Author: Elizabeth Royte
Review: Neil Genzlinger
Imagine a type of obsessive-compulsive disorder that leaves you unable to throw or flush something away without tracking precisely where it goes. Not just from your indoor container to the curb or trunk line; this affliction makes you unable to put your mind at rest unless you follow your castoff into the truck, the transfer station, the landfill, the scrap-metal shredder, the treatment tank.
Elizabeth Royte apparently has such a disorder, but rather than (or perhaps in addition to) letting it ruin her life, she has turned it into a likable chronicle of rubbish-realization, ''Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash.'' Hers is a journey that everyone should take but few will. Put it in a class with how and where we get our gasoline, our food, our bluejeans and sneakers: best not to know the details, because not knowing allows you to not take responsibility.
Royte, whose previous book, ''The Tapir's Morning Bath,'' followed researchers in the tropical rain forest, here follows an assortment of garbage collectors, recyclers and sewage treaters, beginning with the men who pick up the stuff she leaves at her curb in Brooklyn on trash day. The idea is to see how much damage she is personally doing in the grand scheme of things and how she might minimize it; to get beyond the easy plateau of environmental awareness (don't eat endangered fish) and look at, well, the outflow. ''It wasn't fair, I reasoned, to feel connected to the rest of the world only on the front end, to the waving fields of grain and the sparkling mountain streams,'' she writes. ''We needed to cop to a downstream connection as well.''
The resulting journey introduces her to a colorful collection of characters: rabid composters, paranoid dump owners, starry-eyed crusaders, even some levelheaded businessmen and -women. She encounters a fair amount of colorful vernacular as well: ''Coney Island whitefish'' (used condoms in the Gowanus Canal), ''disco rice'' (maggots), ''mongo'' (''trash'' that curbside collectors deem worth saving -- televisions, microwaves, silk blouses, designer skirts).
Royte's quest to see where her discards end up hits a number of human obstacles: in parts of the waste underworld, people don't want to talk to her or let her view their landfills or plants. ''Why was it so hard to look at garbage?'' she laments at one point. ''To me, the secrecy of waste managers -- which was surely based on an aversion to accountability -- was only feeding the culture of shame that had come to surround an ordinary fact of life: throwing things away.''
Royte may have subconsciously let this stonewalling affect her: when a site does let her in for a look, she often seems to give it a free pass; her writing loses its skeptical edge and begins to sound like a report from a school field trip. Still, for the vast millions whose knowledge of waste disposal ends at the trash can and the recycling bin, any glimpse at all into this world is illuminating. Royte's lively description of a beast called the Prolerizer, a giant metal-crushing machine, makes you want to pay it a visit yourself: ''The Prolerizer has a 6,000-horsepower synchronous motor and enormous blades that can convert whole cars to fist-sized chunks of scrap in 30 to 60 seconds. . . . Cars plummeted onto the shredder's spinning rotor, which bristled with 32 bow-tie-shaped blades that weighed 300 pounds each. . . . They were 30 inches long, and though made of a steel-manganese alloy, they lasted a mere 24 hours, such was the ferocity of their labors.''
The deeper into trash and sewage Royte gets, the more discouraging the picture becomes. Landfilled trash does not biodegrade into the ''rich, moist brown humus'' of our guilt-free fantasies; it stews for centuries, generating poisonous leachate. The whole problem of junked computers and cellphones has barely reached public consciousness, even though we're already knee-deep in electronic waste. And as for recycling, some parts of the system seem to work, but the vagaries of markets and the ever-changing array of plastics and mixed-material containers make it hit-or-miss at best; it is in large part something we do for our conscience, not our planet. Some recycling is merely a delaying tactic (mixed plastic, for instance, can be reused only once, as plastic wood or some such), and some is downright harmful (with plastic again the main culprit) because of the toxic substances the process produces. Hard-core enviro-types actually oppose plastic-recycling programs, Royte says, because they foster the belief, held even among those who fancy themselves eco-conscious, that it's all right to swig that all-natural spring water out of a plastic bottle. The true ideal, in this formulation, should be ''closed-loop recycling,'' where no new materials are coming into the system and no waste is being generated.
NONE of this is news to those versed in garbology and environmental advocacy, but Royte is not writing for them. She is aiming for a more general public, and a strength of ''Garbage Land'' is that it doesn't get too preachy and is full of humor and self-deprecation. Here, for instance, is what Royte says about finding a mouse in her home composter: ''The E.P.A. has a regulation, called 40 CFR, Part 503.33, concerning 'vector attraction reduction' in soil enhancements. Obviously, I was out of compliance.'' And here is how she describes her encounter with a fertilizer made from septic sludge: ''I shook some Granulite onto my hand, just to see what holding someone else's highly processed feces felt like. It was no worse than handling raw meat, in the sense that it was so recently part of a living organism.'' She remains casual and scold-free even when she works her way around to the notion that the main thing any of us can do to reduce the waste stream is to buy less stuff.
''Garbage Land,'' though, does have a fundamental bias, one that Royte never confronts: her jumping-off point seems to be the idea that our best, highest use as human beings is to keep our ''garbage footprint'' to a minimum. That is a value judgment, because minimizing waste -- sorting trash, composting, cooking from scratch rather than relying on dinners in microwaveable dishes -- takes time, and time is a currency. Royte sounds smart; it's hard for the reader not to wonder what else she might have done with all those hours she spent washing out her used yogurt containers.
