130 million dollar view of Austin
The view is the best in town. No doubt about it. A full Austin skyline. Funny that just an hour before, our software engineer walked me through his new home in the Bouldin neighborhood, and proudly pointed to a partial silhouette of the downtown skyline — you like it? It’s a thing. Austinites love their views of the downtown. I don’t get it. Personally, I prefer the look out West, taking in the vast Texas sky as the sun is setting.
But there it was, the best view of downtown I’ve ever seen indeed. And not just downtown, but out West too. It had it all, this tabletop mountain on Giles Ln.
We were seated in a pick up truck — I in the front with Jessica driving and Vineet in the back with the manager Jesse explaining — on our way to the designated dumping area. We were being given a tour of the Austin City Landfill operated by Waste Management (WM).
Today was one of those, fake it until you make it days. Over coffee at Patika on South Lamar, I told Vineet, pack it up; we’re going on a field trip. Where, he asked? The landfill! “Are you serious?” Yes, I said. We’re gonna go find out how a landfill runs. How do you expect to get in, he insisted, bewildered and a bit annoyed. You can’t just walk into a landfill dude. We’ll see, I said. And we were off.
I didn’t have a plan. But what I knew is that I will see a landfill today, and nobody was gonna stop me. Once we arrived, it was clear that it would not be a straightforward process. There was the weigh station, a few wooden shacks (makeshift offices), and dump trucks. Shit loads of dump trucks. The most obvious place for us to go, I thought, was the weigh station. But we were in a Tesla, not quite a dump truck. Wait dude, that’s a bad idea. We looked at each other. Fine, I said, let’s go to the office building instead and see if we can convince anyone there into talking to us. We walked into the first shack. Empty. In the second, a friendly engineer came and greeted us, and offered a few data points about the landfill then said we should wait for Jesse, the manager. Sounds like a plan, I thought. Looking at Vineet, we walked out.
Fifteen minutes of downtime at the landfill seemed too precious to just waste. When’s the next time I’m coming to a landfill? So I flagged down a dump truck. “Hey man, can I ask you a few questions,” I said. Sure, what’s up, said the friendly driver. How much does it cost you to bring a truck loaded in? I don’t know man, he said. But it’s 78 USD / ton at the moment. That’s cheap I thought. And how much do you bring? Between 4 and 20. Trucks or tones, I was confused? Tones he explained, and it depends on the day. How many trucks come through? 460, about. A week? I wondered. No, each day, he said. “I sometimes come in 3 times a day.” If he does between 4 and 20 tonnes a run, that’s 14 tonnes on average. Take 460 trucks x14 = 6440 x 78 = 502320.
Half a million USD in revenu a day! That’s nearly 130 million USD a year these guys rake in.
Jesse arrived. I flagged him down. Hey, have a moment. Your engineer said we should talk. Sure, what’s up guys. Ughm, we’re from Europe. A tech company. We do waste detection and we are building the world’s largest database on household waste. We want to know how a landfill works. I thought no way, he’s gonna talk to us.
Sure, guys, let’s talk, he said after a brief pause. So we did, and we learned a lot, and not all of it was bad. Not at all. They are quite thorough in how they deal with waste. The landfill is layered; with bedrock first, then a bed of clay, then comes waste, clay again, waste, and again clay on the top. A plastic film which seals the whole thing up is fitted before the dirt comes. To prevent leaks of gunk into the groundwater, and poisonous gasses into the atmosphere. But the conditions of the layering makes the environment inert, which means all this waste is just sitting there. It’s being preserved in its current state, not decomposing whatsoever. A time capsule of sorts. Except a very troublesome one.
We talked about regulations. From restrictions placed on them on how high they can go in pilling waste. I recall that between 80 and 120 ft is the ceiling. To how they are expected to care for the landfill after it’s full and they are forced to close it. They top it all off with soil and plant grass and trees on it. Looks fine, but it’s not safe. There’s always gas escaping, which they claim they are capturing successfully. But it’s not fit for housing or regular human use. A forever dead zone of sorts.
The methane is captured and processed. In fact this particular facility has a power plant onsite, which burns the methane gas to produce electricity, enough to power between 5000–7000 homes 24/7. Emissions? Who’s counting?
This landfill has 1.5 to 2 years of life left, at which point it will be shut. What happens then? Is the city of Austin going to issue another permit for a new landfill, or ship its waste somewhere else? The City of Austin has recently signed the global zero waste city initiative. But how do they intend to get there? We talked with the City reps about Binit and how our technology helps reduce waste by improving recycling, diverting recyclables out of trash. But I don’t know that it even matters anymore (read on). Not much is happening in Austin to suggest that waste decline is in the cards. Quite the opposite. So technology that promotes accountability is a decent bet.
And this brings me to the holy shit moment of today. As we were being shown how the million dollar waste compactors and waste spreaders move the dumped waste across a designated surface area, readying it to be buried with clay, I saw a blue Austin Recycling truck pull up. The latch opened. Out poured cardboard and paper. WHAT!?? My brain exploded.
Am I seeing what I think I’m seeing? I asked our hosts. Yap. It’s the fucking local recycling center. They do it constantly, sending their overflow to us under the label “contaminated” recycling, too dirty to be processed at their facility. That’s bullshit I said. This stuff is totally legit. It’s paper and cardboard. It was clean, even I could tell it was from the car. What’s going on here? Look he said, it’s the market. If the price isn’t right they send it to us. They are in business to make money. And so are we. If they don’t have buyers lined up for the recycled materials, they reject it, under the pretense of polluted batches which can’t be recycled, and the City of Austin has to send it to us. And they pay us landfill fees. We’re cheaper than sending it all over the country looking for a buyer. For us it is all the same, paper, plastic, whatever. We make our fees. But it’s wrong, he said. It’s completely immoral. At least this dude has a conscience, I thought. Could be worse. And that’s why people don’t give a shit, he continued, to do the right thing. Because they know that it’s all a game of supply and demand. Price is king. And saving the environment a farce.
I was speechless.
We released a cheeky slogan ahead of last year’s Slush Conference which says “Recycling is Bullshit.” Data on this is out, and I felt comfortable that it stacked up and we were correct to say it. It’s not that recycling as an idea is bullshit. But this: dumping recyclables into the landfill is utter bullshit. I saw it with my own eyes; Vineet, my witness to the act. The way our system handles recycling is criminal. In fact, it’s totally counterproductive. People’s time and effort, separating waste daily because they want to do the right thing, is in the end condemned to a landfill. Apathy is already seeping in. And many of us don’t care to recycle anymore, which is why all the ‘do the right thing campaigns, put your plastics in the yellow bin, your cardboard in the blue and your metals in the green, don’t work; why Americans throw 76% of their recyclables into the trash.
Who can blame them? The system is broken. And urgent attention is needed from everyone involved to restore not only the function but also faith back into recycling. But I am growing increasingly skeptical that human good will or can fix this. I am more and more convinced that only with massive technological innovation, robots and data, developed and built to go after us to correct human error, is the only way out of the global waste crisis.
In the meantime enjoy the view, for indeed, it’s one of a kind.
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