Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash by Elizabeth Royte Read Free Book Online Page B

satisfaction with tossing things away to his satisfaction with defecation, “the sensation at least for a moment that my body contains nothing but myself.”
    I felt a kinship with Calvino, for I was obsessed with throwing things away. Transferring objects—whether food scraps, the daily newspaper, or a lamp—from my house to the street made me feel lighter and cleaner, peaceful even. My apartment wasn’t large, and so everything I subtracted gave me more of what I craved: emptiness.
    Eventually, Calvino came to realize that so long as he was contributing to the municipality’s waste heap, he knew he was alive. To toss garbage, in his view, was to know that one was
not
garbage: the act confirmed that “for one more day I have been a producer of detritus and not detritus myself.” Riffing on death and identity, Calvino referred to the men who collected his garbage as “heralds of a possible salvation beyond the destruction inherent in all production and consumption, liberators from the weight of time’s detritus, ponderous dark angels of lightness and clarity.” In a similar vein, Ivan Klima, in his novel
Love and Garbage,
noted that street sweepers regard themselves as “healers of a world in danger of choking.” My san men, while not obviously self-reflective, knew exactly how the public viewed what they did: “People think there’s a garbage fairy,” one worker told me. “You put your trash on the curb, and then
pffft,
it’s gone. They don’t have a clue.”
    When their truck was full, at around ten-thirty, Murphy dropped Sullivan at the garage, then rumbled over the Gowanus and pulled into the courtyard of the IESI transfer station, a white-painted brick building at the corner of Bush and Court Streets, in Red Hook. The drill here was simple: weigh your truck, then pull around to the tipping floor, back in, and pull the lever to dump. If the men had loaded their truck properly, the ejected garbage would extend six to eight feet in a supercompressed bolus before dropping to the ground. Garbage that simply spilled out was poorly packed or indicated that the truck hadn’t been full. The quality of the dump was known as “the turd factor.” According to one designer of packer trucks, “The driver can learn from experience by observing the turd factor and know just how much trash he can put in the truck per trip. If he gets a good turd on every trip to the landfill, that’s a good day.” Judging by the conformation of today’s load, Murphy and Sullivan had done well. The morning’s labors—twenty thousand pounds collected in less than four hours—now lay in a heap, indistinguishable from the heaps dumped before or after. Without a backward glance at what he’d deposited, Murphy put the truck in forward gear.
    Integrated Environmental Services Incorporated was founded in 1995 and had grown by acquisitions, gobbling sometimes as many as a hundred companies a year. It bought this facility from Waste Management in 1999. By 2003, IESI was the tenth-largest solid waste company in the nation. In New York it was the third largest, after Waste Management and Allied Waste.
    I pedaled down to the Court Street station a few days after going out with Sullivan and Murphy, hoping to speak with the plant manager. The doors on the bays were closed, and no one was about. I saw no trucks, and I smelled no garbage. If you didn’t know what went on inside this building, you wouldn’t, on a cold and slow autumn day, be able to guess. I rode around the neighborhood, noting that it was zoned for industry. Then I turned a corner, from Bush onto—just coincidentally—Clinton, and now the multiple towers of the Red Hook housing projects, home to eleven thousand mostly low-income residents, rose before me.
    Garbage follows a strict class topography. It concentrates on the margins, and it tumbles downhill to settle in places of least resistance, among the poor and the disenfranchised. The Gold Coast of Manhattan’s Upper