Freakonomics Radio - 17. Trashed

Episode Date: January 13, 2011

How economics -- and emotion -- have turned our garbage into such a mess

Gather round now, people. It's story time. Come on. Come on in close. Well, I think it would be better just to say the title and then start reading the book. You know, it being a children's book, that's what's often done for kids. Okay. Here comes the garbage barge! The author is Jonah Winter. His book is based on a true story that some of you might remember.

Garbage. Big, heaping, stinking mounds of garbage. Big bags of garbage on the sidewalk. Garbage trucks overflowing with garbage. Landfills reaching up to the heavens with more and more garbage, garbage, garbage trucks overflowing with garbage, landfills reaching up to the heavens with more and more garbage, garbage, garbage. This was back in 1987. Some garbage from Ice Slip, that's near New York City, was loaded onto a barge bound for

North Carolina. So, on March 22, 1987, all 3,168 tons of garbage was loaded up. Then a little tugboat named the Break of Dawn began its long journey south, tugging the rusty old garbage barge behind it. The Break of Dawn was a happy little tugboat. Her captain and crew was Captain Duffy St. Pierre, a crusty old sailor. I'm a retired seaman. My name's Duffy St. Pierre. Together they tugged the garbage barge down the east coast of America.

Captain St. Pierre, who came from Louisiana, got the barge from New York down to Moorhead City, North Carolina, where the garbage was supposed to be unloaded. And that's when things began to go wrong. This was one barge too far, and environmental officials in North Carolina thought its trash was too hot to handle. Everybody went crazy, said we had hospital waste in there, and Jimmy Hoffa was buried

in there, and you know the story about that. Now, where'd the idea come from that Jimmy Hoffa was buried in the trash here? Well, the people blew it up. Pretty soon, the garbage barge had to leave North Carolina. It headed toward Louisiana, but it was turned away again. Shiver me timbers, moaned Captain Duffy. You can't do this to a hometown boy. And the barge, which was called the Mobro 4000, spent the next two months at sea.

Captain St. Pierre tried unloading the trash in the Bahamas. He tried Mexico. He got all the way to Belize. No one would take the trash. There they were, floating out in the middleamas. He tried Mexico. He got all the way to Belize. No one would take the trash. There they were, floating out in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. This was getting ridiculous. Would no one take this garbage? Which, by the way, was really starting to stink. Back home, the Mobro was all over the news. It became a national joke. But the punchline wasn't so funny. We Americans produce

so much trash, we've run out of places to put it. Come on, what are we, a bunch of children? Toot toot! From American Public Media and WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio. Today, we sail the stormy seas of trash.

It's an expanse of white lies, unintended consequences, and romance? Here's your host, Stephen Dubner. Okay, so poor Captain St. Pierre and his garbage barge spent months at sea. The message was loud and clear. Our landfills were, as Jonah Winter puts it, reaching up to the heavens. But were they? Listen to Samantha McBride. She's a waste sociologist who teaches at Columbia University. The notion that we were running out of landfill space got its start by some research that was put out by the EPA that

simply counted up the number of landfills over time and saw them diminishing, but failed to factor in that the new landfills that were opening up were much larger than the old ones. The opposition by various mayors and harbormasters and things like that to the Mobro landing and discharging its contents was purely political. But you all know the first rule of politics, never let a good crisis go to waste. The Mobro crisis, even though it was a manufactured one, was a great opportunity to face the facts. We produce a lot of garbage. Not as much as we used to, believe it or not, at least if you measure by weight. In New York, the amount of trash per capita peaked in the 1940s, in part because our waste back then was so heavy. Lots of coal ash, for instance. But there are a lot more people around

today, and too much of our trash ends up in places where it's not supposed to be. Hey, it's Stephen Dubner. How are you? Great, great. Right here on the bow of the research vessel Algita on a beautiful sunny afternoon after a fierce rain shower that has just left the area. Awesome. Tell me your name and what you do. My name is Captain Charles Moore, and I'm the founder of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation and the skipper of the oceanographic research vessel Algita. Gotcha. How are the waters today? We've experienced torrential rains, and what we find is at the first flush, we get a tremendous load of trash and debris.

And then on the beach, the trash and debris was a foot thick, and it was covered with styrofoam. It looked like a kind of a chocolate bar with white chocolate granules stuck into it. It had this thick cap of grungy urban slobber with white plastic styrofoam bits stuck in it so that the beach looked like a big white chocolate chip cookie. So this is all you're describing. First of all, this is disgusting, so thanks for painting the picture for me. But what you're describing is just the trash from runoff of big rain. That's it, right? Yeah, what we experience here is drainage of two rivers for a population pushing 20 million. So the Los Angeles and Orange County watersheds drain right here into Long Beach

Harbor area. And it's really the armpit of Southern California. And we really are the receiving body for all the waste that kind of exists as part of our consumer throwaway lifestyle. In 1997, Captain Moore was sailing home to California from Honolulu. He was out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, miles and miles and miles from land, when he came upon what is now known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. I couldn't come on deck and spend 10 minutes without seeing some evidence of civilization floating by, whether it was a bottle cap or a toothbrush or a shard of plastic or a soap bottle. The garbage patch is this messy soup of little pieces of trash, estimated to be about the size of Texas, maybe bigger,

right there in the middle of the ocean. Who put it there? You and me. That's who. Why? Well, over the past 35 years or so, landfills have gotten much bigger and better. Landfill technology is a lot more sophisticated than most of us know. Yes, in some parts of the country, it costs a lot to haul trash to these landfills, but in many parts, it's pretty easy and therefore cheap. The truth is that we as a nation are really quite good at trash disposal, maybe too good. A lot of us just stick it out on the curb and then voila, it vanishes. You never even see a bill for it. Sure, you probably pay for trash pickup through your

property taxes, but the fee is buried in there. And more important, it's often a flat fee, which means you can throw away as much trash as you want. So why bother to produce less? If your electricity bill were a flat rate, you'd never turn off the lights. Makes me think about an all-you-can-eat buffet as in all-you-can-throw-out trash, and with no incentives for people to think about the cost of what they're doing. That's Lisa Skumatz. She's an economist at a consulting firm in Boulder, Colorado, that helps cities deal with their trash. She's been studying this stuff for 25 years. When I originally got into the field, it seemed like there were two camps. There were the landfill engineers who thought, what is the problem? Just build another landfill. And on the other side,

we had the pure greenies who thought, well, recycling 100% is the only holy thing to do. Our job is all about trying to find that optimum that's somewhere in between those two extremes. That's what's made this field so fun for me. Schumatz has found what she thinks is the sweet spot for trash. It's called pay as you throw. Instead of all you can eat trash, it puts a price tag on every garbage bag, and it tosses all those free riders off the trash bus. When people start paying for everything they throw away, their trash behavior changes. in an average person's trash bin, by about 17%, with about a third of that going to recycling, about a third of that going to organics and mulch mowing and that sort of thing, and about a third of it due to source reduction,

waste that doesn't have any cost to deal with anymore because people are donating, people are buying more carefully, people are buying less packaging, and so on. We are in the midst of a pay-as-you-throw boom. 20 years ago, fewer than 200 communities in the U.S. had it. Now, we're up to 7,000, about 25% of the country. And here's the beauty part. If you're the government in one of those 7,000 places,

pay-as-you-throw makes it easier to start billing directly for trash pickup. Bingo! A new revenue stream. Last July, the town of Sanford, Maine rolled out a pay-as-you-throw plan. The town manager there is Mark Green. Well, Sanford is an old mill town. It really saw its heyday back in the 50s and 60s. It's the home of the Palm Beach suit, is what we're probably best known for.

Sanford used to crank out breezy summer suits and textiles for drapes and upholstery. But the mills started to shut down a long time ago. And with a high unemployment rate, the government there was looking for ways to raise money. Mark Green estimated that pay-as-you-throw could bring in about $900,000 a year. What we did is they were purple bags because a couple of the counselors liked the purple color. So we did purple bags, and they had the town logo on them. The big bags cost $2 a piece. On the curb, the purple really stood out.

Oh, they sure did. And what was neat about it is that they all matched, and there were very few of them because people were so much more careful with their trash than they are when they don't have to pay for it. According to Green, the results were pretty startling. Because they were paying for volume, people no longer tossed their bottles and cans and newspapers in the trash. So the recycling rate quadrupled and overall trash volume was cut in half.

But not everyone was so happy. I'm sure there are effigies of me hanging from numerous places in people's houses. There were a lot of folks that were angry about it. Like Len Mustachio. He thought the new trash program stank. It's absolutely absurd. You know, anything that's a fee, it might as well be a tax. It's one and the same. You don't have a choice. Although they'll tell you, well, you do have a choice. You can throw out less garbage. Well, what am I supposed to do? Eat it? Coming up, the people of Sanford sink their teeth into pay-as-you-throw and looking for love in all the trashy places. Eat it, eat it, eat it, eat it. In all the trashy places.

From WNYC and American Public Media, this is Freakonomics Radio. So pay-as-you-throw trash collection seems to make perfect sense. You're getting people to pay their fair share of waste disposal, while at the same time giving them an incentive to increase recycling and cut down on trash. Who could argue with that? There's only one problem. Some people see it as a new tax. These days especially, and especially in towns like Sanford, Maine,

people aren't in the mood for more taxes. But Tom Kinnaman, an economist at Bucknell, says that a trash tax is special. It plays on our guilt. Even though we aren't running out of landfill space, we've been taught to feel so bad about producing any trash at all that politicians can cash in on that guilt. Yes, it's a tax grab. And it's, I don't want to say it's disguised, but it's palatable. People who consider this, residents who are tired of higher taxes for things like, you know, property and sales and those kinds of things, kind of swallow this one and say, okay, it is kind of a user system where if we generate more waste, we should pay more. And so it's a politically easy way to get revenue. But it wasn't so easy in Sanford, Maine. After about four months of pay-as-you-throw, the citizens there voted to get rid of it. Does that surprise you? Maybe, maybe not.

As responses to trash fees go, Sanford's was pretty mellow. The data on pay-as-you-throw go back a ways. Here's Tom Kinnaman again. I drive at the time, I drive an old VW Beetle, which was, I think it was about a 1970. It ran really, really well, and it served me all throughout graduate school. It was kind of loud, though. I don't know if you remember the Beetle. I do.

It idles at a very high loud... It's an air-cooled engine, so... In my surveys afterwards, I'd ask for, you know, is there anything else you want to say? And, you know, some people were like, yeah, your car used to wake me up every... because it idled right maybe outside their bedroom window as we went out and slammed the door.

Back in 1992, Kinnaman used to drive around Charlottesville, Virginia, gathering trash data. He was a grad student at the University of Virginia, and Charlottesville was about to start its own pay-as-you-throw program. So he'd hop out of his noisy little VW, grab his scale, and weigh people's garbage cans and recycling bins. He did this before and after the pay-as-you-throw program got going. And we did find, for example, the weight of garbage did go down, and some of that reduction ended up in the recycling bin. About 30% of it did.

The other 60% is unaccountable. We don't know where it could have gone. Some of the trash, Kinnaman deduced, was likely getting dumped in the woods. Isn't that strange? Charlottesville was only charging 80 cents a bag for garbage under the new plan. Was it really worth it to haul your trash into the woods to avoid paying a couple of dollars? The economics might say no, but this is where economics and psychology hook up. When people are used to getting something for free, or even what seems to be free, and are then asked to pay for it, well, some of them will inevitably freak out.

In Ireland, new trash fees led to a rise in burn victims because more people were burning their trash in the backyard to avoid paying. In Germany, people started flushing so much of their food waste down the toilet that the sewers became infested with rats. And then there's the famous tactic, famous among garbage scholars at least, known as the Seattle Stomp. You can imagine a big boot right on top of that garbage. You've got to get this extra stuff in. I can make two garbages out. You know, you could imagine the kid putting the garbage out and the father coming out and saying, hey, wait a minute, you can put those into one can because we can save 80 cents if we do that. It's not too hard.

And I think it would be an interesting economic study to find out. Immediately after a large-scale pay-as-you-go program is implemented, suddenly people are buying waste containers that are a little bit stronger because they really want to compact stuff in there. Before, maybe they had a flimsy one that had a rip in it or something. This might be a really good business for those who make waste containers. It's a cornerstone fact of economics. People

respond to incentives. But they don't always respond how you think they will, or how you want them to. You expect logic. Instead, you might get emotion. And trash, for whatever reason, inspires a lot of emotion. It seems we see it as our civilization's equivalent of bodily waste,

something we're ashamed of. We don't want to think about it, see it, certainly not smell it. But wouldn't it be nice if, in our well-intentioned efforts to produce less waste, to have people pay their fair share, to stop from turning all our oceans into one great soupy garbage patch, wouldn't it be nice if we could undemonize trash just a little bit? Consider Taipei, the capital of Taiwan. Jonathan Forma is an American PhD student in sociology who moved there last fall. He was

baffled by the city's strange trash rituals. They don't make it easy to get rid of trash there, not by a long shot. But as Forma discovered, trash isn't just something to get rid of in Taipei. It's a chance for a love connection. Well, I can tell you that when I arrived here in the dormitory, I was given a list of rules, and one of them was, when you hear the trash truck come, take your trash out the door. When you hear the trash truck come,

bring your trash out the door. So it comes around like an ice cream truck or something? Exactly. You know, this is one of the funny things. It actually plays Beethoven music. Oh, that's nice. It blares it, in fact. And so when you hear it coming,

your first thought is the ice cream truck is coming. But in fact, it is, you know, smelly garbage that is coming down your street. But basically, you're hearing, you're in your room, you're working, or you're getting ready for going to school or whatever, and then you hear,

dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun, and you think, trash. I gotta get my trash. Is that the way it works? That is exactly the way it works. For the first 10 days, I didn't hear it one time. I was told it comes roughly, in our area, it comes in the afternoon and the evening, supposedly. Although,

for the first 10 days, I was literally out every single day. I mean, I just arrived in a new city. I wanted to travel around a little bit. And so, you know, the result of all that was about 10 days worth of trash in my room. 10 days worth of trash in your room because you were not home when the trash truck came, right? Exactly. I couldn't bring myself to tell my friends, no, I won't go out to eat with you because I'm waiting for the trash truck. I couldn't bring myself to tell my friends, no, I won't go out to eat with you because I'm waiting for the trash truck. I couldn't do it. What do the locals think about this trash collection system where you have to wait to hear the trash truck come and bring your trash out to it? You know, I asked a couple of my friends about this. And they said that they think it's like people like going out and talking to each other while they're waiting for the trash truck.

I've seen this where there'll be people, you know, 20, 25 people gathering on a corner and the trash truck coming in the distance. And I've also heard that guys sometimes go there and try to find pretty girls. Oh, so you're giving trash a whole new spin here. You're talking trash is like a babe magnet and trash is a community builder, right? You know, if you talk with your neighbors a lot, I suspect it's just as easy that you could get into an argument as it is to, you know, have delightful chatter. But they say that they like it. And you dress in nice clothes sometimes.

You go out there. You talk to your neighbors. You put your trash in together. It does sound nice. But what you're describing is it's like, you know, I'm living in this neighborhood in Taipei in a residential area, and I'm a young, single guy, and it's like, hey, it's trash time. I'm going to put on my best shirt and try to go meet a girl, right?

That's what you're talking about? I haven't been reduced yet to going to the trash truck to find girls, but maybe one day. Maybe one day. Freakonomics Radio is a co-production of WNYC, American Public Media, and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Susie Lechtenberg and mixed by David Herman. Our producers include Christina Russo, Chris Neary, Jeff Mosankis, and Colin Campbell. Subscribe to this podcast on iTunes

and you'll get the next episode in your sleep. You can find more audio at Freakonomicsradio.com. And as always, if you want to read more about the hidden side of everything, go to Freakonomics.com. Toot toot!