Waste Age

June 10, 2007

The trade magazine that serves the waste industry—that is, the folks who collect, haul, trade, sort, salvage, and bury our leftovers—is called Waste Age. Which, I think, has a different ring in their ears than in mine.

At a guess, the people who make a living by making away with our garbage probably think of "waste age" as the age in which trash was put on a scientific footing, the age in which engineers learned to transform filth into nothing to worry about. I, on the other hand, first thought, "How true! And how refreshingly honest! After all, we have never wasted like we do today!" Then I looked inside.

The magazine is little boy bliss, full of trucks and cranes and lifts, compactors, tractors, chippers and grinders, dozers and shredders. Almost all of the machinery has treads or wheels, sometimes as many as 14 or 18, which means that some lucky dog gets to drive it around. Words like brawn, beefy, and rugged show up in remarkable profusion, as do bigger, larger, and largest (as in, "largest radiator in the refuse industry"). Even brute is used as a term of praise.

You don't have to spend much time in these pages to know there is no problem so intractable that a larger (and brawnier) piece of equipment couldn't solve it. Obviously, when waste is not a problem, but an opportunity, all the usual points of reference shift over just a little bit.

In the process, garbage itself undergoes a remarkable transformation. Waste is not just wonderful; it's even clean. An ad for Sterling trucks envisions a mountain of trash piling up, but in gleaming bags and a few freshly polished and highly decorative garbage cans. There is no suburb quite so spiffy as the one that appears in the Heil ad, and someone has photoshopped out even the memory of dirt from the street the Mack truck sits in. Behold the awesome power of sanitary engineering!

Real garbage, however, has a rather different mien. A few weeks ago we could see just how different, when Naples, Italy, filled up all its landfills and the trash piled up in the streets in frightful mounds. You can see that it stinks to high heaven, even in the pictures that don't show people holding their noses.

Marijke Rijsberman