organic matter decomposes, it creates methane and carbon dioxide, both greenhouse gases. As it filters up through layers of buried garbage, methane can pick up carcinogens like acetone, benzene and ethyl benzene, xylenes, trichloroethylene, and vinyl chloride. These compounds are borne on the breeze into nearby homes and offices.
Just as jurisdiction over trash moved from the public realm to the private, its environmental impact moved from the local—right here in my kitchen—to the general. On its own, my trash might be harmless to me, but combined with the output of several million others, it could be lethal to many. A 1998 New York State Department of Health study found that escaping landfill gases contributed to an estimated fourfold increase in bladder cancer and leukemia rates in women who lived within 250 feet of thirty-eight upstate landfills. Researchers at Imperial College in London reported in 2001 that children of parents living near landfills in England tended to have a higher rate of birth defects than the general population. (Neither study could prove a direct cause-and-effect relationship between exposure and disease or defects, though both called for further study.)
In a few months I’d visit a medium-size landfill in Dixon, California, and study a schematic of its man-made stratigraphy. Directly underneath the “operations layer”—a foot-deep blend of soil and dried sewage sludge that underlay the trash—was six inches of gravel, followed by a layer of geotextile fabric, and then another bed of gravel (to collect and remove leachate). Next came a high-density polyethylene geomembrane, a geosynthetic clay liner backed with another layer of high-density polyethylene geomembrane (forty millimeters thick—the height of forty stacked dimes), a twelve-inch layer of compacted clay, six inches of compacted soil, a six-inch capillary break, and then, at the superbottom, a compacted subgrade of sand. The liners had tough-sounding trade names like Bentomat, Bentofix, Claymax, Geolock, and Geoflex. I’d asked Greg Pryor, who was giving me the blackboard tour, if the whole shebang keep the groundwater and soil safe.
“We get 99.3 percent protection,” he said with pride.
“Do you aim for 100 percent?” I asked.
“You’ve got to look at cost. We pay $210,000 per acre to build landfills
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