Where your Seattle trash ends up

Editor's note: The Seattle P-I recently followed a can of garbage from a home in the Phinney Ridge neighborhood to its final resting place in Oregon.

- Trash came at right time for Arlington
- Photo gallery: Follow the trash

Thomas Masaniai, a Seattle garbage collector, starts his rounds each morning around 6:30. It's around 3 p.m. Wednesday when he reaches Sharon Strauss' house in Phinney Ridge, near the end of that day's route.

Moving her plastic garbage can from curb to truck requires a sort of muscle-man ballet, and Masaniai, 32, moves fast. Jumping out of his stopped truck, he hustles to the curb, pulls the cover off Strauss' bin, and quickly checks that it's not overloaded with recyclables.

"If I open it up and all I see is newspaper, I am going to tag it and leave it," he says. The Strauss bin is good: two full bags of garbage, no glass bottles, cardboard or newspapers.

		Andy Rogers / P-I
	Near the end of Thomas Masaniai's day, he prepares to empty a garbage can from the 600 block of Northwest 76th Street. This is the first of many stops for one household's weekly load.

In a graceful move, Masaniai hoists it to the truck, dumps it into the front scoop, pivots, returns the bin to the curb and replaces the cover. Then he moves on to the next house.

Strauss said she puts out one can of garbage each week for three people. She recycles, and even takes her plastic grocery bags back to the store.

But Strauss doesn't give much thought about what happens to her garbage after it leaves the curb.

"I don't quite know where it goes," she says.

The Strauss family trash is now on its first leg of a journey to its final resting place in Oregon. It will be shoved in a tightly sealed container -- number 980377 -- put on a flat-bed truck, and about three days after Strauss put her garbage on the curb, it will be buried in a landfill in Arlington, Ore.

Six times a week, a train, one mile long, with about 100 cars loaded with garbage, leaves Seattle and chugs to the sprawling Oregon landfill.

The journey begins

A weary Masaniai has finished his route by late afternoon. "It gets pretty heavy after a couple of hundred houses," he says.

Turning the rumbling truck toward the city-operated North Recycling and Disposal station, he pulls onto the scale where the truck weighs in at 42,380 pounds -- including the two bags from the Strauss home.

The transfer station, on North 34th Street between the Wallingford and Fremont neighborhoods, looks like an empty Costco, a concrete warehouse with the maceration pit -- a deep hole half the size of the building, where garbage trucks roll up and dump their loads. Anyone in the city can bring junk here and pay a fee to dump their trash.

Jeff Neuner, a manager for Seattle Public Utilities, said the station was built in 1966, and expanded in the 1970s for recycling. It has reached capacity again.

Masaniai backs his garbage truck up to the edge and tips the "box" on the back. Garbage cascades out quickly -- old food, plastic bottles, crumpled food cartons, grocery store bags and greasy pizza boxes.

Among the garbage is a metal box from a Homer Simpson chess set. An employee spies it, pulls it from the waterfall of garbage before it hits the pit, gives it an amused look and sets the oddity aside for recycling.

A cloud of dust rises from the dumped garbage, then settles quickly under a fine spray from pipes along the ceiling. A yellow bulldozer pushes a mountain of garbage the size of a Mini Cooper through a rectangular hole in the wall, a tunnel that leads to the compactor.

Outside, Dan Williams stands in a narrow corridor with the wall of the transfer station at his back, and a panel of knobs and buttons in front of him.

Over the years, he has turned his concrete workspace into a trash museum, a collection of treasures including a birdhouse and wind chimes he saved from the pit. Others, he has embellished with a decidedly dark sense of humor -- a doll with piercings, some stuffed rats, a gorilla and even a shrunken head. Above it all, a mirrored ball befitting a ballroom sparkles.

It's Williams' job to make sure the garbage is compacted into a rectangular shipping container -- the kind you see on almost every train chugging through the city.

He twists some controls and the garbage is compacted into a 25-ton cube, which squeaks as it is squeezed into the container. He fills about 22 containers each day.

The Strauss family's garbage, along with the rest, is shoved into a green container -- number 980377. It moves to a holding area in the lot until a flatbed truck picks it up the next morning.

Truck driver Keith Wiltse, with Seattle Public Utilities, pulls his shiny blue semi into the transfer station the next morning and positions the long flat bed under the green container until it clacks into place.

Wiltse trucks the garbage-filled container through the city, across the Alaskan Way Viaduct and to the Argo rail yard at Fourth Avenue South and South Dawson Street in South Seattle.

The truck pulls into the rail yard, rolls past nearly 100 containers, stacked two-high on rail cars. In a quick move, the container stuffed with the compacted mess is moved gently on top of a flat rail car.

An empty container replaces it on Wiltse's truck. And he heads back to the transfer station.

		Andy Rogers / P-I
	A train carrying 100 cars filled with garbage, including container 980377, heads south under the Boeing Access Road overpass in South Seattle, destined for Arlington, Ore.

The Union Pacific train departs Seattle every day about 3:30 p.m., except Saturday.

The trip from Seattle to Arlington, Ore., is about 260 miles with a stop of up to eight hours in Portland to change crews. Then the train continues on early the next morning to finish the trip at the Columbia Ridge Landfill and Recycling Center, owned by Waste Management, and located in the hills, 11 miles outside of Arlington.

8,500 tons a day

It doesn't rain much in Arlington, which is part of Gilliam County (residents say Gill-um), just about 9 inches a year, compared with 36 inches annually in Seattle. The scene is Eastern Oregon desert, with softly rolling hills covered with toasted brown grass. The dryness is cut by the Columbia River snaking through the county. A blustery wind blows steadily, and hills are fringed with spinning windmills generating power.

Video of where the trash goes

The railroad tracks are sandwiched between the river and the city. Every afternoon the trash train clatters through town on its way to the landfill. It passes just a few truck-lengths from the parking lot of the Village Inn restaurant.

At the rail yard, trucks come and go in a stream, picking up containers one at a time and taking each to the edge of the landfill to dump.

The landfill is divided into a series of cells, each about 14 acres, and carefully engineered -- lined with layers of gravel, fabric and plastic to prevent the decaying garbage from leaching into the groundwater. A monitoring system checks constantly for leaks.

When a cell is completely filled, it is capped with 4 feet of soil, then seeded with natural grasses. The area then could be reused for grazing, said Will Spears, site manager at the landfill for Waste Management. Other cities have turned their covered landfills into golf courses.

Eventually, about 700 acres will be filled with buried, encapsulated garbage.

The truck pulls to the edge of a deep pit, tilting the container at a steep angle. With a groan, the Strauss family's garbage falls in along with a torrent of other bags.

About 8,500 tons will be dumped here by the end of the day -- most of it from Seattle, some from Portland and a bit from Gilliam County.

Four or five bulldozers roll around the pile, moving the messy mountain. They pack and smooth it evenly across the vast cell. It blends into gray porridge, speckled here and there with color from a bright blue tarp, or a piece of green upholstery.

The sour stomach-churning stench, the kind that comes up from a backyard garbage can at the end of a summer week, mixes with the blowing dust and whips across the landfill.

"The plastic grocery bags are enemy No. 1," Spears said. "They just fly. We spend a lot of time picking them up."

They catch in the wind and blow around like kites.

Spears pays close attention to garbage. He sees trends. The biggest change recently is the huge number of plastic water bottles and drink packages.

"The biodegradables rot over time, and produces the methane. The drink bottles just stay there," Spears said.

The crews work from 6 a.m. until 3 p.m., every day except Christmas and New Year's.

"We need to send an empty train out of here every night. It keeps coming, it doesn't stop."