Excerpt from Garbage Land by Elizabeth Royte, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

My garbage was now in private hands. To get a look at it, I had to call Mickey Flood, the CEO of IESI, in Fort Worth, Texas, and then Ed Apuzzi, the company's vice president for business development and legal affairs in the Northeast region, who decided we should meet at the transfer station on Election Day, when DSNY wasn't delivering garbage (though commercial waste continued to pour in). At the appointed hour, I stood at the building's corner and waited for Apuzzi to show. The sidewalk was litter free but greasy. A truck had damaged the corrugated metal fence across the street, and there was a deep pothole on the corner filled with opaque gray liquid. The building had recently been painted white with blue trim. Under the company logo—a pine tree—was a phone number to call with any complaints.

Casually, as if I weren't really spying, I glanced inside the transfer station. At first, I couldn't tell what I was looking at. Like a Hollywood soundstage, the walls, floor, and ceiling were painted black, and there were large floodlights mounted on tracks overhead. But there weren't many of them, and they shed only a dim light on the hilly mosaic of garbage that covered half the floor. Higher up, they illuminated what I at first took for dust motes but realized, when I got a little closer, were droplets of a powerful perfume, which shot from nozzles near the ceiling. The smell was sweetly antiseptic. As my eyes adjusted to the light, I made out large black bags of garbage, small supermarket sacks of garbage, one of which could have been mine, some bulk metal pushed off to one side, a rotted board, chair cushions, a ketchup bottle. But still, the upper contours of the space were indeterminate. I could have been in a planetarium.

At first the jumble of goods, some ten feet high, appeared homogeneous to me: it was just a lot of garbage—dirty, ragged, bagged, loose. But to the practiced eye of a fanatic recycler or a Mexican pepenador, a professional trash picker, the pile was actually heterogeneous. It contained metals and textiles, wood and glass—commodities with value. Save for the preponderance of plastic, it comprised almost the same materials found in a nineteenth-century ragpicker's shanty: bones, broken dishes, rags, bits of furniture, cinders, old tin, useless lamps, decaying vegetables, ribbons, cloth, legless chairs, and carrion.

Back in the day, all of those items would have found another use. Today, they were prodded into a rough pile by a worker in a front-end loader and spilled into a tractor-trailer parked along the far wall of the tipping floor. Using the backside of its bucket, the loader awkwardly patted the reeking mass into one solid rectangular cube. The driver tucked a tarp over the garbage and, with a roar of the engine, was gone.

While I waited for Apuzzi, I made small talk with Frank Morgante, the site manager. I asked him if neighbors complained about the station.

"They walk by here and they give us looks," he said. "They look at us like we're garbage. I want to say to them, 'You want to solve the garbage problem? Stop eating. Stop living. Then we won't have any more garbage.'"

A middle-aged man walked by, and I asked him what it was like living near a transfer station.

"IESI is not a good neighbor," he said. "The place smells and it's overrun with rats."

From Garbage Land by Elizabeth Royte. Copyright © 2005 by Elizabeth Royte. All rights reserved. No part of this book maybe reproduced without written permission from the publisher.