Against Garbage

I like a book that starts out with a punchy New York attitude and winds down with a borderline-Communist rant. Heather Rogers does just that in her new book, Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage, set to appear at your local capitalist bookstore this October.

Rogers has the lively authorial voice of the Gotham journalist that she is; and despite what could be dismissed as nutty rants, she raises interesting questions of where to draw the line between what industries can do and what they should be regulated against doing.

Drawing on the records of pioneer sanitarians, plumbing historians and landfill experts alike, Rogers describes one incineration plant as follows: "Camouflaged by a neutral big-box exterior, American Ref-Fuel's Newark, New Jersey incinerator houses a macabre scene of nonstop destruction. In the bowels of the plant is a vast ten-story coliseum that's more than 200 feet long and 50 feet wide, filled with garbage."

The facilities sound like a modern day Moloch, consuming babies in its cruel flaming belly: the worshiped deity of the ungodly. She sums up with this opinion of the businesses whose business is garbage treatment: "The larger point is that firms like WMI [Waste Management Inc.] exploit such activities to generate PR that camouflages the darker, indisputably more destructive side of their industry." Yup-they're eating children, for sure.

Rogers' complaint is that these companies thrive on waste-our waste-and therefore put the strength of their marketing behind getting us to waste more. And because it's how they make their money, they want to make waste management seem as healthy as oatmeal.

Rogers sees their very zeal at getting garbage out of sight as proof of their devious ways. But if revealing refuse is a truer and more morally sound way to live, then we were better off in the era described in Rogers' chapter "Rubbish Past," detailing the good old days before effective sanitation clean-up was instituted. That was back when 5th Avenue's Museum Mile was a Manure Mile, its edges lined with horse doo. It was nasty, stinky, and carried disease: But at least we 'fessed up to our own wasti-ness (and that of our ponies).

Here, in one of the appealing challenges of the book, aesthetics, health and morals interplay. The argument is that we shouldn't be allowed to cover up what will ultimately be bad for us. You can bury your homework in the backyard, but eventually your mom will find out you didn't hand it in.

Rogers also discusses a pre-disposable time when saving things in America-reusing them-was necessary. Poop was crucial for a good crop of tomatoes. Fixing a broken jug with homemade glue (Rogers includes a recipe for diamond glue) was the way to still have a jug.

But if all standard ways of pulverizing trash are evil and making our own glue is no longer a number one weekend activity, what are we conscientious citizens supposed to do?

What about those happy blue bins that the volunteer monitor in my dorm used to patrol to make sure we separated our Fresca cans from our calculus study sheets? Well, if you thought recycling was an answer, writes Rogers, think again. The author voices what many New Yorkers have long suspected:

"Just because materials are hauled away in a recycling truck doesn't mean that they actually get reprocessed. Almost half of discarded newspapers and office paper is buried or burned, while two-thirds of glass containers and plastic soda and milk bottles are trashed instead of recycled."

She goes on to explain how even the remaining materials-the ones that actually are recycled-are "down-cycled," losing their intrinsic integrity and usefulness. What was once a shoe can now only be a pencil eraser; and when that eraser gets recycled it's doubtful anything useful can be made from it.

But if recycling is only another ploy on the part of wily trash-mongers to get us to buy, use and discard (even if we sort before we chuck), what's left for us users-of-things to do with our old laptops? Rogers' answer: Don't buy them.

Or make the laptop company deal with it. Echoing William McDonough's Cradle to Cradle, she quotes his conviction that a company must be willing to reduce its profits to be more "green."

Finally, Rogers raises two questions. One is how successfully we can cart away and hide our refuse without it coming back to haunt us in the form of environmental degradation. The other question is what it says about our society -and about us as individuals-that we create refuse at all.

All told, yet another reason to save back issues of New York Press, as if you needed one.