Hidden America Read online

  The Puente Hills Landfill, about sixteen miles east of downtown Los Angeles, was a series of canyons when people first started dumping here. Now it’s a mountain. In 1953 the film adaptation of H. G. Wells’s science fiction novel The War of the Worlds featured the Puente Hills as the landing site of the first spacecraft in the Martian invasion. Dumping started in 1965 in an area named the San Gabriel Valley Dump. In 1970 the dump was purchased by the Sanitation Districts of Los Angeles County, a partnership of twenty-four independent districts serving five million people in seventy-eight cities in Los Angeles County, and renamed the Puente Hills Landfill. Every day 13,200 new tons of trash are added. That’s enough trash to fill a one-acre hole twenty feet deep. The other way to look at it is a football stadium filled two stories high.

  On November 1, 2013, the landfill will be out of room, and all that trash will have to go somewhere else.

  At six o’clock, Herman pushes the button. The back end of the trailer rises and 79,650 pounds of debris comes thundering out, most of it wood and plaster and nails and shreds of wallpaper. Beside him a truck is dumping decidedly more organic garbage, pungent indeed, and way down the row, off to the side, a guy is pouring a truck full of sludge, sterilized human waste, black as ink.

  Herman gets a broom, sweeps his trailer clean. Unlike most of the haulers who come here—the guys who drive for the conglomerates like Waste Management with their continuous fleet of shiny green packers—Herman works for the Sanitation Districts itself, moving trash from a central dumping station in the nearby town of Southgate. Thus, his priority status. He will make five trips in a day, stopping only once to eat Oodles of Noodles and cheese crackers and a cookie. On the ride home, he eats a green apple. “I’ve got my routine,” he says. “Every day I do it all exactly the same.” He talks to me about his philosophy of slowing down, not making mistakes, same way every day, the power of ritual. Peaceful. Using this method, he worked his way up from paper picker, day laborer, traffic director, water truck diver, on and on until he found his niche. There is honor, he says, in being first each day, all those other trucks parting at the gate so Herman can get through. He is careful to note that he is the only one of his entire eighth-grade graduating class of 1954 who has not yet retired. “Why would anyone retire from a place like this?” he asks. “Why would you?”

  Having spent more than a week at the landfill, by now I am getting used to hearing workers here, from the highest to the lowest ranks, speak like this. Concerning the landfill, they are all pride and admiration and even thanks. It seemed, at first, like crazy talk.

  A landfill, after all, is a disgusting place. It is not a place anyone should have to work in, or see, or smell. This is a 100-million-ton solid soup of diapers, Doritos bags, phone books, shoes, carrots, watermelon rinds, boats, shredded tires, coats, stoves, couches, Biggie fries, piled up right here off the I-605 freeway. It’s a place that smells like every dumpster you ever walked by—times a few hundred thousand. It’s a place that brings to mind the hell of civilization, a heap of waste and ugliness and everything denial is designed for. We throw stuff out. The stuff is supposed to . . . go away. Disappear. We tend not to think about the fact that every time we throw a moist towelette or an empty Splenda packet or a Little Debbie snack cake wrapper into the trash can, there are people involved, a whole chain of people charged with the preposterously complicated task of making that thing vanish—which it never really does. A landfill is not something we want to bother thinking about, and if we do, we tend to blame the landfill itself for sitting there stinking like that, for marring the landscape, for offending a sanitized aesthetic. We are human, highly evolved creatures impatient with all things stinky and gooey and gross—remarkably adept at forgetting that a landfill would be nothing, literally nothing, without us.

  In America, we produce more garbage than any other country in the world: four pounds per person each day, for a total of 250 million tons a year. In urban areas, we are running out of places to put all that trash. Right now, the cost of getting rid of it is dirt cheap—maybe $15 a month on a bill most people never even see, all of it wrapped into some mysterious business about municipal tax revenue. So why think about it?

  Electricity used to be cheap too. We went for a long time not thinking about the true cost of that. Same with gas for our cars.

  The problem of trash (and sewage, its even more offensive cousin) is the upside-down version of the problem of fossil fuel: too much of one thing, not enough of the other. Either way, it’s a matter of managing resources. Either way, a few centuries of gorging and not thinking ahead has the people of the twenty-first century standing here scratching our heads. Now what?

  The problem of trash, fortunately, is a wondrously provocative puzzle to scientists and engineers, some of whom lean, because of the inexorability of trash, toward the philosophical. The intrinsic conundrum—the disconnect between human waste and the human himself—becomes grand, even glorious, to the people at the dump.

  “I brought my wife up here once to show her,” Herman tells me. “I said, ‘Look, that’s trash.’ She couldn’t believe it. Then she couldn’t understand it. I told her, I said, ‘This is the Rolls-Royce of landfills.’”

  —

  “NOBODY KNOWS we’re even here,” Joe Haworth is saying as we make our way around the outside of the landfill, winding up and up past scrubby California oaks, sycamore trees, and the occasional shock of pink bougainvillea vine. He is driving his old Cadillac, a 1982 Eldorado, rusty black with a faded KERRY-EDWARDS sticker on the bumper. He has the thick glasses of a civil engineer, which is how he started, and the curls and paunch and demeanor of a crusty retired PR man, which is what he is now. He wears a Hawaiian print shirt and a straw hat, and the way he leans way back in the driver’s seat suggests an easy, uncomplicated confidence.

  “People driving by on the highway think this is a park,” he says. “Or they’ll be, like, ‘What’s with all the pipes going around that mountain?’”

  In fact, we are driving over trash, a half century’s worth, a heap so vast, there are roads and stop signs and traffic cops and a history of motor vehicle accidents, including at least one fatality.

  The outside of the landfill, the face the public sees, reminds me of Disney World, a perfectly crafted veneer of happiness belying a vastly more complicated core. The western side, facing the 605, is lush greens and deep blues, a showy statement of desert defiance, while the eastern face is quiet earth tones, scrubby needlegrass, buttonbush, and sagebrush; the native look on that side was requested by the people living in Hacienda Heights, a well-to-do neighborhood in the foothills of the dump. They wanted the mountain of trash behind them to blend in with the canyons reaching toward the sunset. A staff of fifty landscapers do nothing but honor such requests. The goal: Make the landfill disappear by making it look pretty.

  “No matter what you do with your trash, nature has to process it,” Joe is saying. “Okay? Think about it.” We are making our way up to a lookout point where we can get an overview of the action of the trash trucks and bulldozers and scrapers, a good show and a good place to sit and think. Joe speaks with rapid-fire speed, constantly punctuating his lessons with Groucho Marx–style asides. “Look, we’d be up to our eyeballs in dinosaur poop if nature didn’t have any way to run this stuff around again,” he says. He loves this stuff. He is sixty-four years old, an environmental engineer, a Jesuit-trained fallen Catholic whose enthusiasm for waste management, solid, liquid, recycled, buried, burning, decomposing, is oddly infectious. I have come to regard him as the high priest of trash.

  “Instead of being up to our eyeballs in dinosaur poop, we’re made of dinosaur poop,” he says. “You know? And other chemicals. We’ve got garbage in us. There’s a carbon cell from Napoleon in your elbow somewhere. It’s all nature running things around again, a continuous loop. It’s all done by bacteria breaking it down into carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, okay
? Think about it!”

  I tell him I’ll add it to my list, which keeps getting longer the longer I’m here. Joe retired from the landfill a couple of years ago, but he comes back to consult, to visit, to help Donny, his assistant who took over his job, and to sit and marvel. He entered the refuse world back in the 1960s, when people first awakened, as if from a lazy daydream, to the notion that trash not only matters but trash is matter, and matter never leaves. You can burn it. You can bury it. You can throw it into the ocean. You can try to hide it, but it still exists in some form: ash, sludge, gas, particulate matter floating in the air. “It all comes back to the idea of the cycle,” he says. “We’re going to keep reusing the same stuff, so let’s figure out how to use it responsibly so we don’t choke on it.”

  He gives me an example. “See those pipes?” he says, pointing as we cruise up the landfill. “Those are sucking gas.” The pipes are fat and prominent, about two feet in diameter, and a constant source of wild wonder. Eighty miles of pipes encircle the landfill, pulling out a deadly mix of methane, carbon dioxide, and other gases continuously produced by the fermenting trash. The pipes are connected with seventy-five miles of underground trenches and to a network of fourteen hundred wells. The methane mix is highly explosive and smelly and in the past has been an environmental nightmare. As trash continues to ferment, the methane is unstoppable. And so the pipes—a kind of landfill miracle, a technology pioneered by Sanitation Districts engineers—deliver the methane downhill to the Gas-to-Energy Facility. The methane feeds a boiler, creates steam. The steam turns a turbine. The turbine generates fifty-eight megawatts of electricity—enough to power about seventy thousand Southern California homes.

  Before I started hanging out at the landfill, I had no idea we could generate electricity from trash. “Most people don’t know this,” I say to Joe.

  “Oh, a lot of people know it,” he says.

  No, they don’t. I have checked. I have consulted folks back home, regular trash makers, average citizens going through cartons of Hefty bags, who think little beyond “Gotta take the trash out” when it comes to the final resting place of their garbage. “People don’t know we power homes with landfill gas,” I say. “Don’t you think people should know this?”

  He looks at me, weary. “Why do you think I’ve been busting my ass at this for thirty years, lady?”

  He blinks, removes his glasses, takes out a handkerchief, and wipes them clean. “That’s what I did,” he says. “I did nothing but tell people about what we do here. Now, how much time does society have to listen and understand? Well, the answer to that is, society’s interest level is pretty low. It doesn’t necessarily want to know where its waste goes. It’s embarrassed by its responsibility in this arena.”

  Joe parks the car and we get out. We stand and peer down into the landfill, at trash, the very stuff Herman and his fellow truckers dumped earlier this morning. From this distance, the open landfill is a giant brown five-hundred-acre bowl, with a frantic line of trucks inside snorting and pregnant and awaiting release.

  This is the cheapest place to dump trash in all of L.A. County, about $28 a ton, and so it is the first choice of most garbage companies. When the landfill reaches its 13,200-ton daily capacity, usually by about noon, the guard at the gate will raise a flag visible from the freeway: a sign to truckers to keep on moving and find another place to dump. Anyone can dump here, any private citizen with a pickup full of junk willing to pay the fee.

  Trash gets piled in as many as three active areas, or “cells,” daily. Each cell is about the size of a football field, and every hour an additional 1,200 tons of trash is put into it. A team of thirty heavy-equipment operators dances madly over the pile. Huge bulldozers, ten feet tall, equipped with seventeen-foot blades, push and sculpt the trash into rows. Then the mighty Bomags, 120,000-pound compactors with 130,000 pounds of pushing power, smash and crunch and squish the trash, forcing out air, forcing it tighter and tighter to save space. All of these machines clamber impossibly close to one another, backward, forward, over steep hills of trash, clinging lopsidedly to edges. From up here, the sounds are all roar and backup beeps echoing around the bowl, and the view is a colorful shock of red and green and yellow and white, a smash of crawling color.

  One of the cells has already reached capacity, and so the scrapers have moved in, the biggest machines of all, fifty-three feet long, sixteen feet high—the wheels alone are nine feet tall—and with their big belly hoppers pick up clean dirt, and dump it about a foot thick over the cell, sealing in odors, rats, bugs, concealing the leftovers of a yesterday everyone is more than ready to be done with.

  Forgotten. Gone. By day’s end, there will be no trace of trash anywhere in the landfill.

  The next day, the process repeats. Cell by cell, the garbage spreads across the landfill floor until it hits the far side, the edge of the bowl, and a new layer, or “lift,” is begun.

  A constant parade of water trucks sprays the dirt to control dust, and a team of paper pickers runs madly on foot to catch anything the wind might pick up and try to carry away—the worst offender being plastic grocery bags that can take off like kids’ balloons. A chemical odor retardant is sometimes used when things get too bad, or again if the wind conspires, and there are a lot of seagulls waiting on a nearby ridge. Seagulls are a landfill nuisance because they fly away with food scraps and, as is their reputation, fight each other over them mid-flight, often losing them, and soon a lady has a half-eaten hamburger splashing into her backyard pool. For a time, engineers were utterly confounded by the seagull problem, firing off cannons to scare them away, piping in the sounds of hawks and owls—but the gulls got so used to the sounds they would stand on top of the cannons and inside the speakers. The solution was elegant and simple: tall, portable poles placed at intervals over the working face of the landfill, with nylon fishing line stretched between them. The lines disrupt the gulls’ unique spiral landing pattern; the birds give up before even trying. “And I guess they’re too stupid to walk on in under the wires,” Joe says. He’s got his sunglasses on now, and, together with the hat and the shirt and against the background of the lush foliage, he is the picture of vacation.

  A more urgent and literally more pressing concern than birds in any landfill is leachate, the liquids that might ooze out. People are not supposed to throw away paint thinner or nail polish or batteries or transmission fluid or motor oil, but plenty do, plenty of it comes in on trucks, and plenty of it gets smashed and smushed, mixing with rainwater into an unpredictably toxic cocktail that, if it escapes the landfill and gets into the groundwater, could be deadly to nearby communities. And so a twelve-foot liner of clay, plastic, sand, and other barrier materials covers the walls and floor of the landfill—a diaper of the largest scale imaginable, designed to absorb and seal in wetness. Seventeen miles of pipes carry the leachate into collection areas. A team of field engineers specialize in monitoring the leachate, cleaning and purifying it. One of the ways a landfill engineer anywhere in the world earns bragging rights is if he can pour himself a glass of the leachate from his landfill and drink it.

  All of this—the operational area of Puente Hills—is invisible to the public, thanks to earthen berms that rise ten feet above the working face. The scraper drivers keep adding to the top of the berm as the landfill fills, constantly building the fortress wall, so all the work goes unnoticed.

  For their part, the scraper drivers refer to the berms as “visuals.” The most fun you can have on a scraper, they have told me, is steadying your 155,000-pound machine over the tip of a visual barely wider than the span of your tires. Once in a while a scraper will fall off a visual, sometimes sliding one hundred feet down or sometimes hanging there, half on and half off, until a crane can be summoned to rescue it. A driver who falls off a visual will get called “Tipsy Toes” or “Tipper” until the next guy does it and earns the torch of shame.

  A bulldozer
or Bomag driver who manages to roll his machine over into the trash will likewise have to endure the name “Flipper.”

  “You should go down there,” Joe says. “You should go down there and ride in the trash, get a feel for it.”

  —

  MIKE “BIG MIKE” SPEISER is the most famous Bomag driver at the landfill, and some say in the world. This is only incidentally because he looks, as much as a person can, like a Bomag. He is proudly boxy, enormous, bald, and he appears as though he could crush the trash without the assistance of machinery. He is forty-five years old and has impressive tattoos: a Grim Reaper, a skeleton with a dagger through the head, a skull with flames shooting out, and a skull with horns and a bullet hole in its head. “Like the Devil got shot in the head or something,” he says. “Basically.”

  He is a shy man who blushes when he smiles, and he is known for being a gentleman. He is famous because he won first place on compactors—a test of agility and speed—in the recent Solid Waste Association of North America’s International Road-E-O in Cocoa Beach, Florida. “He is the best in the nation,” a few of the operators have told me. Mike does not himself brag about the honor, but he does allow: “I am very, very good at this.”

  Mike and I stand at the edge of a cell of trash in motion, Bomag chugging, ready to roll. He climbs the ladder to the cab and offers his hand to help hoist me up. “The air conditioner works nice, and it’s a pressurized cab, so it keeps the smells out.” He shows off the air-ride feature of the cushioned seat, apologizing that there is only one. He takes the controls while I hunch behind him and hang on to his soft shoulders. We crawl slowly, as if in a tank, toward and into the cell of trash, about thirty feet deep. We are high above with a marvelous view of smeared paper plates, Target bags, egg cartons, Green Giant frozen peas, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, all manner of Hefty and Glad bags splayed open to reveal the guts of everyday American life. Effortlessly, we climb over a mattress and a TV and a tricycle and a rocking chair and soda bottles and deodorant, until pretty soon the eye refuses to differentiate the trash, refuses to register nonsense the mind can’t begin to place in anything close to a meaningful narrative. We go rolling through an acre of garbage, mounds and mounds of it cracking and turning to mush under the teeth of the Bomag.