It had fallen to Marjorie1 to manage the recycling program for Morganville and she was none too happy with the assignment. “Bunch of damn garbage!” was her instant reaction when Public Works Director Mark Crenshaw had told her of her promotion. “Does it pay more?” was her second reaction.
“It’s a better job title,” he’d replied. “Director of Non-trash Management.”
“But does it pay more?”
“No, but you get a car. Think of it as a lateral promotion.””
“I guess that’s something. Assuming I can drive it home.”
“We’ll do a press release. Picture in the paper and all2.”
Sighing, “Okay. Though that doesn’t exactly thrill me. I’m gonna get accused of all kinds of crap, just like Toby. That’s why he quit. Won’t help if people know what I look like.”
“But you’re stronger.”
“Right.”
“No really, you’ve been dealing with potholes for three years. Handled them like a champ. Lots more complaints there than with the recycles.”
“Likely story.” But Marge was smart enough to understand that refusing the “promotion” was a dead end in muni government. She had her sights set on the directorship, maybe stepping up to city manager in some town or the other after she had another decade under her belt. Even if this was lateral, it was a kind of move up. Job titles matter on a resumé.
What she didn’t see coming was the learning curve or lack thereof.
It wasn’t her own.
In the years since Morganville had adopted single-stream recycling the net tonnage of landfill garbage had dropped significantly. Toby had overseen the change and he’d pointed out, in bed,3 soon afterward that the biggest immediate switch was in the quantity of liquor and beer containers that were coming out of the waste stream.
“When we had those open bins, you know glass and metal and paper, people didn’t want their neighbors to see all the empties. Once they had a big roll-out with a lid, bam, the evidence was suddenly hidden, and they were happy to make the switch. And frankly, people are terrible at sorting. The stuff from the separate bins still had to be gone through at the plant.”4
Another bit of wisdom Toby had passed along before he left was this: “If you want to understand the failure of Western Civilization, look at the waste stream.” Then he’d headed off to Boise where his brother’s construction business was going full tilt as the city became the fastest growing metro in the country.5
Standing at the landfill, Marge watched the house-sized bulldozers pushing and burying and crushing ton after ton of perfectly useful material and let her thoughts drift. Was it Ferlinghetti who’d waxed poetic about Japan sinking the American fleet at Pearl Harbor with munitions built from recycled American street cars? Were those the street cars General Motors bought and scrapped when they decided to put Americans in autos, or was that after the war? She’d seen Roger Rabbit6, but couldn’t put a date on the GM scheme.
Her father had related boyhood memories of the scrap metal and paper drives in the 40s, and her grandfather had been part owner of a paper mill. The elder Rumson had snorted. “The damn Boy Scouts collected so much damn paper we had a damn glut. Couldn’t begin to use it all in ‘42! Then we had a damn shortage by ‘44. The damn government was makin’ damn paperwork faster than we could roll it out. Damn fools.”
Her uncle Charles had served in Vietnam and had his own recycling story. “The damn7 gooks raided our trash heaps. Got half their damn weapons from us! The damn higher ups had us toss anything halfway glitched and give us new gear. Think they were workin’ with the damn arms companies that hired ‘em after the war. The damn gooks were doing damn repairs that we shoulda done. That’s why the damn army is burning all the damn crap in Iraq.”
Now she’d heard that veterans of the current mess in the Mideast were turning up sick as hell from breathing the fumes while they guarded the burn pits. “Look at the waste stream,” indeed.
The GreenStream® plant was no more encouraging. GS®, the private side of Morganville’s public/private partnership, handled the actual collection, sorting and distribution of blue bin material. GS® General Manager Buck Tindle was tensely terse. “Bags, lids, rats, in that order. Next? What in hell to do with the plastic.”
Plastic bags, it seemed, jammed the machinery. Lids on containers made them much harder to crush while lids off scattered like cockroaches frightened by sudden light in a dark Southern kitchen. The plant floor was littered with them. And rats. “Damn idiots don’t rinse containers. We’ve got more damn rats around here than a goddam Trump tenement in New York.”
“As for plastic containers, once China stopped accepting the stuff the dirty secret is that about 90 percent ends up in the landfill anyway. Hell, turns out that China was landfilling most of what we sent there. Why they wanted it is anybody’s guess. And now Thailand and Vietnam have quit too.”
Marge shook her head, “So do we quit collecting it?”
“Nah. Some of it is reusable, and there’s a lot of research on ways we might eventually use the rest. Meanwhile the crap that shouldn’t be here in the first place is a pain in the ass, and it costs plenty, but it’s not really a big problem to sort.” Buck aimed a thumb at the huge rollaway dumpster at the head of the sorting line. “We fill that every other day.”
“That’s a hell of a pile of garbage,” Marjorie replied, shaking her head.
“Yeah. But ...” Buck grinned, “The trouble is we’re dealing with human beings and human beings aren’t very bright. I’ve been in this business for twenty years. On the upside, locally at least, we send all that crap to South Carolina, so at least it isn’t filling up this county’s landfill.”
“You’d think some basics would sink in. Eventually.”
“You’d think.”
The big surprise in her new job was something Toby could have told her, but as mentioned in the footnote two pages back, was not the first thing on his mind when they trysted. As could have Director Crenshaw if he’d been paying attention, which he was not, directing much of his time to golf.8 The new position did not actually require real non-waste management, that was pretty much in the bailiwick of Tindle and company. What it did entail was education. Marjorie Rumson, now Director of Non-trash Management, was become Morganville’s chief educator regarding Materials & What The Hell Are We Going To Do?
How do you teach people what not to throw away in a culture whose economy depends on throwing away as much as possible as fast as possible in order to create demand for ever more stuff to be thrown away?
Take this as a real case in point, told to your author by a real trash expert hired to evaluate trash streams in cities around the country:
The methodology is to go through all of the garbage in trucks from a selected section of a town. This enables evaluation based on demographics, socio-economic data and etc. One truck load included hundreds of brand-new toothbrushes in their packaging. Knowing where the load had been sourced, the expert was able to trace it back to a CVS® Pharmacy. When asked about the new toothbrushes the store manager explained that the store had received a shipment of the “new” models and “corporate” had told him to dump the previous year’s stock.9
Seriously. This is an actual thing. It was in Boston.
Nor was the packaging industry of any help with Marge’s remit. While plastics had been dutifully stamped with various numbers since 1988, the “chasing arrows” symbol gave everyone the impression that all the plastics, #1-#7, were recyclable, when in fact they were not. The latter was particularly problematic since #7 indicated “other”—a catchall that included BPA, polycarbonate and LEXAN as well as compostable plastics made from corn starch. Worse yet, BPA leaches into food products and, when disposed, into the environment. BPA is a xenoestrogen, a known endocrine disrupter. Endocrine disrupters in the environment have rendered alligators sterile, frogs deformed, birds unable to reproduce, and other jollities.
Naturally, a major use of BPA-based polycarbonates is for sippy cups for infants.
Perhaps worse yet (?) they can’t currently be recycled. Nor can #3s. And #5s only in some places. Nor can lids.
On a bright note #4s, like the ubiquitous check-out lane grocery bag, can be converted into park benches and deck boards, but you, being a good egg, always utilize cloth shopping bags, rendering this bit of information only of intellectual import.
Marge has a big problem on her hands, if she really intends to “Direct” Non-trash Management.
I know this story is neither funny nor particularly amusing but it is included here to help Marge out.10
Marge is a nice person11 and except for that very brief affair with Al12, she’s been able to steer clear of the links.
****
I wrote this story in 2020 and things are worse than I then imagined. Most new plastic is made from ethane which is a byproduct of methane production (fracking, these days). It has virtually no value, so plastic manufacturers buy it for the cost of collection and transport which is five times less than the cost of reusing old material. The only way we will ever achieve meaningful recycling of plastic is to drastically cut the use of natural gas. Trump is setting that back by years if not decades. Good luck folks!
****
Note: Substack starts footnote numbers anew each time I paste in a story. But footnotes are wildly important and sometimes refer back to previous matters, so I’ve thoughtfully put the correct numbers in brackets, like so [#].
1 [53] Yes, that Marjorie. I told you we’d get back to her.
2 [54] This will lead to potential trouble in a later story. Stay tuned.
3 [55] Their relationship had been something more than merely collegial, and better in her estimation than that with her former, one Nutter Knudsen, the aforementioned wood carver now (Surprise!) in bed with Lurlene.
4 [56] Morganville was now six years into the new program but the recycling rate had flat-lined, moreover the quantity of non-recyclables in the blue bins had gone up. The hapless citizens had gone from failure to take all the useable stuff out of the garbage can to putting too much garbage in the recycles. Oh, with the best of intentions. Some had begun to assume that pretty much everything in the trash can was likely to be reusable. Toby hadn’t filled her in on this. They actually didn’t discuss work much, being in the throes of passion. Sex claimed a slightly higher priority than business.
5 [57] True fact. Maybe she should have accepted his invitation. He was a cut above Nutter regarding little things said and done. But Boise?
6 [58] Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a 1988 film about just such a scheme.
7 [59] Eloquence runs in the damn family.
8 [60] Under the City Manager’s radar because managing the municipal links was part of Crenshaw’s departmental purview, and the chief reason he had worked for two years to wrest the golf course from the Parks and Rec Department. His daily visits were chalked up to Just Doing His Job.
9 [61] Do toothbrushes really change that much year to year? This is a true story. Did the idea of donation to a homeless shelter ever graze the brain of the store manager or the higher ups?
10 [62] And don’t get me started on glass, which should be far easier to recycle than plastics. In many locations there is no market for used glass, so it is either shipped long distances, with the recycling system paying for the fuel—that is, paying to give it away—or, with a lower carbon footprint, ground up and used as fill material in landfills (replacing soil). However in many jurisdictions ground glass doesn’t legally qualify as “sanitary” for use in landfills. Go figure. Clean enough to drink out of, but too dirty to bury garbage?
11 [63] Which is why Nutter misses her, or did before Lurlene moved in. All the things he should have said and done, and he never took the time. Apparently she wasn’t always on his mind.
12 [64] Brief mention in the next story.
*****
Copyright© 2020, Cecil Bothwell, All rights reserved.
Want more stories? Check out my website
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.