You can tell a lot about a neighborhood by what ends up in its recycling bins.
Wine bottles and newspapers? Calling cards of the middle class. Enough bombers to sing “99 Bottles of Beer” forward and backward? College kids. Stacks of broken down furniture and electronics boxes? Young families and first-time homeowners.
Then there are areas where recycling seems to be the last thing on anyone’s mind, where Denver’s new purple collection carts stand empty, if residents even have them at all.
“You would think that everyone would want to do it,” Angelo Santistevan, a driver for Denver Recycles, said one morning while scooping up full carts with the mechanical arm on his PendPac/Peterbilt truck and then depositing the empty carts back by the curb. “It really cuts down on the trash.”
Not long ago, few people contemplated their trash. John and Jane Q. Public generally employed a use-it and lose-it mentality about everything from soda cans and TV dinner trays to old tires and ripped-up furniture.
But now, people worry about hotter summers and colder winters, about international crises propelled by a mutual addiction to depleting natural resources, and about safeguarding the planet for future generations.
Eco-anxiety is real, and on the rise.
In a condition some researchers have dubbed Waking-Up Syndrome, anxiety over global warming and each individual’s responsibility for it surfaces in phases akin to the early stages of grieving: denial, slow acknowledgment, despair, anger and then action.
An event with innocent beginnings — a trip to the farmers market, falling in love with a new bicycle, giving the living room a fresh coat of paint — starts a spiral into full-on green guilt as a nagging question takes hold in your mind like a bad song from drive-time radio: Where does my garbage go?
Garbage as a resource
If it’s not recycled, the answer is infuriatingly simple: landfills.
That means that all my garbage and your garbage and the garbage of everyone we know is compacted underground, covered with top soil, seeded and then poked with pipes that monitor and release refuse-induced methane gas. That gas either burns off, becoming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, or is diverted into expensive alternative-energy plants.
With so many people “waking up” to the reality of greenhouses gases, work has been busy for Santistevan. As his truck rumbled south on Federal Boulevard, the 31-year-old Denver native described a typical day on the job:
He awakes at 5 a.m., then rouses his two youngest kids. The three head out of their house in unincorporated Adams County about 40 minutes later. Santistevan drops off the kids at their grandmother’s house in north Denver, then heads for the Solid Waste Management offices and garage on Decatur Street just south of Invesco Field.
He checks on his truck, then grabs a cup of coffee. “I ain’t a morning person.”
At around 6:30 a.m., a supervisor leads Santistevan and the other recycling drivers through a meeting about the day’s routes, department news or new procedures.
By 7 a.m. — but never earlier because of city noise ordinances — Santistevan is in the right-side driver’s seat of his truck, where a small screen provides a live video feed from cameras over “the hopper,” or holding container, and the back of the vehicle. The screen is next to a control panel Santistevan uses to operate lights and a hydraulic lift, and just above a joystick he uses to control the metal jaws that latch on to each purple cart.
“My dad has been with Solid Waste since ’74, before I was even around,” he said. “If it was good enough for him to raise his family, it’s good enough for me.”
Like a good neighbor
Along Santistevan’s recycling pickup route, residents stop him to ask questions about large-item pickup and other garbage-disposal issues that he knows little about. Others like to time his pickup or wait so they can snatch back their carts just as soon as he empties them. “There are some people who just want to come out and see the truck,” he said.
A cold, unopened can of Pepsi waited on top of one cart. And you can bet Santistevan finds a few batches of cookies at Christmastime.
He likes the job, but it has its challenges. On blocks thick with parked cars, maneuvering the truck between them can be trickier than fishing a stuffed animal out of an arcade game. In alleys, “We’ve got to deal with the trees and the garages and the power lines,” he said, not to mention the occasional drug deal (or drug bust).
Shredded paper tends to pick up and fly away instead of landing in the hopper, and picking up along busy streets can be downright treacherous.
“People are in such a hurry that they’re going around you or they’re riding on your tail or they cut you off,” he said. “They don’t show too much respect.”
By midmorning, Santistevan’s cellphone chimes with the Jay-Z song “Roc Boys” as fellow drivers decide where to meet for lunch. They like CiCi’s Pizza or Sam Taylor’s Bar-B-Q or Gunther Toody’s. Eating together gives them a chance to debrief about the morning and if need be, help wrap up each other’s work.
“I don’t think I could sit in an office,” Santistevan said. “I don’t want to put it down, but I’ve got a better view.”
Words go here
Recycling drivers like Santistevan and others from municipalities across the Front Range take their loads to Waste Management’s single- stream processing center at 5395 Franklin St. in Denver. There, the whir of industrial gears and factory conveyor belts is a constant soundtrack for the roughly 100 people who staff the plant up to 20 hours-a-day.
A tractor scoops away parts of the mountain of recyclable refuse dumped in the yard and pushes it toward a sorting system. There, in a scene reminiscent of Lucille Ball attempting to sort truffles flowing down a conveyor belt in a famous “I Love Lucy,” episode, Waste Management employees wearing two layers of gloves stand next to conveyor belts and pick out nonrecyclable junk, such as strollers, hoses, bicycles and spiral-bound notebooks.
The recyclables move on through the system and emerge as tight bales of paper, aluminum, cardboard, glass and plastic that Waste Management markets and sells to companies producing post-consumer recycled products that include fleece jackets and glass mulch.
The processing plant deals with more materials all the time, according to Bill Cira, Colorado district manager for Waste Management’s Recycle America program. “If you take all the materials that we’re processing out of my plants in a year’s time and load them up on a train, those cars would stretch from Denver all the way to Pueblo.”
Demands are high
The challenges for the Denver sorting facility include keeping up with the workload. A half-day off to replace one piece of equipment can result in enough backed-up bottles and cans to mirror the Foothills. Those materials wait to be sorted in an uncovered yard and become more difficult to handle in inclement weather. And keeping trained labor for such physically taxing and monotonous work can be difficult.
Is all of this recycling making a difference? There’s growing suspicion that recycling is actually more expensive than it’s worth. In garbage-choked New York City, for example, the cost of processing a ton of recycling from collection to commercial redistribution is about $239, according to The Gotham Gazette. The cost of processing a ton of garbage, without recycling any of it, is $132.
“The way I look at it,” Cira said, “is we’re greatly reducing the amount of new raw materials that we need to mine and farm for production. By recycling all those raw materials, we are reducing the carbon footprint (and) reducing the amount of natural materials we need to use. That goes a long way toward balancing the scale.”
A case for recycling
Arguments in favor of recycling become easier to make once concerned citizens get a look at a place like “DADS Landfill,” or Waste Management’s 4-square-mile Denver Arapahoe Disposal Site on South Gun Club Road in Aurora. This is the largest landfill in the area and one of the five largest in the country. Those rolling grassy hills at the far east end of East Hampden Avenue may look placid but are in fact Section 31, roughly 210 acres of compacted trash that took 11 years to fill to capacity.
Three million tons a year, or roughly 12,000 tons of trash a day, come to DADS. After being weighed and charged a disposal fee, garbage trucks from across the Front Range now dump their loads into Section 32 where Mad Max-looking bulldozers with gigantic studded tires push the trash down into the earth, roll back over it with topsoil, and repeat.
“We sell space here,” facility engineer and site manager Doc Nyiro said during a recent tour. “The more we can pack that waste in, the more we can be competitive with the other landfills in the area.”
DADS is also home to the Lowry Landfill Superfund site, where 138 million gallons of industrial waste were disposed of in the 1960s and 1970s, before environmental engineers like Nyiro understood the full environmental impact.
Waste Management, the largest of four major waste disposal companies in Colorado, predicts that there’s enough space at DADS to serve the Front Range for about another century. The facility could last longer if if people continue to recycle, and buy products made from recycled materials.
“You’ll see a lot of paper here,” Nyiro said as the smell of diesel and dirty diapers wafted into a tour bus parked on top of roughly 120 feet of garbage.
“You’ll see a lot of cardboard, a lot of plastic, a lot of stuff that can be recycled,” he said. “There’s definitely room for improvement.”
Elana Ashanti Jefferson: ejefferson@denverpost.com or 303-954-1957
Beyond plastic and glass
Maybe you’ve got a handle on common household recycling – cardboard, aluminum cans, office paper, phone books and plastic bottles – but still struggle with how to responsibly dispose of other, bigger products. These sources could help:
Computers, telephones and electronics can be recycled by Waste Management. Call 1-866-588-0572 to locate the nearest drop-off facility.
Household hazardous waste such as paint, pesticides, solvents, cleaners, motor oil and batteries can be toxic. They should not be thrown in the trash or poured down the drain. Call Denver’s Household Hazardous Waste Hotline, 800-HHW-PKUP (1-800-449-7587) to request a collection.
Appliances such as stoves, washing machines, dryers, refrigerators, freezers and air conditioners can be recycled by Denver Solid Waste Management. Dial 311 to schedule a pickup.
Mattresses can either be reconditioned or broken down into scrap metal by most major mattress retailers.
Curbside Recycling programs outside of Denver: visit coloradocurbside.com.
Eco-Cycle, based in Boulder, is one of the largest nonprofit recyclers in the country and can help problem-solve difficult recycling issues. Call 303-444-6634 or visit ecocycle.org.
