Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash Read online

  This waste-to-energy idea gripped the entire state of California then, where leaders imagined the state as a world leader in turning trash into electrical treasure, and exporting its expertise globally. It was embraced in a big way in the Los Angeles area by the two main trash-dealing government entities of Southern California: the city of Los Angeles, which has its own dedicated sanitation fleet and landfills, and Puente Hills’s owner, the L.A. Sanitation Districts, a unique quasi-public agency that serves the other seventy-eight cities in Los Angeles County, from Agoura Hills to Malibu to Whittier (whose mayors compose the agency’s governing board). Each jurisdiction, city and county, simultaneously laid plans for massive trash-fueled power plants as the solution to aging, leaking landfills that, in those boom times for Southern California, were rapidly filling.

  The first step in making these plans a reality in Los Angeles was the Sanitation Districts’ permit to expand the old dump on the Pellissier ranch into a modern sanitary landfill, a process that led in 1983 to the first of many public hearings. These hearings were not cordial. It proved to be a very difficult time to seek consensus on plotting the future of the Valley of the Dumps. Robert Bennett had just been murdered, his body missing but presumed hidden in the trash of Puente Hills, raising questions about safety, security and oversight. In Sacramento, dire warnings of a severe budget crisis gripping the state became a daily ritual, making large capital projects such as power plants a dicey proposition at best. And in Washington, the Reagan administration’s top environmental officials, including the head of the Superfund, were under investigation for cover-ups and for being in the pocket of toxic polluters and crooked waste-site operators—hardly a climate conducive to trusting the plans and promises of landfill operators in Reagan’s native state. Residents in the neighboring communities marched to the podium at public hearings to express their alarm about the expansion of the Puente Hills landfill. They were outraged to have received official assurances that there were no hazardous materials or leaks there, only to learn later that there had been both. Now they wanted the dump shut down and Los Angeles’s growing flow of garbage redirected to some remote location out in the desert, rather than have it dumped and piled in the midst of a growing community of more than fifty thousand residents adjacent to Puente Hills who had been there long before the landfill. “We didn’t move here for this,” was the oft-repeated slogan.

  But the trash bosses assured them that the future of garbage wasn’t about landfills—it was all about drawing clean energy from waste. And in the process, the volume of the trash would be reduced 95 percent. They’d barely need landfills after that. The whole country was going in this direction, they confidently predicted. Burying trash for eternity was old school. Lighting your houses with it made so much more sense.

  First, though, the Sanitation Districts’ leaders said they needed a ten-year permit to expand the dump near the Nike missile site and turn it into a modern landfill while they planned the new trash-to-energy future, then got it up and running. There’d be more hearings once those plans took shape in a few years. In the meantime, an innovative power plant was already being built to make the old dump’s noxious emissions into electricity instead of simply burning it in flaring stations—giant Bunsen burners powered by garbage gas—as was done in the past. When dubious homeowners and local activists pointed to the dense fine print of the new Puente Hills permit proposal—the parts that suggested the newly modernized landfill could, if necessary, operate for thirty years and absorb 100 million tons of garbage without breaking a sweat—this was dismissed as a mere contingency. Nobody wanted that future, what one homeowner prophetically envisioned as “seventy stories of ugly.” That would be a crazy squandering of resources, it was agreed. “We have a lot of money in this,” the Sanitation Districts’ spokesman said of the waste-to-energy plans, and it was true—the plants would cost three-quarters of a billion dollars to build, to be financed primarily with municipal bonds. “We’re committed.”

  So the road map for the Puente Hills landfill of today was approved. The landfill got a ten-year lease on life through 1993. The evidence suggests that the waste-to-energy goals announced at the time were sincere rather than a ploy or a smoke screen, that those in charge really did expect to make the landfill part of Puente Hills virtually obsolete. Combined with similar proposals up and down the state, those plans would indeed have made California the world leader in generating energy from trash, and provided a new model for the rest of the nation to follow. But then public opposition to such plants turned out to be even more vehement than the sentiment against landfill expansion, and it was accompanied by a new laissez-faire politics that dismissed concerns over fossil fuel dependence and energy security as if the crises and embargoes of the seventies had never occurred. The combination slowly strangled the waste-to-energy plans in California and most of the rest of the country, and contingency plans became the only plans. Garbage Mountain was born.

  The energy plan had been nothing if not ambitious. Puente Hills was to have been the site of the largest waste-to-energy plant in the world, capable of swallowing up to 10,000 tons of trash a day. The smokestack, which proponents of the plant promised would emit no visible plume, would have reached up to 450 feet high in order to make sure emissions blew up and away from the neighborhoods below. It would rise as tall as three Statues of Liberty standing on one another’s heads. That image alone was enough to alarm the locals. They imagined a towering spire despoiling the foothills and the low-slung suburban skyline. This was anathema to men and women who still recalled the sounds of dairy herds lowing and shuffling by every morning. They didn’t know in the early 1980s that Garbage Mountain would eventually rise up higher than any smokestack would have, blotting out a much bigger piece of the skyline without a trash-burning energy plant there to suck up the waste and give them power in return.

  The Sanitation Districts’ plan also called for seven other smaller plants, with capacities ranging as high as 4,000 tons of trash burned daily, to be placed in strategic locations designed to reduce the number of miles trash had to be hauled around the Los Angeles Basin. If all were built, their combined capacity would be great enough to handle all the trash then going to L.A. landfills, with ample extra capacity to handle future trash growth. There would be little more than ash left to bury at any landfill once the plants came on line—the garbage “crisis” would be solved for decades. And power for up to a half million homes could be squeezed out of that trash at the same time.

  The city of Los Angeles, meanwhile, separately proposed three large-scale plants of its own to burn almost all of the city’s garbage. This proposal, dubbed Project LANCER (a somewhat tortured derivation from Los Angeles City Energy Recovery), though not as ambitious as the county’s plans, was better publicized and drew most of the national attention and debate. It had been conceived in the 1970s as concerns mounted over the use of the city’s remote landfills in the scenic Santa Monica Mountains. One plant alone was supposed to save 1.6 million miles of garbage truck travel to one of the city’s distant garbage dumps. In comparison to the spewing diesel fumes from those trucks, the anticipated emissions from the state-of-the-art trash plant would, at least according to city officials, represent a net gain for the environment and the battle against smog.

  Such cheery pronouncements were soon displaced in the headlines by the campaign to stop it all from happening. The specter of Los Angeles’s fight decades earlier over backyard and old-style industrial incinerators haunted the proceedings. The last time Los Angeles fired up a trash incinerator had been in 1947, when the thick, black smoke pouring out looked like the sickly plume of a forest fire so big and so foul that it stopped traffic for miles. A city councilman complained that his district was “inundated in ashes like from a volcano,” and the plant was soon shut down in favor of … landfilling. Incineration was the past, sanitary landfills were the future—that had been the line in the fifties and sixties. Now people were bewildered: Hadn’t city and count
y leaders spent years convincing us that incinerators were the big evil, contributing to smog, asthma, cancer and who knew what else? Now we’re supposed to embrace all that again?

  The backlash caught the sanitation engineers flat-footed. Four hundred angry residents showed up at a 1985 city council meeting in the nearby suburb of Duarte, where the leaders had initially acquiesced to the waste-to-energy plants. Council members immediately reversed their position. Another 250 people showed up for the next hearing in Puente Hills, condemning plans for the giant landfill incinerator envisioned there. Yes, they had been told waste-to-energy was the future back in 1983. But they hadn’t known then that that future, that monster plant, the biggest in the world, would be erected in their neighborhood. They had assumed it would be built out in the desert somewhere, and Puente Hills would be phased out or at least gradually shrunk until it closed when its permit lapsed in 1993. Now they were being asked to accept a plant that would be there for another twenty or thirty years, and their answer was a resounding no. Protestors at the meeting bore signs saying, “Dump the dump.” They wore surgical masks to indicate their fears about pollution should trash burning return in force to the Los Angeles Basin. “Keep your ash out of the San Gabriel Valley,” another protest sign proclaimed.

  Similar complaints about plant location, about the city of Los Angeles trying to saddle the poorest parts of town with everyone’s burning garbage, and concerns that the pollution solutions were not as effective as waste-to-energy proponents had claimed, all served to increase public opinion against trash burning for power everywhere it had been proposed for Los Angeles. Dioxins were again a huge concern, with opponents warning that the smokestacks would be spewing the same potent carcinogens that had made the military defoliant Agent Orange so harmful, something the sanitation officials vigorously disputed. It didn’t help that Sweden, a leader in the waste-to-energy industry, had put a moratorium on building the plants at that time because of dioxin concerns. The moratorium was later lifted once new emissions controls were put in place, but the impression that the technology was dirty and dangerous lingered.

  With hundreds of angry voters showing up at city council meetings and public hearings, it didn’t take long for city council members in the small cities ringing Los Angeles to gauge the political winds and join the smokestack opponents rather than risk being voted out of office. Soon the opposition included sixteen cities served by the Sanitation Districts, along with two congressmen and a passel of state legislators. With that, trash power was dead. All but two tiny demonstration plants already under construction were canceled, reducing waste-to-energy to a hobby rather than a solution in Los Angeles. This mirrored developments around the state and most parts of the country.

  And so Puente Hills became the go-to place for burying, rather than burning, garbage. The Sanitation Districts made do with collecting landfill methane to generate power, a process about half as efficient as burning the trash, producing far less electricity and doing nothing to reduce the volume of material going into the landfill.

  At the time, the citizens who opposed the plans for Puente Hills had said they weren’t necessarily against waste-to-energy “done right.” They just thought it should be done in some remote location, far away from the city—away from their homes. Then the unsightly smokestack, the question of emissions, the flow of trucks filled with trash—all would be out of sight and out of mind, the way trash is supposed to be. “If we have to burn garbage, let’s put it on a train and take it out to the desert,” a leader of the anti-trash-burning coalition said. “It may cost us five or ten dollars more per person a month, but it’s worth it. They shouldn’t be built in a metropolitan area.” This statement proved to be quite prescient in one way—the trash train would one day be chosen as L.A.’s trash solution—but it also reflected just how poorly the opponents of waste-to-energy understood the economics and logistics of trash.

  The neighbors of Puente Hills thought they had scored a victory, but they had only traded a power plant for an even bigger trash mountain. And when 1993 rolled around, they were outraged anew when, instead of closing down as they expected, the landfill was allowed to expand and extend its life another two decades, to 2013. Sanitation officials couldn’t resist a bit of schadenfreude at that, for the neighborhood opposition to the power plants had left the county with no other option but to ramp up trash burial at Puente Hills. There simply was no other place for the garbage to go at that point. The protesters had, in effect, made sure that the biggest landfill in the country would be in their backyard for decades. And so the tradition of creating waste-management systems through miscalculation continued.

  Because of its convenient location, because the Sanitation Districts are a public agency with no need to amass profits, and because of savings from generating power on-site, Puente Hills became the most affordable place in California to dump trash. For many years it charged cities (the same cities that owned and governed the Sanitation Districts) as well as private trash collection companies and everyone else who needed to dispose of waste just $18 a ton to dump. This was half of what some other public and private facilities charged in Southern California. During boom times through the nineties and up until the recession, garbage trucks would line up at sunrise for the privilege of tipping their loads at Puente Hills, and by eleven in the morning, the gates would have to be shut, as the operating permit limits daily intake to 13,000 tons. Big Mike and his colleagues had to scramble to keep up with the constant flow of garbage at that rate.

  Even charging below-market rates, Puente Hills took in more money than it could spend. By 2011, it had salted away a quarter billion dollars to pay for the next trash solution in Los Angeles. This is what made Puente Hills the envy of the landfill industry. There was even enough income to skim one dollar from every ton of earnings and designate it for preserving wildlands next to the landfill. No other active landfill in the country has nearly four thousand contiguous acres of hiking trails, parkland and wildlife preserve abutting a massive garbage mountain. The preserve is so huge and has attracted so much wildlife that the conservation authority created to run it has hired a full-time ecologist.

  The dump and power plant opponents couldn’t kill the landfill in 1993, or again in 2003, though they tried each time the ten-year permit came up for renewal. But they secured one other victory in addition to killing waste-to-energy: 2013, Puente Hills’s thirtieth birthday, was designated as the irreversible drop-dead date for the landfill. The trash train plan advocated by the opponents is supposed to come on line then, and L.A. garbage is supposed to hit the rails.

  But there is a complication. Those who wanted the landfill moved, and who imagined it would be only slightly more costly to railroad the garbage out of town, were wrong. It is a lot more expensive. Transferring trash from a new rail depot at Puente Hills to the Sanitation Districts’ newly purchased former gold mine two hundred miles away in the desert of Imperial County will cost $80 a ton, more than four times what it costs to bury trash at Puente Hills. The Sanitation Districts can use its war chest to subsidize a lower price for the trash train, but even so, at a cut-rate price of $50 or $60 a ton, waste by rail will be more expensive than the power plants would have been, and far more expensive than Waste Management, Inc.’s private landfills in Los Angeles that, with the recession reducing trash flow, would be happy to take on the garbage now going to Puente Hills. It’s unclear, in a tough economy, if this waste-by-rail plan can succeed, leaving Puente Hills and its neighbors in trash limbo. And Los Angeles has an unexpected sort of trash crisis on its hands: It is supposed to open a new, very pricey mega-landfill in the desert, with four times the capacity of Puente Hills and a lifetime of no less than one hundred years—and it just might have no trash it can afford to put in it.

  The dilemma has raised, once again, the specter of garbage crisis, and the equally long-lived question we have yet to answer well: Isn’t there something better we can do with, or about, our trash?

  Decades o
f landfilling have answered, at least in part, the first of the big three questions that must be answered to begin to wipe away our 102-ton legacy: What is the nature of our waste? We may badly underestimate how much stuff we’re burying, but we do have a good handle on what it’s made of. And we also know what it’s worth—some $50 billion in value chucked each year, lost to us now, but waiting to be recovered if only we could somehow make the transition from waste management to materials management that the king of trash, Dave Steiner, dreams of. Yet every time we have approached a new paradigm for waste, we have turned away from it, dating all the way back to Colonel Waring and his White Wings, who arguably were better at reclaiming and recycling materials than we are today. We are still in thrall to J. Gordon Lippincott’s brilliant warping of human instinct from thrift to a disposable abundance. That marketing man’s sleight of hand still commands us, having redefined the American Dream so thoroughly that it is hard to envision a land in which no need or desire could justify the construction of a mountain made of garbage.

  BIG MIKE climbs down from his BOMAG, another day of bending garbage to his will behind him. Gone are those 13,000-ton days of garbage and gates that closed at noon. Now the landfill stays open till five, and gets nowhere near the daily limit.

  Back in the landfill boom days, a third of the trash was commercial, a third was building construction debris, and a third was household waste. With the bursting of the housing bubble, construction waste in 2011 became a trickle instead of a flood. With the economy in recession and Los Angeles unemployment at 12 percent, people are buying less, so the commercial and household trash was way down, too. All told, the daily flow in 2011 was hovering around 5,000 tons a day at Puente Hills. In theory, the place could stay open for years beyond 2013 without filling up.