Wide World of Waste

As a science writer for magazines ranging from Outside to The New Yorker, Elizabeth Royte travels to exotic places. She has tracked mushers on the Iditarod Trail, chased wild dogs in Africa, slept in a cockroach-rich rain forest in Central America (awakening one night to find a 4-inch Blaberus giganteus sharing her pillow) and walked into a Texas cave “just as 6 million Mexican freetail bats were flying out.”

But none of that really prepared Royte for what awaited her just a few years ago when she slipped her canoe into the tidewater canal that bisects her New York City neighborhood to watch local activists troll for litter.

“It was low tide, and the smell was – even for someone expecting the worst – fairly bad, a combination of outhouse, mud flat and mold,” Royte wrote in her critically acclaimed nonfiction book, “Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash.”

“I glided over submerged shopping carts coated thick with algae and watched as other paddlers plucked spent condoms – or Coney Island whitefish, as they’re locally known – from the water’s surface.”

A lot of it was simply litter, the sort of trash that might accumulate anywhere in America. But not all of it was haphazard. Some of the pollution entered the Brooklyn canal as unregulated discharges from neighboring industries and row houses.

“In one small, godforsaken stretch of water drifted household trash, raw sewage, waste, containers that ought to have been recycled and rapidly putrescing organic debris,” she wrote. “With a start, I realized it was all the stuff I got rid of almost daily.”

That particular insight led Royte to wonder exactly what else we’re throwing away these days and where it all goes.

“That’s when I got this idea that following different streams of waste would be a form of adventure travel,” she said last week in a telephone interview.

What she found eventually led Royte to write “Garbage Land,” selected by The New York Times and The Washington Post as one of the best books of 2005.

Exploring that world took Royte on a sometimes wild journey from her kitchen floor (where, like a field archaeologist, she began dissecting her own family’s trash each day) to curbside garbage cans to midtown transfer stations to far-flung landfills, including a few she wasn’t officially allowed to visit.

In New York, it was a story that was begging to be told. The city’s Fresh Kills Landfill – at 200 feet high, the largest in the world – had recently shut down, which prompted the city to begin trucking all of its refuse out of state.

The daily exodus of thousands of tons of New York City trash continues to be a spectacle, Royte says. The 300-mile round-trip journey to Pennsylvania and back employs a fleet of some 450 tractor- trailer rigs that consume an estimated 33,700 gallons of diesel fuel a day.

The amount of trash America generates each year is nothing short of spectacular. In 2002, U.S. municipalities disposed of 369 million tons of solid waste, more per capita than anywhere else in the world.

And that’s just the tip of the trash pile. Far more waste, Royte says, is produced “upstream” by the miners, farmers and industries that make all the products we consume.

“For every barrel of waste we put on the curb, there’s 71 barrels of waste generated upstream in manufacturing this stuff,” Royte says.

“A lot of it is liquid, and that’s like hog lagoons. … A lot of it is mining wastes, because there is a lot of slag, and a lot of earth is pushed around to get at gold for our computers or wedding rings.”

Royte’s book also examines recycling efforts.

She interviews specialists on salvaging paper, plastic and metal, including more than a few eccentrics. One operates the Prolerizer, the biggest metal shredder in the world, which she watched “convert whole cars into fist-sized chunks of scrap in 30 to 60 seconds.” Another champions a small desktop composter filled with worms. Still another a pellet form of fertilizer manufactured from human feces.

Royte encourages recycling but says she’s also a realist.

“The good news on the recycling front is that paper recycling rates are up over 50 percent. But paper consumption is up also, so we’re still cutting down trees to make paper.”

Other types of recycling, however, have proven to be less popular, which is a problem since they depend on economies of scale to succeed. And none of it is really keeping pace with America’s ever-growing appetite to consume even more. Hence more and more trash.

Whereas each American produced an average of 2.7 pounds of garbage per day in 1960, today each generates 4.5 pounds, Royte says, citing statistics from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Of particular concern nowadays is electronics waste – one study estimates that 163,420 computers and televisions become obsolete every day – and how much of it winds up in landfills, even when it’s prohibited. That and the fact that the average desktop monitor contains nearly 4 pounds of lead.

We ought to be concerned about it, Royte says, even in the West.

“Just because your population density is lower than New York City’s – just because you don’t have the largest landfill in the world or you don’t live near an incinerator or a transfer station – doesn’t mean that your garbage isn’t affecting you,” she said.

Everyone’s garbage is generating methane that’s changing the climate, Royte said. Everyone whose garbage is going into an incinerator is sending mercury into the air.

“It’s settling into waterways and working its way up the food chain. Dioxins from incinerators and from spreading sewage sludge is showing up in the breast milk of women as far north as the Arctic.”

And that, Royte says, is only what we know about so far. Our garbage probably has other surprises in store.