Put It Out There

Among her cavalcade of facts: "While the fatality rate for all occupations is 4.7 deaths per 100,000 workers, garbage collectors die at a rate of 46 per 100,000. In fact, they're approximately three times more likely to be killed on the job than police officers or firefighters." "Depending on its burial context, a Granny Smith apple can biodegrade completely in two weeks or last several thousand years." "As late as 1892, a hundred thousand pigs roamed New York City's streets, feasting on scraps tossed out doors and windows by the working poor, who relied on these animals to convert waste into edible protein." "In 2001, American companies sent out seventeen billion" holiday catalogues, "fifty-nine for every man, woman, and child in the United States -- weighing a total of 7.2 billion pounds."

While mulling over these revelations, readers will discover that there are many ways to describe the cast-off materials and byproducts of our disposable society. Besides the conventional "stuff," "mess," "trash," "litter," "rubbish" and "refuse," Royte occasionally resorts to "feculence," "putrescible waste" and a four-letter word that rhymes with "spit." Then there are the quirky acronyms with which habitués of garbage and recycling circles pepper their speech. ONP means old newspapers; MOW is shorthand for mixed office waste; and OCC stands for old corrugated cardboard. None of these would wind up in a MRF (materials recovery facility, pronounced "murf"), the destination of recycled metal, glass and plastic.

In contrast, the designations for the pollutants deriving from waste mismanagement are totally devoid of quirk. Unsurprisingly, such poisons are plentiful in Garbage Land and generally burdened with less pronounceable names, which helps to endow them with the necessary malevolence. Furans, mercury, lead cadmium, polyvinyl chloride, trichloroethane, benzene and methyl ethyl ketone are among the caustic chemicals that Royte discusses.

As impressive as Royte's doggedness and investigative skill is the care she takes with language. In a book where facts and figures are so plentiful and ominous, felicitous phrasing can work like the proverbial spoonful of sugar. Above a vat in a recycling plant, Royte observes "a shroud of steam" that "obscured its contents until a sudden draft revealed a surface of bubbling brown scum: primordial paper soup." She describes a truckload of cardboard, loose paper and junk mail, newly dumped and entered into the recycling process, as a "mass with a million edges." The immense mounds at Fresh Kills are adorned with "waving fields of fescue." A pile of recycled metal is "a monadnock of shredded ferrous scrap." The prose in Garbage Land flows as if its author read each sentence aloud before committing it to print.

Ever the intrepid reporter, Royte even ventures into the pungent world of human waste disposal, an area that one zealous recycler calls "the realm of taboo." This chapter should not be read while eating. As Royte tells it, cities used to just chuck human excrement into the ocean. The Ocean Dumping Reform Act went into effect in 1991. Until then, Boston dumped 400,000 gallons of sludge into the ocean every day. New York dumped similar amounts.

So what do cities do with it now? They begin with a trick of language. "Somewhere between the treatment plant in Bay Ridge and a factory on the South Bronx waterfront," Royte writes, "my sewage was transformed, semantically, into 'biosolids.' "

In some cities, the newly labeled product is packaged and sold as fertilizer, sporting brand names such as Nu-Earth and Nitrohumus. Fifty-four percent of our waste is handled this way, according to Royte. "The rest is buried in landfills (28 percent), incinerated (17 percent) and 'surface disposed' without processing (1 percent)."

Her investigation of waste-transfer stations and raw sewage dewatering plants enables Royte to cast necessary light on environmental racism. She rightly condemns the practice of building such facilities mostly where poor, nonwhite citizens live. She cites a 1987 study's finding that "three out of every five African Americans or Hispanic Americans live in communities with one or more unregulated toxic-waste sites."

Royte reserves her greatest indignation for plastics, which are not biodegradable in any conventional sense. She laments, "It's estimated that Americans go through about a hundred billion polyethylene bags -- the ubiquitous eighteen-microns-thick grocery sacks that snag on branches, skip along on the breeze, clog sewers and storm drains, and burrow into ditches and dunes -- a year. . . . They persist in the environment for decades, if not centuries."

Royte discovers that alternatives, such as recyclable paperboard boxes, generate waste as well. "Which was preferable? The choices, like so many at the intersection of consumerism and environmental concern, were agonizing." The difficulty of making wise, meaningful decisions is a factor Royte often acknowledges in her praiseworthy book. But just as important as her admission that she doesn't have all the answers is her persuasive demonstration that no one does.

She leaves us with a foreboding premise that even the cynics she has encountered along the trail of trash may grudgingly agree with: "If we don't wake up and make the connection between our economy and the environment (which provides the resources to make all our stuff), the planet will eventually do it for us. And it won't be pretty." ·

Jabari Asim is deputy editor of Book World.