---Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash, by Elizabeth Royte
Once you throw something away, you don't ever have to think about it again, but it hasn't ceased to exist. This book tells the story of one woman who tries to follow the trail of where her trash goes. She describes a day in life of New York's Stongest, the garbage collectors, she explains composting, the recycling business, and where things go when you flush them. While reading it, you can't help but assess your entire life and consider what you can do to reduce your waste. It leaves you with a lot to think about. Even though we put out all of this plastic for recycling, have you ever seen a recycled plastic product for sale? Not very often.
The most interesting thing I had previously read about garbage was by the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, in her Sanitation Manifesto! from 1984. I have a copy of it in the book Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings. Here is an excerpt: ...I am- along with every other citizen who lives, works, visits, or passes through this space- a co-producer of Sanitation's work-product, as well as a customer of Sanitation's work...Sanitation is the principal symbol of Time's passage and the mutable value of materiality on organized urban life. Sanitation, as an environmental energy system, is trapped in a miasma of of essentially pre-democratic perceptions. The public generally doesn't want to "see" beyond the tip of its nose- or see where we put our waste, or see what we do or should do with it, or see what choices we have about managing our waste. Waste is our immediate unwanted past. Do we "conserve" its energy through transformation, or do we drown in it? We are facing an environmental crisis, because we are running out of space to put it "away." To begin to accept as "ours" the difficult social task of dealing with "our" waste at the highest, not the most mediocre level of intelligence and creativity in reality, in all its effulgent scale here, people need to understand how they connect one to the other across our society, in all its scale...As a first step, we certainly need to peel away and separate ourselves from the ancient, transcultural alienating notion and aura of the caste-stigma of waste-worker, of "garbage-man," which has already translated, trickily, into "their" waste, not "ours"; they're "dirty," we're "clean"... There's much more, but you get the idea. I just looked her up, and I'm glad to see she is still alive and living in New York. She is the artist in residence for New York City's Department of Sanitation. I have gotten totally off-subject, but I'm allowed; it's my blog.
Saturday, June 2, 2007
Books To Read Part 2: Garbage Land
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I would like there to be an honest public examination of the reality of recycling efforts. As it stands, much of the technically recyclable packaging is rejected by community recyclers for unspecified reasons. Byzantine rules about what can and cannot be recycled, and how it must be presented for recycling pickup, makes it a difficult process and only encourages many people to forego the effort. I am happy to recycle whatever I can, but I'm also dismayed at how much I'm expected to throw into the trash because my local facility is not able to accept it. Further disheartening is the knowledge that not everything I set out for recycling actually goes through the process. For instance, in my office building, we cube-dwellers are all issued a "trash" bin and a blue "recycling" bin. When working late at night, I routinely witness the cleaning crew dumping both bins into the same big plastic bag on their cleaning cart. This was true in my office in San Francisco as well as in Hoboken NJ. In San Francisco I was told "it's OK, they sort it all out later." Riiight. If that's the case, why the f*** do they dump it into the same bag when it's ALREADY SORTED OUT? In talking to a fellow employee in Hoboken, she told me that she raised the same question with the building staff there. She was told "Oh, there's a machine in the basement that sorts it all out." Riiiight. I know someone who actually works in a recycling facility, and the reality of sorting recyclables there takes massive machinery and staffing-- and much of it is still sorted by hand. (As a side note, the percentage of material actually recycled at that state-of-the-art facility depends directly on the staffing level on any given day. Unless foreign dignitaries are visiting on an inspection junket, the facility is usually so understaffed as a cost-saving measure that a huge percentage of the arriving recyclables goes straight to the landfill.) As my friend at work stated, "Just look at the official rules for recycling items and how complicated they are! Are you going to tell me that one machine in the basement can differentiate between a glass bottle, a plastic bottle, a newspaper, a piece of cardboard, a yogurt container, and all the stuff people dump in recycling bins that can't be recycled-- like pizza cartons with pizza cheese stuck to them?" Exactly. As another example of smoke-screen recycling, in the kitchen area at work there are two holes in the countertop with bins below them. You would assume that one was for food-sodden trash items, and the other for recyclables such as cans, bottles etc. Well, good luck figuring out which is which, because they're unmarked, and BOTH contain blue bins-- which are routinely stuffed with a mix of recyclable and non-recycleable items. And I'm not even going into the whole issue of our cafeteria, where the only plates and utensils are plastic and styrofoam; and there's not even a nod to recycling anything-- just three unmarked bins piled high with plastic "trash."
I'd like to organize some kind of effort with kindred spirits at work to uncover the realities of workplace recycling, and actually meet with building and cafeteria staff in an attempt to change what seem to be truly wasteful practices. I'm sure any such inquiries would be seen as a nuisance by the officials, and at higher levels perhaps even a hostile "threat" to be dealt with. I mean let's be honest; on the face of it everything I see in my workplace, whether it's the plastic forks in the cafeteria or the cheap manufacturing of our products, is driven by the bottom line. That styrofoam plate saves them the cost of a dishwasher, the power/water it uses, and an employee to run it. Saving two cents per unit by using less-environmentally-friendly components in our product is seen as a major budgetary victory. Is there a chance in hell that anyone at the upper levels wants me and my friends making noise about the imaginary "sorting machine" in the basement, or the army of smiling elves next to it that re-sort the mixed bags of trash and recycleables? No. They'd prefer that we all buy into this fantasy of being an "environmentally friendly workplace" just because they made a one-time investment in trash cans that are blue instead of brown. Likewise, the people that run the higher-level recycling facilities would probably not want a close public scrutiny of efficiency in their plants. Let's all just sort our bottles and cans according to the cartoons in the official guidelines, and pat ourselves on the back for "doing the right thing"... and try not to think about how it doesn't make a damn bit of difference if those on the other end aren't holding up their end of the bargain.
This is a real problem that is just piling up. My former place of work also dumped the recycling in with the regular trash, but denied it. Is it a wider conspiracy, or just typical of the way businesses operate? And why do Brooklyn residents have to meet strict recycling standards (with recycling inspectors and fines), while the rest of the city can do whatever it wants?
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