John Sullivan on his route in Brooklyn.   (Photo: Michael Schmelling)

At eight o’clock, truck CN191 turned east onto my block. “We’ll get ten tons today,” predicted Sullivan. We moved up the street, about three brownstones at a time, looking for breaks between parked cars. This type of collection is called “house to house.” In Manhattan, where high-rises are the norm, san men do “flats,” and a truck can pack out after clearing just one or two big buildings.

My quest to learn what happened to my garbage was partly anthropological: Like fossils, ancient kitchen middens, and Clovis points hewn by early man, the stuff we reject today reveals a great deal about human beings and how we live. My quest was also grounded in a growing sense of environmental consternation: Where was all this stuff going, and what impact did it have once it got there? As I would soon learn, my dinner scraps, in the anaerobic confines of a landfill, produced methane, a potent greenhouse gas. My spent batteries leaked heavy metals into groundwater. Burned in an incinerator, busted PVC toys and empty shampoo bottles would exhale noxious fumes, including dioxins and furans. This stuff didn’t go away: It was increasingly coming back to bite us—in our food, water, air, and soil.

At last, CN191 parked in front of my building: a brownstone divided into three apartments that shelter six adults, three children, two dogs, two cats, and one fish. I was nervous. Had we put the barrels—two for putrescible waste, two for recyclable containers, and one for paper—in a convenient place? Were the lids off? They were supposed to be on, but they were a pain and the san men didn’t like them. I wondered if my trash was too heavy or too smelly or contained anything identifiably mine. Would Sullivan make some crack about the stained napkins and place mats I was tossing? Would Murphy think it coldhearted to throw out a child’s artwork?

I suspected that many people feel guilty about the volume of their trash. I certainly did. There was stuff in my barrel for which I’d failed to find further use. When I’d brought this stuff into the house—a new T-shirt, healthful food, a really fun toy—it was live weight, something I was proud to have selected and purchased with my hard-earned money. Now the contents of the bag were dead weight, headed for burial. No wonder we prefer garbage bags that are opaque.

Sullivan rolled one plastic bin to the street, and Murphy grabbed the other. They looked heavy—I knew they were about three-quarters full—but they hoisted them to the hopper’s edge without apparent effort. A small plastic grocery sack puffed with refuse, possibly mine, tumbled into the street. My heart stopped. Murphy swooped down upon it, tossing the tiny package into the hopper with a flick of his gloved hand. It was over. Nothing untoward had happened. Nobody had said a word.

Was I being neurotic? What, after all, could Sullivan and Murphy say about me, based on an average week’s trash? That I wasted food, made unhealthy snack choices, bought new socks, or had a cold? I knew, after just one day on the job, that san men constantly make judgments about individuals. They determine residents’ wealth or poverty by the artifacts they leave behind. They appraise real estate by the height of a discarded Christmas tree, measure education level by the newspapers and magazines stacked on the curb. Glancing at your flotsam and jetsam, they know who has broken up, who has recently given birth, who is cross-dressing.

When sixties radical A. J. Weberman sorted through Bob Dylan’s garbage, snatched from outside his Greenwich Village brownstone, he found nothing that helped him interpret his hero’s cryptic lyrics. Unhappy about this invasion of privacy, Dylan chased Weberman through the street, smushed his head to the pavement, and eventually sued him. Weberman went on to found the National Institute of Garbology, and when he tired of Dylan’s trash, he dove into Neil Simon’s (he found bagel scraps, lox, whitefish, and an infestation of ants); Gloria Vanderbilt’s (a Valium bottle); Tony Perkins’s (a tiny amount of marijuana); Norman Mailer’s (betting slips); and the antiwar activist Bella Abzug’s (proof of investments in arms companies).

At a large apartment building on the corner of Eighth Avenue, Sullivan parked the truck at an angle to the curb. The building’s super had heaped long black garbage bags—each a 120-pound sausage—into a four-foot-high mound. It took the team less than two minutes, and a few cranks of the packing blade, to transfer the mound from the street to their truck and crush it together. When they were done, one bag remained on the sidewalk, its contents gushing through a long tear. “Gotta watch for rats when it’s like that,” Murphy said. “Once a rat ran across my back,” Sullivan said. “Whaddaya gonna do?” Maggots, known in the biz as “disco rice,” were something else. On monsoon days, they floated in garbage pails half full of rainwater. “I won’t empty those,” Sullivan said.