Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash by Elizabeth Royte Page A

facilities (known as MRFs, pronounced “murfs”), and at least one of which, Waste Management, had a history of price fixing, bid rigging, insider trading, fraud, and environmental violations. By the late nineties, though, the companies started complaining of big losses: they wanted to charge more for their services. Giuliani refused to raise carting rates significantly, but toward the end of his term it became obvious that for the MRFs, at least, to operate efficiently, they had to raise rates high enough to make the capital improvements that would let them capture and process more recyclables, to say nothing of bringing their facilities up to city and state standards. (The MRFs were notoriously dirty, dangerous places. The
New York Daily News
reported three accidental deaths in 1996 at Waste Management’s transfer and recycling facility in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. In 1999, a severed human head—badly damaged—showed up on a conveyor belt in the same sorting center, though it probably had nothing to do with a workplace accident.) Among the reasons Mayor Bloomberg cited for suspending plastic and glass recycling in 2002 was to avoid paying the huge rate increases that Waste Management and Allied insisted upon. The city had been paying roughly $58 a ton to drop recyclables at their MRFs; the new rate would be $120.
    “There was a lot of consolidation after Giuliani ran the mob out,” Robert Lange, of DSNY’s Bureau of Waste Prevention, Reuse and Recycling, told me. “And lots of buyouts, and now we have a monopolistic system and skyrocketing costs to export garbage.” Between 1996 and 2002, the Department of Sanitation budget nearly doubled, from $631 million to about $1 billion. Meanwhile, back in the realm of private carting, the national companies’ prices inched up and up until they reached historic Mafia levels. Now, according to private carter Sal Benedetto, “the only difference between the majors”—the nationals—“and the boys”—the mob—“is that the majors don’t actually kill you.”
    I called Flood three more times and left messages with Suzy, his extrafriendly secretary. Eventually she suggested I call Ed Apuzzi, my old transfer station friend. I’d already left him several messages, but just for sport, and using Suzy’s name, I left one more. While waiting for my phone to ring, I biked down to the transfer station to take a look at the drivers waiting in the tractor-trailer queue. Might one of them let me ride with him into the landfill? I spent some minutes shopping for a trustworthy face and a clean-looking cab, then performed a reality check and went back home.
    And then one day, Apuzzi called. My heart skipped a beat. I told him the troubles I’d been having, and he told me Bethlehem had just gotten a permit to expand operations. Maybe that explained why Donato hadn’t wanted visitors earlier.
    “So it’s okay for me to see it now?” I asked.
    “Oh, no,” Apuzzi said. “For insurance purposes, you can’t walk around on the landfill. It’s just not our policy.”
    “I don’t want to walk around on the landfill,” I said. “I just want to see it, from the front seat of a truck or something.” I told him I’d stay put in the vehicle and sign any waivers he wanted.
    He paused. “Let me check with some lawyers. I’ll get back to you.” I said thanks and hung up, knowing I’d never speak to him again.
    Why was it so hard to look at garbage? To me, the secrecy of waste managers—which was surely based on an aversion to accountability—was only feeding the culture of shame that had come to surround an ordinary fact of life: throwing things away. Sure, the volume was shameful (especially the volume of stuff that could have been reused or should never have been acquired in the first place), but the volume wasn’t Ed Apuzzi’s or Mickey Flood’s, it was ours. And yes, garbage wasn’t a pretty sight, but so what? The sewage treatment plant gave tours,