CHAPTER 1

Making Soup

Here's something true in all places and times: the richer you are, andthe more educated you are, the more stuff you will throw away. In theUnited States, wealthy people not only buy more stuff but they buy morerecyclable stuff , like the recyclable cans, bottles, and boxes that containthe goods they covet. That's why, if you take a drive through a high-income,highly educated neighborhood on recycling day, you'll see greenand blue bins overflowing with neatly sorted newspapers, iPad boxes,wine bottles, and Diet Coke cans. Meanwhile, take a drive through apoor neighborhood, and you'll invariably see fewer bins, and fewerrecyclables.

The people in the wealthier neighborhoods who did that sorting, thatharvesting, were good stewards of their trash. But they wouldn't havehad the chance to be good stewards if they weren't also very good consumersof stuff (just as poor people don't harvest as much recycling inpart because they don't buy as much). There's statistical support for theobservation: between 1960 and 2010 (the most recent date for which theU.S. Environmental Protection Agency provides data) the volume of recyclablesthat Americans harvested from their homes and workplacesrose from 5.6 to 65 million tons. Yet during that same period the totalvolume of waste generated tripled, from 88.1 to 249.9 million tons. Nodoubt Americans were doing a better job of recycling their waste, butthey were also doing an equally fine job of generating it. The more numerousand wealthier they became—and the period from 1960 to 2010was a period of intense wealth accumulation—the more waste they generated.In fact, over the course of the last five de cades, the only significantannual decline in total generated waste occurred in the wake of the2008 financial crisis and recession.

The correlation between income and recycling has been well establishedfor de cades. Consider, for example, Hennepin County, Minnesota,population 1.168 million. I was born in Minneapolis, Hennepin's largestcity, and as of 2010, my hometown's recycling rate ranked thirty-sixthout of forty-one Hennepin County communities, with an average annualhouse hold recycling harvest of 388 pounds. Meanwhile, west ofMinneapolis, house holds in the highly affluent lakeside community ofMinnetonka Beach had an annual house hold recycling harvest of 838pounds, putting them atop the county rankings. Why? One reason isthat the median house hold income in Minnetonka Beach was $168,868in 2010, compared to $45,838 for Minneapolis, a city with large pocketsof poverty. Sure, there are other factors at play (at the time the data wastaken, Minneapolis required residents to sort recyclables into an irritatingand time-consuming seven different categories, while MinnetonkaBeach required only one), but it's hard to escape the fact that places likeMinnetonka Beach generate many more neat white recyclable iPadboxes, and Sunday editions of the New York Times, than the housingprojects of Minneapolis.

Back when I lived in the United States, I had blue bins and green bins,and I felt an ethical compulsion to fill them—and, if possible, fill themmore than I filled the trash bin. The paper went into one, and everythingelse went into the other. Then I'd drop them at the curb, but—owing toa childhood spent in my family's scrapyard—I felt as if I'd just cheatedmyself. Aluminum cans, I knew, were priced by the pound; duringsummer breaks from school I'd oft en be the person assigned to weighthe ones dropped off by bums, college students, and thrift y home recyclersat our family business. In her later years, my grandmother—raisedin a depression-era house hold that saw value in everything reusable—wouldstill insist on driving her modest number of cans to the business,rather than give them away to a municipal recycling program for free.

More oft en than not, in the United States and the rest of the developedworld, the people who have to figure out what to do with the trashthat we toss out of our homes are not teenagers on can machines butcities and a handful of large corporate waste-handling companies. Insome cases they have no choice but to take what's tossed into those bins.If they had a choice, they'd take only the stuff that they can sell for aprofit—like the cans that my grandmother liked to deny them. Thosethings that can be sold for a profit are generally things that can be easilyremade into something new. An aluminum can is easy to remake into anew aluminum can; a leather suitcase, however, is hard to remake intoanything at all.

Occasionally, when I drive through an American neighborhood onrecycling day, I'll notice bins filled with things like old luggage, placedthere out of a misplaced but righteous conviction that the companiesneed to do the right thing and "recycle" them too—whatever that means.But the recycling companies aren't resisting the chance to do the rightthing. They just haven't found a profitable way to separate, for example,the plastic that constitutes the luggage handle from the different kind ofplastic that constitutes the luggage itself. That sort of work has to be doneby people who can see a profit in it, and so far the large-scale recyclingcompanies that pick up blue and green bins haven't figured it out. Butwhat they have started to figure out is how to dig deeper into your trashto get at the stuff that can be recycled profitably. It's not the most glamorouswork, and it's generally not the sort of thing that politicians andenvironmentalists discuss when they discuss "green jobs." But for theright person, it's an opportunity as endless as anything dreamed up bySilicon Valley.

Alan Bachrach is the right kind of person. As director of recycling forthe South Texas region of Waste Management Corporation, North America'slargest recycler of house hold waste, he has a professional, profit-driveninterest in recycling. Like so many of his peers in the global scrapand recycling trade, he has a youthfulness to him that belies his latemiddle age—a youthfulness that suggests nothing so much as that hereally, really enjoys machines that sort trash. If there are those who feelshame for working in an industry that handles other people's waste,Alan Bachrach isn't one of them. He loves it.

We meet early in January 2012 in the visitor's area of Waste Management's$15 million new Walmart-sized recycling plant. Bachrach playeda major role in designing the facility, and he's now responsible for runningit. But even though we're kind of having a conversation, Bachrach'seyes don't focus on me, but rather on what's on the other side of a plate-glasswindow and two stories down: swiftly moving Class A rapids ofplastic bottles, cardboard, and paper, riding up and down conveyors,over and under, around and around, until they emerge as perfectlysorted hay-bale-sized blocks of bottles, cardboard, and paper, tied togetherwith steel ties. "You either love it or you hate it," he tells me aboutthose who work in the industry. "You're either gone after six weeks,probably before six weeks, or you don't ever leave."

In a sense this is Green Heaven, the place where all that home recyclingset out on recycling day—the paper, bottles, and cans lovinglyharvested—eventually ends up. Alan Bachrach isn't exactly Saint Peterat the gates, but he's definitely in the chain of command. But then if this,the Houston Material Recovery Facility, is Green Heaven, then it must besaid that Houston itself is a kind of Green Hell—at least if you careabout what happens to residential waste and recycling.

The numbers tell the story. In 2010 the United States recycled approximately34 percent of its "municipal solid waste." That is, 34 percentof the waste generated by homes, schools, and office-based businesses(but not industrial facilities, construction sites, farms, and mines) wasdiverted from landfills into some kind of facility that sent it on its wayto a reusable afterlife. Give or take a few percentage points, that 34 percentis roughly the same percentage achieved by New York, Minneapolis,and other U.S. cities with long-standing recycling programs. ButHouston? As recently as 2008 Houston only managed to recycle 2.6percent of its municipal solid waste. The other 97.4 percent? By and large,it was landfilled. Since 2008, the rate has been pushed up to "six or sevenpercent," according to a sheepish Alan. That's not good, by any definition.How to explain it?

For people who live in places like San Francisco, where the recyclingrate exceeds 70 percent, a popular explanation is that rednecks don't likerecycling. But that's not only condescending, it demonstrates a profoundmisunderstanding of how and why San Francisco's trash is recycledat such a high rate.

No doubt culture, education, and income play a role in how muchactual waste a particular person or place recycles. But in my experience,no culture encourages a high recycling rate quite like the culture ofpoverty. In essence: if you can afford very little, you'll tend to reuse a lot.So in San Francisco a glass jar of Trader Joe's bruschetta is likely headeddirectly to the recycling bin; in the slums of Mumbai that same jar—ifsomebody could afford it—might very well become a kitchen implement.The slum dwellers of Mumbai have a far higher recycling ratethan the suburbs of San Francisco because (a) they consume less—forexample, no iPad boxes to recycle—and (b) daily survival requires thriftiness.But no matter how poor or eco-conscious a particular populationis, the degree to which they recycle primarily comes down to whether ornot someone can derive some economic benefit from reusing waste. InMumbai the benefit is largely a matter of personal economy; in wealthySan Francisco, where few residents worry about the pennies they mightgenerate from a pile of newspapers, it's a recycling company that has tofind an answer to the question of whether there's economic benefit inpicking up someone else's waste.

Houstonians, like most Americans, don't share an interest in practicingMumbai-style thriftiness. So that places pressure on recyclingcompanies, who unfortunately have found it very, very difficult to beprofitable in Houston. The problems are several. First, Houston is big,but its population density is very low—around 3,300 people per squaremile. San Francisco, by contrast, has a population density that exceeds17,000 people per square mile. From a demographic standpoint, thatmeans there will be more recycling bins per square mile in San Francisco—becausethere will be more house holds per square mile—than in Houston.What that means, from a recycling business standpoint, is that arecycling truck has to drive much farther to pick up, say, a thousandpounds of newspaper in Houston than it does to pick up the same weightof newspaper in San Francisco. In other words: a Houston recyclingcompany has to work harder, and pay more money, for the same revenueas a San Francisco recycling company.

One way to overcome this problem is for local governments to subsidizerecycling—and some do. But in tax-and fee-averse Houston, that'sa tough proposition, especially because Texas has some of the cheapestlandfill rates in the United States. Reasonable taxpayers—not to mentionpoliticians—might ask why they're being asked to pay more to recycle,when the same trash can be landfilled for so much less.

The other way to overcome the problem is to encourage Houston'shouse holds to harvest more recyclables so that each pickup ispotentially richer for the recycling companies. Believe it or not, that'sreally easy to do (and to do without encouraging an increase in consumption).Here's how: take away the two, three, and sometimes sevenbins into which some American house holds are expected to sort wasterecyclables, and replace them with one big bin where everything recyclablecan be dumped. This is called single-stream recycling (as opposedto dual-stream recycling, which requires one bin for paper and anotherfor everything else). In communities where this has been tried, recyclingrates have increased by as much as 30 percent. And why not? Likeit or not, even eco-conscious people are sometimes too busy to be botheredwith the need to separate their trash into multiple containers("playing with garbage" is how I like to describe it). So Waste Managementhas spent the last several years rolling out single-stream recyclingin Houston.

But if Houston's house holds aren't sorting all of the extra recyclingthey're dumping into Waste Management's trucks, how is Waste Managementsupposed to extract more recycling from it? That's where AlanBachrach, a bunch of engineers, and $15 million comes in.

In high school, some kids look for jobs at McDonald's, and some kidsare happy mowing lawns. Alan Bachrach wasn't that kind of kid. Rather,he was the entrepreneurial kind, the sort who looked for things thatcould be sold for more than they cost to buy. He found two: the computerpunch cards that were, until the late 1960s, the primary means offeeding data into mainframes, and continuous-feed computer paper.Both were 100 percent salable, for cash, to local paper scrapyards, wherethey were prepared for processing into new paper. Thus, Alan Bachrachhad plenty of pocket money in high school. In fact, I'm guessing he hadmore money than most.

"I got very lucky," he tells me when I ask about how he was attractedto the recycling business. "It fit my aptitudes and my ADD and my OCDvery well." As with many young entrepreneurs who find their callingearly, Alan's college career didn't last long, and aft er dropping out hewent to work for a friend's trash-hauling company. There he introducedthe trash men to the revenue potential of selling recyclable paper andcardboard to scrapyards, and for the next three de cades he devotedhis life to recycling paper and cardboard generated in Houston-areabusinesses (not homes). Everything changed, however, in 2008, whenWaste Management, in search of recycling companies that could help itestablish a residential recycling business in Houston, decided that GulfCoast Recycling—the company where Alan had spent nearly threedecades—was the one to help them do it. This was well timed. Alan wantedGulf Coast to move into residential recycling, but they lacked access tolarge volumes of recyclables. "Those are collected by trash companies,"he explains. "And so it's very difficult to justify fifteen, twenty milliondollars of equipment when you don't have the feed materials secured.""You need scale," I respond.

Standing beside him, Lynn Brown, Waste Management's VP for communications,pipes up: "Or you need a municipal contract in the city ofHouston."

Alan smiles widely. "Scale is very important in this business."

Waste Management acquired Gulf Coast Recycling in 2008, and in2010 it began to transform this GCR facility into a single-stream recyclingplant that opened in February 2011. Today it sorts between 600,000and 700,000 pounds of single-stream recycling per day. That's roughlythe weight of an Airbus A380 jet—measured out in newspapers, plasticmilk jugs, beer cans, and shoe boxes. When I ask for an estimate of justhow many house holds those pounds represent, Alan tells me that, onaverage, a Houston family generates fifty pounds of single-stream recyclingper month. However, not everybody recycles, not everybody rollsout their container on a weekly basis, and some—like Alan's family,which rolls out six (!) containers per week—recycle more than the average.At the same time, a small percentage of the material handled at thisfacility continues to come from commercial sites, such as the Dumpstersfilled with cardboard behind supermarkets. Still, a rough calculationsuggests that—on a daily basis—the Houston Material RecoveryFacility pro cesses a volume equivalent to the monthly recycling generatedby approximately 12,000 Houston house holds.

"You ready to take a walk?" Alan asks me with that childlike gleam.We're accompanied by Matt Coz, the Waste Management VP in chargeof growth and commodity sales—that is, making money off the stuffpro cessed at this plant—and Lynn Brown. Both of them have beenthrough the plant many times—Matt was intimately involved in itsplanning—but I don't sense any weariness at the thought of touring itagain.

The four of us walk outside and around the building, to an enclosedreceiving area where a truck is tipping a load of recycling onto the concretefloor. Single-stream recycling hisses more than it clanks, mostlydue to the fact that 70 percent of it is paper—junk mail, newspaper, officepaper. A front-end loader of the sort most people are accustomed toseeing dig in the dirt at construction sites rolls up and digs into thismass of well-intentioned waste, picks it up, and dumps it into what Alantells me is a device that feeds the stuff onto conveyors at a steady, uniformpace. "That's really important," Alan says, "if everything you'reabout to see is going to work properly and consistently."