Sifting Through the Dirt on Garbage

“Hi. Welcome to City Hall,” New York City’s sanitation commissioner wrote in a note to newly elected Mayor David Dinkins. “By the way, you have no place to put the trash.”

At least that’s the opening anecdote in Newsweek’s Nov. 27 cover story, “Buried Alive, the Garbage Glut: An Environmental Crisis Reaches Our Doorstep.”

But even as trucks begin to haul the million-plus copies of that news weekly off to sanitary landfills, the December Atlantic Monthly is arriving in subscribers’ mailboxes with an article that takes a substantially different view of trash--even though the author was a source for the Newsweek piece.

With the help of strong-stomached students, author William L. Rathje, an archeologist who heads the Garbage Project at the University of Arizona in Tucson, has rummaged through garbage cans and excavated dumps across the country, weighing and evaluating their contents.

His conclusion is that “a great deal of mythology has built up around the modern landfill. We have stuffed it with the contents of our imaginations.

“It may be,” he argues in the Atlantic, “that the lack of reliable information and the persistence of misinformation constitute the real garbage crisis.”

Rathje’s article offers a surprisingly fascinating look at “the solid waste stream,” from the Bronze Age, when the city of Troy rose 4.7 feet per century on layers of its own pottery shards, through relatively modern times, when American cities had to figure how to dispose of hundreds of thousands of dead horses each year.

Contrary to popular assumptions, the situation now is no worse than it has ever been, Rathje contends. And in advancing that view, he takes on other “myths” as well.

Plastics, for instance, aren’t nearly as serious a waste problem as people think, he writes. Squashed flat, old bleach bottles and fast food trays don’t take up much space, and they don’t leach pollutants into the soil.

On the other hand, some of the stuff we toss out with a sense of righteousness, believing that it will promptly go back to nature through decomposition, clutters dumps for decades. For example, Rathje’s crews have found “mummified” corn husks deep beneath the rubbish piles and decades-old newspapers that remain perfectly legible.

In fact, plain old paper is a much bigger problem than plastic, he writes, pointing to the millions of tons of old phone books that lie in landfills “like geological strata.”

While few experts would argue with Rathje’s credentials as a garbologist, many might find him off target in his hip-shooting analysis of broader environmental and cultural issues.

His dismissal of the pollution potential of mass burn incinerators seems slightly cavalier, for instance.

And one suspects he has become a bit too attached to the pretty mosaic of rubbish he must dig through when he dismisses as “nonsense” the environmentalist arguments that excessive packaging is being shoved down consumers’ throats by a marketing mentality gone haywire.

American consumers “as a practical matter depend on the product identification and convenience that modern packaging allows,” he writes. But do we really depend on that shrink wrap over those little cardboard boxes over those plastic pump gizmos to get our toothpaste?

Rathje believes that ‘the biggest challenge we will face is to recognize that the conventional wisdom about garbage is often wrong.” He pokes fun at the “vivid imagery relating to volume,” that traditionally supplants hard figures in reportage of how much garbage we produce.

Newsweek, a reliable fount of conventional wisdom, fell right into line, with standard-issue newsweekly statistics telling us that Americans yearly throw out enough trash “to spread 30 stories high over 1,000 football fields, enough to fill a bumper-to-bumper convoy of garbage trucks halfway to the moon.”

By picking through these two articles, however, readers will scavenge enough good information to make them start rethinking their disposable society.

Perhaps the most important thing they’ll learn is what Rathje’s crew learned in interviewing Americans about their trash disposal and recycling habits. Most citizens sounded wonderfully community-minded in their self evaluations, but were pessimistic about the big picture because they believed their neighbors so resistant to environmental enlightenment.

By comparing people’s trash with their interviews, however, Rathje found that “the most accurate description of the behavior of any household lies in that household’s description of the behavior of the neighboring household.”

A Snap at Nancy, a Glimpse of Cooke

The December Washingtonian, which contains former White House Chief of Staff Don Regan’s pay-back review of Nancy Reagan’s new book, is reportedly as popular this Christmas as Teen-Age Mutant Ninja Turtles.

But readers relying on photocopies of the piece to find out how Nancy’s apparent obsession with astrology virtually ruled the President will miss other dirt in same issue.

In “Driving Mr. Cooke,” a former chauffeur of Jack Kent Cooke, who owns the Washington Redskins and the Los Angeles Daily News, reveals what he says it’s like to work for a man who firmly believes that he’s a millionaire because almost everyone else is stupid; deems Windex and paper towels too expensive for washing the windows of his limos, and verbally abuses many of the people he gathers around him.

The writer “got to see the advantages of power and money up close.” The reader does, too. Also some of the possible pitfalls.

Help for Devotees of Classical Music

Highbrow music aficionados still mourning the death of radio station KFAC have a new magazine to guide them if they want to switch to the compact disc player.

Classical magazine makes its debut in December, and if the 96-page premier issue is an indication, it should help soothe the pain folks feel about what’s happening with classical music in Los Angeles.

The magazine is built around an established publication called The Stevenson Classical Compact Disc Guide, which catalogues “nearly every classical disc on the market,” along with quantified ratings of those recordings, based on reviews in publications ranging from High Fidelity to the Los Angeles Times.

This is pure utilitarian stuff--column after column of small type black-and-white print filling the back half of the publication.

The front of the New Jersey-based magazine is devoted to longer reviews of discs, books, videos and stereo gadgetry; news briefs from the world of classical music, and a feature: in this case, an annoyingly self-conscious profile of the intriguing 18-year-old Japanese violin prodigy Midori.