Waystation: Sunnyvale Garbage Dump

November 5, 2006

Images from Google Earth clearly show the garbage mounds, the transfer processing station, the water purification plant, and the oxidation pond that's used to let the purified water breathe before being released into the bay.

Like almost all the communities with direct access to the San Francisco Bay, Sunnyvale has built itself a sizable bayside garbage range. Its four mounds, of unequal size and laid out in a straight line along the shore, have lain baking peacefully in the summer sun since dumping stopped in 1993. In winter they turn a vivid green. But no matter the hue, they don’t ever look like they belong in the landscape.

Sunnyvale was once a small farming community. Before the time of major defense contractors, aeronautics research facilities, and dot.com midgets and giants, the landfill lay alongside fields of oats and barley. It started its career as an open dump, where in-coming trash was burned and ashes buried in a fairly effective garbage reduction cycle. By the 1950s, however, garbage had become more toxic with the admixture of large amounts of plastics and the smoke a lot more noxious. People complained. Burning stopped and sanitary filling started, by which trash is compacted and covered with dirt on a daily basis. No smoke, no smells, no worries.

Almost all of the volume of the mounds is attributable to those years of sanitary filling. The local population soared and so did their disposable income. The amount of garbage each resident produced mushroomed to somewhere around 6lb per person per day. How much you throw out stands in direct proportion to how much you rake in. What’s more, compaction doesn’t reduce volume nearly as much as incineration does. In other words, not too long ago, you had a view if you walked along Borregas Avenue towards the bay, where now you only see the slopes of neatly graded garbage.

These days, local trash is handled in the SMaRT station that stands in the middle of the mounds. Household trash—2.2 million pounds of it per day—from Palo Alto, Mountain View, and Sunnyvale is picked over before being sent to its eternal rest at the Kirby Canyon landfill near Morgan Hill. I took the SMaRT station tour in July 2006, with a group of high-school science teachers in a summer enrichment program. Some of them were hugely interested in garbage and recycling, but most of them just trailed along in a daze, just like I did. The station offers an extreme sensory experience so overwhelming it is hard to keep your mind focused on anything except the realization of what it is like to be there and how much you want to step outside and breathe again.

Aside
As a garbage sorter, I imagine, you know you have signed up for filthy, oppressive, and unhealthy work well before you show up for your first day on the job. And you are presumably well aware of the fact that you’re doing it for a pittance you can't properly feed your family on.... more

The tipping floor, where the garbage trucks upend their loads, smells the way you would expect—especially on a hot summer day when the kitchen slops arrive well after they have started their headlong rush to annihilation. On good days, the breeze off the bay dilutes the stench a bit and occasionally blows in a whiff of lumber yard from the wood chipper out back that chips and mulches all the wood waste pulled out of the garbage. The flat, dead smell of dust hangs around the giant bales of recyclables at the other end of the facility, waiting to be brought back to life in a new incarnation. And in between, in the belly of the plant, shrouded in gloom, lies a clanking hell of machinery that sorts and squashes and separates our leavings. Its inner circle belongs to the garbage sorters. They go about their filthy business in a small cabin, much like a trailer, that hangs suspended high above the station floor in a maze of metal staircases.

A few weeks after I visited, on September 6, 2006, a dead body trundled up the conveyor belt into the eyrie of the SMaRT station sorters. The conveyor bisects the trailer lengthwise, and the garbage runs the gauntlet between two rows of people, who are clad in hard hats, safety glasses, and oversized rubber gloves for protection. It doesn't seem nearly enough. A solid layer of brownish-greyish filth adheres to the walls just about man high and then begins to thin out to a splatter pattern higher up. Each facing pair of sorters is responsible for removing a particular class of valuables—cardboard, paper, plastic, wood, glass, metal. Occasionally, they find a dead pet.

A few years ago, the local police received a tip that a missing woman had been dumped in the trash, and the line was stopped for much of a day, until the woman showed up at the other end of town, in one piece and under her own steam. But this time, it was for real. Somehow, this woman ended up on the tipping floor, traveling to the SMART station by garbage truck or having perhaps been inserted by an unknown third party into the scrofulous pile of garbage waiting on the tipping floor to be loaded onto the line.

Somehow, she escaped the watchful eye of the men who drag off oversize items too big to go onto the conveyor. Somehow, she got shoveled onto the moving line without detection and traveled through the gloom of the station toward the sorting loft, at the same slow, stuttery pace as the egg shells and the paper towels, the kitty litter and the candy wrappers. And finally, she emerged through the hatch with the rest of the routine trash and scared the sorters half to death. Imagine it. A stream of loose and half-bagged garbage. Pizza boxes. Coffee grinds. Milk cartons stuffed with plate scrapings. Sodden newspapers. Chicken bones. Hair clippings. Kelley Daniel.

She had lived on the streets for years, a diminutive person who slept on buses at night, insofar as it is possible to sleep folded up across a few hard plastic seats. She was 50 years old.

In 1999, a dead body was found at the Newby Island landfill, just down the road a bit. Also a woman, a murder victim. Gruesome as that is, it is easier to comprehend the chain of events leading to that grim burial. If you have to dispose of a body, then a garbage dump is presumably no worse than a secluded spot in the woods. But a homeless woman showing up dead on the line in a transfer processing station with no marks on her except those “consistent with being dumped onto a conveyor belt” contains a horror on a different order of magnitude.

The local paper suggested that she might have fallen asleep in a dumpster, but that’s hardly an explanation. Between falling asleep in a dumpster and ending up dead on the garbage line in the SMART station, there lies an unforeseen development, a happenstance, a horror so complete it sets your hair on end.

What came together so shockingly in the local waste stream this past September has once again been put asunder. The irrecoverables have been trucked to Kirby Canyon. The recyclables have hopefully found a buyer and are once more on their way to market. And Kelley Daniel has been reclaimed and rehumanized by a brother in Washington, who's put together a memorial service and an internet photo album with baby pictures. Even a husband has turned up. The papers have kept quiet for a while now, offering neither fact nor eloquence on the subject. Everything's settled back into the normal routine, and we can stop thinking about it again. What a relief.

Marijke Rijsberman

More Information
Woman Found at Sunnyvale Trash Facility Identified (CBS5)
Kelley Daniel Photo Album
Human Head Turns out to be A Goat's
SMaRT Station