Photograph by Dilip Vishwanat
Trash has always been an ugly nuisance to be left at the curb and dealt with by someone else, but a hot mess of controversy in the county has thrown it right back in everyone's face. And what a crazy, complex, fascinating mess it is
Something stinks. That's saying something, coming from a guy who works in waste hauling.
This profession — the picking up and transporting of other people's refuse, the piloting of a truck capable of carrying 13 tons of banana peels and half-eaten drumsticks and wadded-up paper towels stained with French fry grease — is one in which a keen sense of smell is, to put it mildly, a handicap. Like anything else, though, the acridly sweet stench of refuse is something one becomes accustomed to if one spends enough time immersed in it, and after hauling 100 tons of the stuff every week for 4½ years — that's almost 47,000,000 pounds, if you don't happen to have a calculator handy — Bryan Barcom has been around trash long enough to become more or less immune to its aroma. This makes it all the more significant that he's finally caught a whiff of something he doesn't like.
He recounts this development as we drive south on I-55 from the American Eagle Waste offices in South County to a tangle of streets in Oakville, where — eventually, after a couple of miscommunications and missed turns — we'll meet up with one of his drivers, who has agreed to let me ride along for the second half of his shift. Barcom, who grew up playing football in South County and has a drill instructor's crew cut and biceps the size of HoneyBaked hams, is the owner of American Eagle, and he talks with a disarmingly nasal voice that sounds more like the product of a lifetime on Chicago's South Side. "We're getting ready to lose about $3.2 million," he says. That figure makes up about 85 percent of American Eagle's annual revenue, and Barcom is worried that St. Louis County's decision to rejigger the trash hauling system is going to send that money to his competition. And the way he sees it, unless he can find a way to keep that from happening, "it's over. We're out of business. It's that simple. No ifs, ands or buts about it."
Thanks in large part to the predicament Barcom and a lot of his independent hauling contemporaries find themselves in today, trash — more specifically its collection and disposal — has become about as contentious in the county as a subject that most people typically prefer to ignore can get. And it turns out that what those people have been ignoring is one of the more intricate, nuanced and — at times — smack-your-forehead-with-your-palm frustrating municipal systems you can possibly imagine.
Given the subject matter, "a mess" would seem like the most literary way to describe the state of trash hauling in St. Louis County, but then again, it wouldn't really be accurate. "An overly complex and multilayered system of public and private interests" might be more appropriate. The county does not provide trash service of any kind. Its Solid Waste Managment Program, which falls under the purview of the Department of Public Health, has fewer than 10 employees, who spend most of their time conducting random compliance checks of trash haulers' trucks, inspecting the two active landfills and four transfer stations in the county and responding to your complaints about the guy next door whose idea of "lawn ornaments" more closely resembles household trash to anyone with a less creative interpretation of the term.
As fun as it is to imagine the county's solid waste employees as the trash police, pulling over offending garbage trucks and asking their drivers, "Do you have any idea how many tons of trash you're carrying?" that's not the case. "Unfortunately, we don't have cars with lights on them," says John Haasis, the manager of the Solid Waste Management Program. Instead, his inspectors run monthly "blitzes," stationing themselves at a landfill and inspecting every truck that drives onto the scales.
Because the county has no municipal trash system in place, that means it's up to its 91 municipalities to find a way to dispose of their own trash. Five provide trash-hauling service through their public works departments (Brentwood, Kirkwood, Normandy, University City and Valley Park), leaving 86 municipalities for private haulers to fight over. As of April, 75 of the remaining cities, villages and townships had contracts with private haulers to dispose of residential waste within their borders. In some cities, like Frontenac, which contracts with Veolia Environmental Services, trash pickup is provided "free of charge"; "free," of course, being a relative term when city taxes are involved. In others, like Overland, residents pay Allied Waste directly, $53.88 every quarter.
Residents in the 11 remaining municipalities (Bellerive, Country Life Acres, Florissant, Huntleigh, Kinloch, Ladue, Riverview, Sunset Hills, Town & Country, Wellston and Westwood) can choose their hauler. And they've got plenty to choose from: 22 private haulers have a license to work inside the county.
Until this spring, service levels varied from one municipality to the next: Some got once-a-week pickups for trash, recycling and yard waste. Others got twice-a-week trash pickup, once-a-week recycling and yard waste collection if they wanted to pay extra. Some had trash and yard waste service but had to take any recyclables to their local recycling center.
All of which is to say this: If you wanted to make a color-coded map of who serves whom and what services are available and which contracts are about to expire, it would look a little like a preschooler's first stab at finger painting. The operative word there, though, is "if" — why take the time when, chances are, no one's going to pay attention anyway? For the last century, trash — and what happens to it — hasn't exactly been top-of-mind stuff for your average homeowners. Once a week, they put it at the curb (or at the back door, in places like Ladue and Clayton) and out of their minds.
At least they did in the county until last year. That's when residents found out that the rules for trash pickup were about to change. First, as part of the county's decision to raise the bar for minimum service levels, haulers would be required to provide every resident with the option of a once-weekly recycling pickup. And not only that, the county also decided to deliver a 65-gallon recycling cart to every one of the 104,000 homes in the unincorporated areas of the county, free of charge, to encourage residents to take advantage of the service. Environmentally forward-thinking policy, right?
The only catch was that everyone had to pay for the recycling pickup, regardless of whether they used it. And that's when the phone in Haasis' office started to ring off the hook. "We're getting calls of 'I don't recycle. I don't want to pay for this,'" he says with a sigh. "They're upset because they've got bills that are $5 more for this service. And then with these carts that we're sending out to them, they say, 'I don't want this cart. I don't recycle.' So we're pulling those back, and then we have problems where we didn't deliver and they did want them."
Here in an empty conference room across the hall from his office in downtown Clayton, Haasis looks tired — a little beat down, even. It's late March, and so far carts have gone to only half of the homes that were set to receive them. He's even taken to screening his calls lately, letting the outgoing message on his voice mail instruct angry callers on what they can do with their carts if they don't want them. Tomorrow he and his staff will spend the afternoon stuffing informational packets into plastic bags that will get taped to the lids of the next round of carts to go out; the staffing agency that the county had hired to do the stuffing quit after the first thousand. The health department's public information officer, who's sitting next to Haasis, sucks in his lips and forces a smile: "We've learned this is not our business."
Haasis has a mechanical engineering degree, but he has done everything from environmental engineering work for the Missouri Department of Natural Resources to mechanical inspections for the county. He has sad, down-turned eyes that probably add to the exasperated expression he wears when bemoaning our society's self-defeating obsession with pretty packaging ("You know how we do things in America — you make it more convenient to sell in the store, but that just creates more waste") and the state of denial that leads some people to throw fits about paying a few bucks a month to help pay down their shocking environmental debt.
But tonight, an unseasonably cool late March night, his expression seems especially slack, most likely because he knows that in a couple of hours he'll be sitting in a city council meeting in St. George, once again defending the county's new waste regulations. Down there, though, they aren't getting out the pitchforks and torches over recycling — OK, they are, but on the list of reasons to hate the Man, having him force his pay-regardless-of-whether-you-play green agenda on them comes in a distant second to his decision to select their waste hauler for them.
Up to this point, residents in unincorporated parts of the county — all 104,000 households — could choose who picked up their trash. It was the kind of free-market arrangement that gave those residents the comfort of knowing that if John's Disposal wasn't giving them the level of customer service they expected out of their garbage man, well by God, they could fire him and find someone who would. It also meant that any number of 55,000-pound trash trucks could be passing each other on the streets of South County (and North County and that little spot between Creve Coeur and Maryland Heights and …) on any given day, stopping at every third or fourth house and conspiring to tear up the asphalt along the way. So to simplify things, unincorporated
St. Louis County was divided into eight districts, and this spring the haulers entered bids for each district; low bidder wins.
Again, the phone started ringing in Haasis' office: "We don't want you to pick who our hauler is. It's our American right. It's our right from God to pick who hauls our trash." Haasis sighs again. "Last time I checked," he says, "it's not in the Bill of Rights."
Maybe not, but Bryan Barcom at American Eagle Waste does think that any legislation that could ultimately put him out of business is, at the very least, unconstitutional. The bids for the first district were opened in late March, and the low bidder was Veolia Environmental Services, the waste-management division of an international company that operates everything from water-treatment plants to public transportation systems. Its bid for District 3 was $11.60 per month. Barcom says he's barely paying the bills by charging his South County customers $18 a month. "I can't bid at $11.60 and be profitable," he says. "It's not even an option to do that."
So every Tuesday for the last year, he and his brother Mike, who started the business with him, have been going straight from work to county council meetings, dumping a week's worth of frustration at the council members' feet each time they go, in an effort to get the ordinance changed or at the very least put to a public vote. "I don't think the council members care for me too much," he says with a grin. He doesn't really blame them, though. "It's hard when somebody comes in every week and busts your balls."
For all of the county's layers of ordinances and regulations, the rat's nest of overlapping hauling routes and pickup schedules, and the widely varying levels of service (for the time being, anyway), the actual business of hauling trash from curb to landfill is remarkably clean — metaphorically speaking, of course. One driver and one "thrower" per truck. Drive up and down streets. Throw trash in back of truck. Drive truck to landfill. Dump. Lather, rinse, repeat.
"I don't have no problems getting up and coming to my job," Seawood is saying as he brings his garbage truck to a shuddering stop on a narrow street in South County. "I don't have no squabbles with it. I like the idea of coming in and driving my truck on my route." Seawood (his first name is Anthony, but everyone calls him by his last name) is thin, a little on the short side, laughs a lot and has a habit of calling people — Bryan, other drivers, his thrower — "baby."
Seawood has been driving garbage trucks for 27 years, and he drives this one for American Eagle Waste with the confidence that you can only assume comes with that kind of experience. This 28-ton behemoth does not stop on a dime, but he seems to know exactly when to begin applying the brakes so that when it does stop, he's placed his thrower, Jimmy, who hangs off the back of the truck, directly in front of their customer's cans. He slaloms — carefully — between cars parked on the street, driving in reverse as often as he drives forward because this neighborhood is littered with cul-de-sacs. (The less he can drive in circles, the longer his front steering tires will last, but even then, he burns through a new set every month. They cost $1,100 a set. When I tell him I don't believe it's possible to kill two tires in a month, he slows down, leans over and points out my window to the little bits of black rubber we've left on the road.)
Jimmy, a wiry kid with short blond hair who doesn't look a day over 22, started as Seawood's thrower six months ago, "the day after Labor Day." When Seawood occasionally pauses to study his route sheet — a list of the 800 houses he'll hit today — I can see Jimmy in one of the truck's side mirrors, impatiently bouncing up and down on the back of the truck. Seawood says he's a good kid, but he "tends to get aggravated. He's come a long way, though. When he started, I was getting out to help him when there was only two cans."
Now that Jimmy has the hang of it, Seawood gets out of the truck to help him occasionally, "if there's additional items that are sitting along with the household trash," but he spends most of his time in the truck, studying that route sheet, checking off the houses they've stopped at, circling the ones that didn't put their trash out. He likes being up here in the cab, alone, with no distractions; it keeps him focused. I tell him that I was kind of hoping that he'd tell me he spent that time philosophizing about trash and what it says about his customers and their habits and the patterns of life and the wastefulness of society —
"You mean do I think about how they live, house-wise?"
Yeah.
"Nah," he says with a laugh. "We don't really look at anything like that. I'll tell you what be on our minds: Coming out here and getting our route picked up."
It's probably a good thing that he doesn't do a lot of deep thinking out here in this hearse built for transporting our empty husks made of watermelon rinds and fast-food bags and Slim Jim wrappers and empty beer bottles and dead cellphones that we molt and leave at our curbs after a week of consuming — because this shit would drive you crazy if you let it. In just a little over four hours with Seawood and Jimmy, I saw old hockey sticks and broken mirrors, toaster ovens and deflated basketballs, trash bags filled with the remnants of a dinner party and distended like the stretch-marked gut of some gluttonous Roman senator. And that's nothing compared to what these guys have seen. They laugh when I ask them to tell me about some of the strangest castoffs they've thrown in the back of their truck. "You'd be surprised what you can see out here on this route," Seawood says with a grin after he and Jimmy tick off the most memorable items. (An unsolicited piece of advice: If you plan to throw away old sex toys, don't put them in clear plastic bags, unless, of course, you do that kind of thing on purpose just to get a rise out of your friendly neighborhood trash hauler, in which case you've got some issues.)
The only time Seawood gets pensive is when I bring up the possibility of American Eagle's going under. I ask him what he'd do, whether he'd try to get a job with another hauler. "Yeah, I would, to be honest with you, because I done did this for so long. I could do other things, but this is in my blood, so to speak. But I feel secure that Mike and Bryan are doing everything in they power to keep from going under. They're pretty good guys to work for. They treated me fine. I ain't never had no problems with them. They help you out when you need help."
But then we're at our next stop, and he snaps back into garbage truck–driver mode. Jimmy, who's been riding up in the cab with us because we've been driving on a busy road, opens the passenger door to get out, but just before he slips down to the street, he turns. "Time to do it again. Ain't that right, Seawood?"
"Yee-uh, baby."
It's all about compaction: How dense of a little cube can you make out of a day's worth of Hefty bags and green bean cans and ketchup bottles and pizza boxes? For the haulers, it's about simple economics, particularly when it comes to picking up recyclables. The more plastic and aluminum and paper you can stuff into the back of that truck = the less trash you're taking to the dump = the less trash you're paying to dump (and the more you're getting paid for the recyclables) = the better chance you have at being profitable.
For the landfills, it's about struggling in vain to outlast the relentless onslaught of society's lifestyle of ecological denial. The Veolia ES Oak Ridge sanitary landfill, off of Sulphur Springs Road in Valley Park, is close to running out of available space. Depending on a couple of factors — mainly the rate at which it continues to take in garbage and the staff's ability to compact that trash — it could last anywhere from a year to five years. Trucks from about 10 different haulers unload here every day, leaving behind between 500 and 750 tons per day. Sounds like a lot, until you learn that just three years ago, it was taking in 3,000 tons per day. The site's general manager, Randy Tourville, rattles off these numbers a little hesitantly. He's been very friendly and accommodating, welcoming me out to the site and agreeing to take me up to the top of the landfill to see what happens to the trash when it gets dumped, but I can't help feeling like he'd really rather I weren't here.
In 2006, according to figures published by the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, the Oak Ridge landfill accepted 251,713 tons of waste. To put that in perspective, if you assume the average 13-gallon kitchen trash bag holds 15 pounds of garbage, that's almost 33,600,000 bags of trash. In one year. (The really sobering fact: That's less than a third of the trash dumped at the county's other landfill, in Maryland Heights, that same year.)
As the final resting place of everything we deem too filthy or useless to store in our own homes, landfills are by their very nature disgusting places. Rainwater percolates through that massive mound of trash, picking up bacteria as it speeds decomposition, creating a toxic soup called leachate that runs to the bottom of the landfill. Methane produced by that decomposition builds and seeps through any crevices it can find, looking for an escape.
So yeah, you can't really blame Tourville, the crypt keeper of this trash tomb, for being a little sensitive about the landfill's reputation. "It can be frustrating, from the standpoint that we're doing everything in an environmentally conscious manner, and we do things the right way, and our landfill is safe, and we take all the precautions to make sure we monitor it," he says in a trailer at the base of the landfill that serves as his office. That leachate? It's collected in a series of pipes that run along the bottom of the landfill and is flushed into the municipal sewer line and on to the wastewater treatment facility. And the methane gets sucked into a separate system of pipes and pumped under the Meramec River to the Chrysler plant, where it's burned in a boiler. And the whole thing is lined with rigid plastic sheeting that feels like asphalt wallpaper and that will also be used to seal off the top when the landfill closes in a couple of years. So it's a repugnant abscess of rotting irresponsibility, but it's about as secure as a repugnant abscess of rotting irresponsibility can get.
Tourville has been working at landfills for going on 20 years, so he knows what people — especially people who live nearby — think of them. "We know what we do may not be the best thing to do," he says, "but right now it's one of the only alternatives we have." And even that alternative is filling up quickly. He says all this as he's standing next to a black-and-white aerial photograph of the landfill. The mountain doesn't seem so big when you look at it like that, but all you have to do is look out the window next to Tourville's desk to see just how massive it is.
It's been raining for days, so my tour will be brief and restricted to today's "lift," the 100- by 100-foot spot at the top of the mountain where trash is being dumped and compacted. We bounce and fishtail in Tourville's Chevy Silverado on the makeshift road that leads to the top (and happens to be covered in a foot-deep layer of compost to improve traction), passing a line of six garbage trucks, each anxiously waiting its turn to unload. The hot potato of waste has reached the end of the line, and Tourville has no choice but to keep it.
We find a spot and park a safe distance from where the bulldozers and the Terex 3-90 are busy compacting today's heap. The Terex 3-90 is an 85,000-pound piece of machinery used to push and rend and shred and mash and crush; equipped with a blade the size of a garage door and its wheels studded with rows of phone book–sized steel spikes, it looks like a tractor from some post-apocalyptic, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome farm that raises mutant iron pumpkins. Ironically, the thing you expect to see the most of up here — trash — is the thing that's actually in the shortest supply, at least visibly. As each truck dumps a load of empty kitty litter pails and coffee filters and celery stalks and old bikes with the training wheels still on, it's smoothed out and eventually buried under a foot of dirt to reduce the smell. If you can get past the thought of what you know is beneath you, it kind of just looks like a racetrack for dirt bikes — and not at all like the vast seas of trash overrun by seagulls where Det. Lennie Briscoe used to find bodies on Law & Order.
It's enough to make me wonder out loud if in his two decades of burying other people's trash, Tourville has come to think of society as a bunch of filthy degenerates — because I probably would. "I don't think we're a filthy society," he says. "What I think is that we could be better stewards. I think we're a wasteful society, because we've been trained that it's very easy to go out and replace something nowadays as opposed to having to fix it and reuse it like our fathers and grandfathers had to do."
As we bounce our way back down the hill, we talk about the fact that people are actually starting to dig back into closed landfills and literally mine recyclables like plastic bottles and aluminum cans. It's amazing the levels of ingenuity that desperation can inspire. "Yeah, they actually go in and screen it and get the recyclables out and create air space to be able to go back in there and put trash," Tourville says as we round a corner and drive past another half-dozen trucks that have lined up since we ascended Mt. Trash. "But that's more of an extreme measure, in areas where they're lacking in available landfill space."
Gary Gilliam is what you'd call a numbers guy. He throws stats around like "1 percent or less contamination by weight" and "$1,700 a ton" and "2,389 trees saved through recycling every day." He can tell you the point of origin of all 200 tons of material that gets dumped at the Resource Management material recovery facility (or "merf") in Earth City every day, and he's got spreadsheets on recycling rates for every municipality in the county. He uses them to calculate pounds of recyclables per person per month and to project how many tons of recyclables he might be able to bring into the facility per day by the end of the year. (He's hoping for 300.) He can tell you which city recycles the most (Olivette, at 20 pounds per person per month) and what they recycle (70 percent of every ton of recyclables is paper; 30 percent is containers, of which 50 percent is glass, 17 percent is plastic and the rest is steel and aluminum).
He knows this because he is Resource Management's sales manager, and to him recycling is a business. He believes in good stewardship and taking care of the planet and all of that, but at the end of the day, this is a numbers game, and for him, this trendy green movement we're living through right now is like the California gold rush of 1849. And it's all thanks to single-stream recycling: No more separating your paper from your plastic and glass. Just throw it all in the same container and let your waste hauler take it to Mr. Gilliam. He'll take it from there.
"Two of those are what your car weighs," Gilliam says, pointing to a bale of newspaper that's ready to be shipped out to a paper mill. It's just one of what looks like hundreds, stacked five or six high in rows that look a little like the warehouse of government secrets at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. "Twenty-two tons an hour that we're compacting and running through this facility every day, five days a week. Now look at this," he says, spreading his arms wide in front of the stacks of bales. "Basically, we're looking at three days' worth of volume. This would have been in a landfill had we not got it through recycling. And this is not counting all of the containers that are being taken out. We're shipping two loads of containers every day to our sort line in Chicago."
Those plastic containers get separated from the paper on an assembly line on the other side of this warehouse that looks like something out of some mad scientist's lab in a Warner Bros. cartoon. Loads of garbage travel up a conveyor belt and end up on a line of thick metal tines that shimmy and shake and rattle, dropping the heavier plastic and glass and aluminum below and sending the paper on to a second line where it's quality-checked. It's a million dollars' worth of equipment, and Gilliam's getting ready to install another one just like it later this year to handle the increase in material he expects the county's new recycling program will send his way. "These carts that the county sent to the unincorporated areas, on the lid there's an embossed list of what can be thrown in them," he says, and I'm reminded of a little fact John Haasis told me: At least 80 percent of all household trash can be recycled. "If 10 percent of the 104,000 people who get these carts utilize them, I think that would generate another 200 to 300 tons per month. And I'm going to tell you — it'll be more than 10 percent."
"Three hundred tons," he says again, this time referring to the amount of recyclables he hopes to be processing per day by the end of the year, and I give a little whistle, partly because it seems like the right thing to do. But partly I do it because, as mound after mound of trash that didn't get dumped in a landfill makes its way up that conveyor belt behind us, my mind starts to race at the possibilities. Why, I ask Gilliam, isn't he hiring a staff of 10 to go out and drill some sense into every homeowner who gets one of those carts, to bludgeon them with the club of numbers he's been hitting me over the head with for the last hour and a half? He could really start making a dent in all of this — not to mention make a killing.
He pauses for a minute, grins a little sheepishly and says two words: "Controlled growth." He is, after all, a numbers guy, and he's done the math.
By the time you read this, the bids for the four districts that American Eagle Waste serves will have been opened, and Bryan Barcom is pretty sure that he won't be the low bidder — with eight districts to divvy up among 22 haulers, four of which are large corporations, the chances are slim. There is hope, though: More than 16,000 households in Barcom's South County territory took the county's offer to opt out of the districting program, which means they could ultimately choose American Eagle. Barcom is "in the process of breaking that down," and if he's able to get them all, the company will be safe. But that, as they say, is a big if.
Ironically, the most positive thing to come out of all this for him has been the county's new mandatory recycling program. Before those carts went out to his customers in the spring, he was collecting about three or four tons of recyclables per week. The week that I rode with Seawood, that number was up to 57½ tons.
"We're going to make our best effort to make this thing work," he says. "The county enforces this great recycling program, and then they take a page out in the Suburban Journal that says, 'If you don't want this recycling cart, call this number, and we'll come and pick it up.' Why not take a full-page ad out and say, 'Please utilize this container to the best of your ability, because you will be charged for this service, whether you use it or not'?" He shakes his head. "It seems like they do everything ass-backwards." And then he hits the emergency brake and hops out of his truck to pick up a cart.
