Hidden America: From Coal Miners to Cowboys, an Extraordinary Exploration of the Unseen People Who Make This Country Work

In this last section, Laskas shadows the workers at the Puente Hills Landfill in California. She describes the daily operations of the landfill: trash is taken to one of three “cell[s]” each “about the size of a football field” (284), bulldozers push the trash into rows, and then “mighty Bomags, 120,000-pound compacters […], smash and crunch and squish the trash, forcing out air, forcing it tighter and tighter to save space” (284). When a cell reaches capacity, scrapers come in and cover the trash with dirt, “sealing in odors, rats, bugs, concealing the leftovers of a yesterday everyone is more than ready to be done with” (284). Next, water trucks spray down the dirt to keep dust under control, while human paper pickers secure anything that “the wind might pick up and try to carry away,” especially plastic grocery bags (285).

Puente Hills has been used a landfill since the 1960s, when it was still a “series of canyons.” Now, “it’s a mountain,” which will reach capacity in November 2013. Laskas shadows Herman, who drives a “tractor-trailer full of trash assigned to him each day” (277). Herman, like many of the workers Laskas has met, loves his job, and is not looking forward to retirement.

She also goes into the landfill proper, and rides in a Bomag with Mike “Big Mike” Speiser “the most famous Bomag driver at the landfill, and some say in the world” (287). Mike won a prize at the Solid Waste Association of North America’s International Road-E-O in “agility and speed” (287). She is terrified in the Bomag, and he admits that a “lot of guys [he] train[s] cry their first couple of weeks” (289).

She also tours the landfill with Joe Haworth, an environmental engineer, who talks to her about the problems of waste management and the innovative ways they’ve devised to deal with trash and its attendant problems. For example, one major problem is seagulls, which often carry trash away to other parts of the neighborhood, as well as leachate, the liquid that is produced by the rotting trash in the landfill.

In addition to solving these problems, engineers like Haworth have also been able to find innovative uses for trash. For instance, decomposing trash produces gas, which is then pumped to a “Gas-to-Energy Facility” and “generates fifty-eight megawatts of electricity—enough to power about seventy thousand Southern California homes” (283). Laskas points out to Joe that few people know that landfill gas can be used to produce electricity; if people think of landfills at all, it is as dirty, smelly, environmentally unfriendly eyesores—all the things Puente Hills is not.

Joe explains, “society’s interest level” in waste management is “pretty low. It doesn’t necessarily want to know where its waste goes. It’s embarrassed by its responsibility in this arena” (284). Joe, however, and others like him are tasked with this responsibility, not just to hide the landfill, hide the waste, but to find ways to make it work for us. Waste management is complex, but that complexity represents progress.

Prior to the twentieth century, communities burned their trash or threw their trash in the ocean. It wasn’t until the 1960s that people began to be concerned about pollution, and engineers tried to devise solutions for “a planet choking on its own debris” (293). Joe thinks of pollution as “the wrong stuff in the wrong place at the wrong time. Any other time, it’s a resource” (295-96), and engineers continue to explore solutions to make the waste generated by modern society into a resource. Puente Hills itself will become a park, “a place for people to play” (303).

Trash coming into Puente Hills after it closes will go to the Puente Hill Material Recovery Facility, “where they’ll sort the trash, save and sell the good stuff” (308), with the rest “put in sealed boxcars and delivered to […] a super-landfill said to last a hundred years” (303). Laskas finds this “depressing,” symbolic of America’s rampant consumerism, but Joe points out again the need to see trash as not a problem, but as inevitable. Furthermore, he doesn’t think this is “a uniquely American or even modern phenomenon” (310) as much as it represents how young humanity is on the scale of things.

Joe truly believes that one day, humans will figure out how to get to a “[z]ero waste” state, which might start with having to rein in “our gluttony” but will ultimately happen because, he argues, “[p]eople are basically good-hearted until put in a very bad corner” (312). Joe’s optimism is infectious, and Laskas ends the chapter with Joe pointing out that human beings are composed of molecules that came from space, that “we’re stardust literally […]. We are atomic waste!” (315).