Conscious Choice: Garbage In, Art Out

March 2008

Garbage In, Art Out

Three eco-mavericks are changing the way we make, stash and talk trash

by Amelia Glynn

We all know people — friends, co-workers, neighbors — who have embarked on some reductionist experiment or another. From the members of San Francisco’s Compact Collective, to the devout followers of Rev. Billy’s Church of Stop Shopping, to your ex who pledged to forego petroleum products or plastic grocery bags for a month, these determined downsizers were motivated by the dawning realization that, on a rapidly warming planet, there is no “away” to throw things to.

I talked with three eco-mavericks who, in stumbling toward a better way of living, unexpectedly found themselves at the forefront of a growing cultural movement — one that at its most extreme is anti-consumerist and at its most mild, pro-recycling. A caterer-turned-overnight-media-hero, an ex-lawyer photographer and a modern-day muckraker each willingly dirtied their hands and made trash (or more accurately, the examination of our society’s consumptive behavior) a permanent part of their lives. And without preachy prose, judging looks or finger wagging, their somewhat extreme tactics have managed to get many of us more mild-mannered types talking and thinking about our own cycle of consumption.

The Trashman Cometh

Contrary to what was reported in the media blitz of late 2007, Ari Defel’s trash does not reside in his living room. The truth is, he had all 365-day’s worth neatly organized in his kitchen closet until the reporters came knocking on his door — a whole bunch of them — asking to see his bounty. Derfel, a caterer by trade and an environmentalist and yogi by philosophy, decided to save his trash for a full year. He mentioned it to a few friends who mentioned it to a few more, and then — KABOOM — the press, the talk show circuit and what at times felt like the entire Internet were looking at him.

The original idea — “If I had to live with my trash, would it change the way I live?” — was hatched at a dinner party with friends who planned to tough out the experiment together. After the first week, the others bailed, but Derfel stuck with it as a kind of daily meditation. From December 4, 2006 to December 4, 2007, Derfel composted his organic matter and meticulously saved, rinsed and sorted his trash to see what it would amount to — and how it made him feel. This included all his garbage from vacations and eating out. “Some people ask me, well, what about toilet paper?” he says, pausing for effect. “I may be weird, but I’m not crazy.”

During the experiment, Derfel says he began to physically “feel” every purchase. His hand would fall on a bottle of juice, and the whole story of how it got there would come to life: the glass container manufactured somewhere faraway, shipped somewhere else faraway for bottling, then trucked to the store for him to buy and drink in less than five minutes, only to toss in the recycling bin to be schlepped back to a plant in China. “It’s the 50,000-mile juice when I could have just bought Asian pears at the local farmer’s market and juiced them at home,” he says.

After being outed by the press, everyone started looking to Derfel for answers, but he’s careful to set them straight: “I’m not a trash epidemiologist,” he says. It’s not uncommon for people to exclaim how incredible it is (it being his pile of trash), but he just laughs. “Painting the Sistine Chapel is incredible. I just saved my garbage for a year.”

Why does Derfel think his experiment ignited the curiosity of so many? “Because I’m not the dirty old man with a bunch of cats,” he answers dryly. “Granted, I live in Berkeley, so I must be a freak, but I’m not ugly, or stupid.” And it’s true… with dark wavy hair and glasses that lend him a bookish air, the 35-year-old is articulate and mediagenic. He also believes in magic — or in this case, the magic of good press. “This social experiment has been an interesting and creative way to get my voice out there,” he says.

Now Derfel’s working on drawing the connection between “guy-who-saves-trash-for-a-year” and the concept of mindful living. Recently, he enlisted local Bay Area artists Michael Christian and Suzy Cornfield to help create art with the saved trash, and this year he hopes to recruit between 10 and 100 people from around the world to join him in what he calls a kind of Buddhist Olympics (where the person who makes the least amount of trash wins).

“Consciousness is not a fad,” he says. “More people are wanting to feel connected to the planet.” Stay connected to Derfel and his ongoing trash project at saveyourtrash.com.

Double-Oh-Seven at the Dump

Paul Seattle-based photographer Chris Jordan’s large-scale color portraits of American consumption began as a singular quest for aesthetic beauty. In early 2003, while chasing the cosmic color theory, a complex color palate that occurs in nature by chance (often amidst the ugly and mundane), he shot a photo of a pile of trash in one of Seattle’s garbage dumps. “It fit perfectly into my color theory and was one of the coolest I had done,” says Jordan, who hung the 50-inch wide print on the wall of his studio. This image was to become the first of a series called “Intolerable Beauty,” exploring the unexpected moments of grace in Seattle’s foulest haunts.

At the time, Jordan was practicing insurance law and photography was his superficial means of escaping a career he loathed. But this image wasn’t just another pretty picture. When friends and other artists saw the new print it inevitably spurred conversations about consumerism — and specifically their own contributions to the Seattle-based trash heap the work depicted. They would point to an aluminum Altoids container or orange juice carton and wonder if it was theirs. Jordan found this “misinterpretation” of his work annoying. “That’s not what it’s about,” he would argue.

“I was asleep to mass culture and the role of the individual,” Jordan admits. For the entire 10 years he worked as a lawyer, he didn’t vote in a single election. “I lived in some pretty deep denial about what was going on around me and my own role in it,” he confides. He justified buying things like rosewood speaker cabinets by convincing himself that it would make no difference if he alone changed his behavior. He assigned responsibility to “a bunch of good ass-kickers in the Sierra Club” to fix things, and washed his hands. “I didn’t realize the cost to myself,” he says.

The more time he spent around garbage and the more he tuned in to people’s reactions to his photographs, the more his own attitudes began to shift. He realized he could honor his aesthetic and also connect with the contemporary world on the issue of consumption. That’s when he started sneaking into landfills and dumps, like “a spy in my own country,” and his art took on an intensity and excitement that he hadn’t experienced before. “All I had ever known about consumption up until that point was about the nice stuff you buy,” he says. Jordan decided that people needed to see the underbelly — the ugly machine behind our consumerist nature — and he was just the guy to show them.

His newest collection of photographs “Running the Numbers” pushes the boundaries of his previous work by depicting the actual number of cups, cigarettes, batteries, plastic bottles and cell phones we consume in a finite period of time. It shows the scale of our mass consumption on both an abstract and representational plane.

For Jordan, consumerism remains a complex issue. He struggles with the hypocrisy he witnesses at sustainability conferences — where inspiring discussions about solutions to environmental challenges occur, but also where guests receive free Nokia cell phones, personal limo service and extravagant dinners complete with imported wine from Australia. “The disconnect can be incredibly frightening and overwhelming,” he says. “It’s like now we know we’re alcoholics but we’re not stopping the drink.”

Jordan is the first to admit that he’s not doing everything he could. He buys much of his clothing at Goodwill, eats a vegetarian diet and recycles, but it often feels “like a bunch of gestures.” “Every time I upgrade to a new computer or fly on jets, I am part of the problem,” he says. “I am in no position to finger wag, but I also don’t want to be silent.” And perhaps it is his own imperfections that make his message — couched in the beauty of photography — so potent.

The Garbage Groupie

Paul What began as a foray into a book about garbage has taken on a life of its own. While researching and writing Garbage Land (Little, Brown and Company, 2005), author Elizabeth Royte saved and weighed her yogurt cups, plastic wrappers and milk cartons on a daily basis and then followed them to see where they ended up. In the process, she got intimately acquainted with waste treatment facilities, landfills and compost heaps, and conversed with numerous san-men, haulers, bureaucrats, tight-lipped landfill operators and hardcore environmentalists. By unveiling the secret life of our trash she also uncovered some interesting (albeit stomach-churning) trash lingo: “Coney Island whitefish” (used condoms), “disco rice” (maggots), and perhaps the greatest environmental evil of all, “Satan’s resin” (plastic).

Trash isn’t inherently sexy, but changing our relationship to it can be, believes Royte, noting the increased popularity of reusable bags and bottles and our growing concern over our carbon footprint. As she discovered, there’s a lot of human interest in garbage issues. “People always want to know the most astonishing thing or the grossest thing I discovered,” she says.

Not surprisingly, having this kind of information has made her think about everything that enters her life. Living in a small brownstone apartment on a journalist’s salary naturally limited her consumption, so she found it easy to beat the national average of 4.5 pounds of trash a day, including recyclables. But she was compelled to make some lifestyle changes. For one, she stopped buying things in single-serving sizes (no matter how much her daughter may beg for them). And after learning about the tremendous expense associated with transporting food waste to landfills, and the methane gas it produces once buried there, Royte started composting — no small feat in New York City, where there’s no formal program or curbside pick-up. She worked out a deal with her downstairs neighbor to compost in the garden and, well, so far so good.

Royte admits that while she knows her personal contributions to recycling, reuse and composting aren’t going to change the world, being informed and urging the city to consider solutions to help curb and recycle commercial garbage can.

“We are clearly thinking more about where what we buy comes from, and we can’t consider downstream impacts without looking upstream as well,” she continues. Her newest book Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought, available in mid-May, explores the horrors of our recent “health” obsession with plastic-encased water. Royte takes comfort in witnessing celebrities who once endorsed Evian and Perrier toting recycled designer bags and extolling the virtues of water filters. For Royte’s tips on what we can do to temper our consumption, visit booknoise.net/garbageland/whattodo.html

Since writing this piece, San Francisco freelancer Amelia Glynn has sworn off to-go cups for good.

Recommend this page to a friend

Top Ten pages recommended to friends: