Wasteland

Our intrepid correspondent gets to the bottom of Vancouver's waste disposal system and discovers some pleasant surprises.

By Tyee Bridge; photograph by Marina Dodis

The theft itself goes smoothly enough. Garbage day in this section of Kitsilano is Tuesday, so just before midnight on Monday I drive out 12th, heading east. At Arbutus I turn right, park under a twitching streetlight and pop the hatchback. I lift the hinged lid, hoist half a dozen green garbage bags over my shoulder and steal back to the car like a binner's Grinch. In they go. No witnesses. Five minutes later I'm driving back to the east side with a boot full of garbage and the windows wide open.

By the time I get home I'm too tired to deal with the bags—catalog their contents, that is, as part of my investigation into the secret life of garbage—so I leave them in the car overnight. Big mistake. When I open the door the next day, I'm hit by a suffocating aroma of warm diapers, ashtray cigarettes and liquefying orange peels that sends me reeling.

After the gagging subsides I take the bags to the alley and tear them apart. By their garbage shall thee know them: My efforts uncover a garbological cross-section of Kitsilano archetypes. First to be revealed is, it seems, the Sporty Bachelor, whose trash includes, among other things, two pairs of 32-by-32 (worn but quite wearable) Docker khakis, a can of tuna, a Lowry supporter cup box, and Bauer elbow-pad product tags. Another bag looks like that of his counterpart, the Busy Bachelorette: half a frozen pizza, coffee grounds, a frozen orange juice can, three pairs of ratty red thong underwear. Then comes the Unhealthy Married Couple: wine corks, two Safeway Select fresh linguini packages, one large empty jar Skippy peanut butter (chunky), one each du Maurier and Rothman's cigarette packs. Trash from the next generation is provided by what must be the Upscale Neighbourhood Daycare, consisting mostly of spoonable, squeezable and drinkable yogurt containers (Danone strawberry-banana the big favourite) and a bouffant sack of used paper towels.

While it's fascinating to lift the lid on something so nasty, looking at other people's garbage also stirs up some ecological angst. I'm motivated by perverse curiosity, but also by self-reproach. When I tie up my own chicken bones, Jelly Tot wrappers and splitting cheese-ends in a used grocery bag, I feel uneasy. Not because I know what happens to it, but because I don't. I only know it won't be good. Every snowflake in an avalanche pleads not guilty, as they say, but whenever I chuck my trash I feel myself chipping in. And so I experience the household guilt that is, unless you're a votary of the Bill O'Reilly Experience, a hallmark of the modern era. Uneasiness and guilt may get bad press from conservative talking heads, but as a social corrective they're invaluable.

The secret life of garbage in Vancouver goes something like this: Either you pitch your bags in the dumpster for pick-up by a private contractor, or you roll your new black-and-grey tote to the curb, where it waits for a city truck. In the case of the black-and-grey bins, one of the new hydraulic-arm trucks stops alongside-no more old-school trucks with the jaunty garbageman riding the fender—and a driver like Ward Gogol toggles the grappler joystick, his eye on a small ceiling-mounted video screen. Provided the can has been placed a safe distance from decorative fences, Audi TTs and other Kitsilano alley obstacles, the arm slides it up and inverts it into the back, where it joins up with the contents of as many as 1,000 other upendings.
Gogol has two kids and plays for the Burnaby Buzzards, part of a new baseball league "for us over-45, knockaround guys." He's worked in sanitation since 1991, and was one of the first to man the new city trucks. On the day I ride with him, he hits the neighbourhoods where I'd Grinched trashbags the night before. "It's a lot tidier than it was back then," he says of the new truck, and this seems an understatement. The cab is hospital clean, smells like Little Tree air freshener, and is noise-free except for a crackling two-way radio and CFMI classic rock.

The trucks work on a task system, meaning no one goes home until all the trash is collected. "Everyone helps everyone, so there's a certain pressure to perform," Gogol says with a smile. At the end of the day he drives his load to the Vancouver South Transfer Station, near Fraser and Marine Drive, where along with the private dumpster truck drivers he unloads his garbage into what's known as The Pit.

A sunken bay filled with fresh garbage and a raging D8R Caterpillar bulldozer, the Pit is where all illusions of sterility vanish. Beyond this point any functional stereos, missing jewellery, decent sofas or semi-edible pizzas abandon all hope, as they are mangled and degraded beyond recognition. If you want to be awed by the reality of urban waste-management, this is the place to visit. Here, rotten canteloupes, Ikea furnishings and spoiled meat are crushed into an unholy admixture along with bags of dogshit, glossy magazines and pieces of Tupperware. The compacted substance is then hoisted by crane into the back of a 425-horsepower International semi-trailer and hauled across the Oak Street Bridge to the landfill in Delta.

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