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

"We have an exterminator every two weeks!" Morgante interjected.

"That just sends them up there," the man shouted, indicating his home in the Red Hook housing projects.

Earlier, Morgante had told me that rats tumbled out of the trucks—they weren't living at his transfer station. Now he told the neighbor that the trash didn't sit in the transfer station. It came in and it went out. In. And out. He repeated it brightly. The neighbor didn't care about in and out. He cared about the continual presence of garbage. He cared about its cumulative physical impact.

"This place has given me asthma," he said.

"You probably had asthma before we ever worked here," Morgante said. They were getting a little loud. The neighbor waved his arm as if to ward off Morgante's retort and turned to leave. "You know why the garbage is here?" he asked. "It's because we're poor."

"You know what?" Morgante said to his back. "I'm poor, too, and I don't live that far from here."
 

Apuzzi finally appeared. He was clean shaven, with a neat haircut and what I took to be, in November, a salon tan. He seemed ill at ease here. He declined to wear the orange vest and hard hat that Morgante had forced upon me before I made the ten-foot walk from the bay door, over the knee-high tide of garbage, to an open stairway that led to a small office. Frowning in his dress shirt and polished brown shoes, Apuzzi picked his way over a sofa cushion, across the slippery frame of a foldout bed, and in between two black garbage bags. A sheen of brown muck coated the floor.

The office, which smelled slightly garbagey, contained a cheap L-shaped desk with a computer, a small meeting table, and several ceiling-mounted security monitors. The room had no street windows, but it did have an interior window that overlooked the tipping floor, and that's what I wanted to see.

At 11:00 a.m., the trash was halfway up to the horizontal yellow line on the push wall. The front-end loader, with its six-yard bucket, was filling a truck. I asked Apuzzi why everything was painted black. "I don't know," he said. He seemed as puzzled as I was.

I asked him about his background. I imagined that like many in the trash business, he was a guy whose career had probably started out promisingly enough in another field but had then taken a sudden turn and rolled downhill. "I'm an attorney," he said. "I worked as a litigator in Manhattan and then Princeton until IESI bought my family's waste collection business." Now his boss was Mickey Flood.

"Trucks dump here until about eleven p.m.," Apuzzi said, gazing down on the trash. "The floor has to be clean by midnight—empty of garbage and washed. Then the garbage starts coming in again." I watched as a kid from the projects zipped around in a small forklift, picking bulk metal objects from the trash heap—a stroller, a desk, a swing set frame. He piled this stuff in the station's adjacent empty bay. Metal is heavy, and IESI didn't want to pay to tip it in someone else's landfill. The company could sell it for scrap. "The garbage always sits less than one day," Apuzzi continued. "On Sunday we're empty."

I asked how many trucks came in each day. "City trucks bring about eight tons each and commercial trucks bring thirteen. You can do the math." I divided the station's permitted 745 tons by 21 tons, the amount in one commercial and one residential truck, and got approximately 75 full trucks entering each day. The tractor-trailer trucks held 20 tons, so that was an additional 37 trucks leaving. They delivered the waste to two landfills IESI owned in Pennsylvania or—if those landfills had met their daily permitted tonnages—to two or three others owned by competitors.

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.