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Where Does America's Trash Go?
HARTFORD, CT (AP) – It burns the nostrils and stings the throat, this is
the stench simmering from the floor of the cavernous trash-to-energy plant in
Hartford’s South Meadows.
From your kitchen wastebasket to the garbage heap, this is what a tossed
banana peel, a discarded detergent bottle, and an old phone book look like – multiplied
by the 70 towns that haul it away to the Connecticut Resources Recovery Authority’s
Mid-Connecticut Project.
Reams of paper. Bags of clothes. Computers, cellphones, and mattresses. Even
fistfuls of loose change. The trash habits of our throw-away culture are astonishing.
And few know this better than John Romano, who has a bird’s-eye view
of the hot mess brought in daily.
“Anything you can imagine, anything you can throw out is here,” says
Romano, the facility’s manager.
On a steamy Friday morning, he looks out over the “tip floor,” which
a steady stream of garbage trucks is filling up.
From his perch above this 4,000 tons of waste, he points out what he means:
the front bumper of a car, a stack of wood planks, a child’s plastic
riding toy, a blue beach cooler.
“The way we go through material as Americans, I mean, it’s incredible,” the
61-year-old said.
“Other people (in other countries) hold on to something for years. We change
with the market. I buy my iPod today, but if next year there’s a better
one, where’s that old one going? In the trash.”
That mindset translates to about 4.5 pounds of garbage per person per day.
Nationwide, it adds up to more than 236 million tons of trash a year – up
more than 50 percent from what Americans produced in 1980, reports the U.S.
Environmental
Protection Agency.
“We have groups that come here (from overseas), and they’re just
shocked to see the amount of waste,” Romano said. “We’ve
had groups from Japan, Korea; we had one in from Africa. Their recycling practices
are a lot more extensive than ours. They utilize everything.”
The Hartford plant is one of six trash-to-energy facilities in the state
trying to extract some good out of our disposable culture’s habits. Pulled
along on two conveyors, the 830,000 tons of trash dumped here annually is separated
for metals, recyclables and nonburnable waste, with the rest shredded into
6-inch pieces that get burned to make energy.
About 2,000 tons of burnable waste is combusted here daily, producing about
1,440 megawatt hours of power.
Dentyne gum packaging, Poland Spring bottles, milk cartons, Federal Express
envelopes. All chugging along the conveyor to be reborn as electricity, a better
environment
fate than joining the mountain of waste in the landfills of yesteryear.
Still, it’s astounding. Even for Romano, a man who has been working with
waste, one way or another, for nearly 20 years. He has seen us get on the recycling
bandwagon in the early ‘90s and seen the efforts wane in recent years.
Recycling doesn’t just mean washing out aluminum cans and folding cardboard
boxes. Romano sees bags of clothes, abandoned toys, perfectly good items that
could get a second life by being donated to places like Goodwill. Coats, for
example, come through the waste streams at the end of each winter. Not all of
them, he says, can be so worn that they can’t keep a needy body in a
local shelter warm for a season.
“Oh, the coins. It’s the coins that fascinate me,” he says
of the nickels and dimes and pennies that litter the heaps like confetti. “People,
I guess, don’t like pennies.”
The Hartford plant isn’t equipped to extract them. But he has heard
of other plants that pull in as much as $2,000 in coins a week.
In 20 years, the biggest change in what we’re throwing away has to be in
electronics, Romano says. Technology evolves so rapidly these days that it seems
it’s always out with the old.
Now, with the advent of HDTV, Romano predicts the next few years will see a
lot of old televisions on the curb.
The good news, says Paul Nonnemacher, spokesman for CRRA, is that most people
know their old electronics shouldn’t be headed for the garbage.
“Half of all the calls and e-mails we get from the public ask the same
question: What do I do with my old computer? When’s the next recycling
program? They should be recycling. I think most people understand that, which
is why they ask the second question more than the first.”
Another question that comes into the agency but isn’t always as easy
to answer: I accidentally threw out my (fill in the blank). Can I come down
there
and try to find it?
“They’ll tell me, ‘I know what my garbage bag looks like,’” Romano
says. “Believe me, that’s a quote: I know what my garbage bag looks
like.”
He laughs at this. In the sea of brown sacks and white plastic bags, “Which
one is yours? Has it got your name on it?”
If the caller can follow into the plant the exact truck that picked up the
trash bag in question, Romano will let them onto the floor, with an employee,
to sort
through the heap.
When that truck pulls in and dumps its contents, he says, “They definitely
want to die. I mean, they can’t believe it. You don’t understand
what 3, 4 tons of waste is until you see it pushed out of a truck.”
Maybe two out of 10 people find what they’re looking for, he says.
About five years ago, an elderly woman called in a panic. Her husband had
trashed a paper bag stuffed with several hundred dollars – money the couple had
been saving to pay bills. The garbage truck took off before they could retrieve
it.
“We put a couple of guys out on the floor. I was there, too,” he
says. “We spread the load out in the corner, and we looked through it.”
The woman pointed to something. A worker hoisted it up.
“Sure enough, that was it. All the money was there,” says Romano,
smiling at the memory.
“Oh, she was elated. They were almost (in) tears. We were very happy about
that.”
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