In the Future, Your Recycling Will Be Monitored and Dumpsters Will Be Trashed

Chris Martin is busting open garbage bags in a Georgetown lot—three days' worth of accumulated waste from two downtown office buildings. He won't say which buildings they are. That's because (a) the tenants are mostly environmental advocacy groups, and (b) the results of this "garbage audit" are not going to be pretty.

Martin and his crew dump the contents on the ground, forming heaps of banana peels, coffee cups, energy-bar wrappers, McDonald's packaging, plastic bags, water bottles, bunched-up paper, and other by-products of office life. They sort through it all with rakes and hands, separating out the recyclables from the true trash—that is, doing what the tenants should have done in the first place.

A half-hour or so into the exam, a crew member tears open a pair of bags piled high with recyclable paper, and a ripple of excitement runs through the group. They're like cops who've just found the rock of cocaine they knew was hiding somewhere.

"See, this is classic," says Martin, gleefully peering over the bags through his goggles. (Gardening gloves, shorts, and a neon yellow-green vest complete his uniform.) He retrieves the topmost document on the pile—a report on "sustainable-housing" trends—and is almost giddy at the irony: The greens failed to recycle a report on going green. It's not just hypocritical, "it's against the law," he notes.

He tosses the report into a recycling cart where, eventually, 433 pounds of improperly thrown-out material accumulates. Food scraps that could have been composted add another 55 pounds. He'll deliver these stats to the buildings' tenants, who've enlisted Martin's trash-hauling and street-cleaning company, CleanScapes, to assess their performance.

If Martin is allowed to implement what he calls "my best idea, my get-people-riled-up thing," we could all soon be subject to a kind of garbage audit, too. He wants to bring the equivalent of the red-light camera to your front curb. Just as the traffic camera captures you running through a stoplight, CleanScapes' incriminating photos would catch you improperly disposing of a milk carton. (It belongs in the recycling bin.)

"We could do it the nice way," he says, meaning his company would e-mail you pictures of your detritus, along with helpful information about separating out recyclables. Or, he says, CleanScapes could send the pictures on to municipal inspectors, and "the city could enforce its own laws." (While the city has sent warning letters, no fines have ever been issued, according to Seattle Public Utilities.)

Getting Seattle to clean up its trash act is something of an obsession for Martin. To him, waste disposal isn't just about where and how we haul our refuse; it's a form of social engineering. He started his company 10 years ago with a campaign to rid Pioneer Square of Dumpsters—a solution, he said, to the problems of filth and filthy behavior among alley denizens. "I know it sounds far-fetched, but I'm convinced that [Dumpsters] hide a lot of problems," he says. He's since expanded his niche business to other Seattle neighborhoods and even down the West Coast, serving restaurants and other waste-heavy commercial customers with Dumpster-free rubbish removal and other services.

Now Martin stands poised to have an even bigger influence on Seattle's future. He's made an improbable bid for a piece of the citywide garbage-collection contract. And last month he improbably learned he was a finalist.

Garbage pickup is the biggest contract the city has, apart from electricity, and Seattle has long divided it up among the industry's biggest players, most recently Texas-based Waste Management and Arizona-based Allied Waste Industries. Together they had $20 billion in 2006 revenue. But last month, when Seattle Public Utilities named finalists for the contract, there was a third company on the list: CleanScapes, which had all of $6 million in revenue last year.

If Martin is awarded a piece of the municipal business on Oct. 23, CleanScapes would become one of the first "boutique" garbage haulers to win such a contract in a major urban center.

CleanScapes is tapping into the new garbage morality that arose with the recycling age and has only gotten more intense. To those who follow the creed, there's a right and a wrong way to treat your trash, and Martin is quick to tell you which is which. Asked during the garbage audit about the proper way to handle plastic baggies, he replies, "You should bloody well use wax-paper baggies." (Who knew there was such a thing? Apparently, they can be thrown in the compost bin.)

For someone like this, it's a good time to enter the garbage business. The Seattle City Council recently passed a so-called "Zero Waste" policy, which sets new targets for reducing the amount of Seattle trash—438,000 tons of it last year—that we send off by train to an Oregon landfill. A third of this landfilled material could be composted, according to a recent SPU report. But right now, only 60 percent of single-family homes in the city even have a yard bin, let alone use it.

Under the new garbage contract, which starts April 1, 2009, single-family homeowners will be required to at least have the bin, and will be encouraged to put all their food scraps (except meat and dairy) in it. The city's even considering a trade, whereby garbage pickup would be reduced to every other week, and compost pickup would be weekly. That could help alleviate health department concerns that currently keep meat and dairy out of the compost mix. The city wants to get more restaurants and other food businesses signed up for composting as well—only 10 percent currently are—and to design a compost system for apartment buildings.