The Monster Under the Sink

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This is 99% Invisible.

I'm Roman Mars.

If you ever find yourself driving around the Midwest looking for a historic corn mill or a German culture festival or a chair factory, there's a chance you might end up in the small town of Jasper, Indiana.

Good morning.

Driving through what looks to be more or less downtown Jasper, heading over to my first interview.

That's reporter Jasper Davidoff reporting from Jasper, Indiana, which admittedly is a little confusing.

And you're James?

Well, Jasper.

I was going to say, with a name like Jasper, you had to come to Jasper.

Yeah, well, exactly.

I mean, I'm excited to be here.

I was in Jasper the Place this past fall because I wanted to talk with a guy named Jim Tin.

My name is Jim Tin.

With my wife, Pat, Jasper is our home.

I was born here.

Jim's dad, Herb Tin, was the mayor of Jasper back in the 1940s and 50s.

And when Jim was about seven years old, the town did something kind of radical.

Something that no other city had done before.

They made garbage illegal.

As of August 1st, 1950, they drew a bright line and said if you were in the city, they would no longer collect any garbage.

Although the city was still collecting stuff like plastics, soup cans, a lot of what you might recycle today, it was no longer picking up organic waste or what the city called garbage.

That's stuff like yard trimmings or the yucky things that people typically throw out, like chicken bones, rotten fruit, eggshells.

And this Sanitation Vanishing Act was made possible by a relatively new appliance, one that would soon make its way into kitchens across across the country.

The garbage disposer.

The garbage disposer is that little grinding machine at the bottom of a lot of kitchen sinks.

Most people call it the disposal with an AL or the incincorator or even the garbureator, but to keep things simple and avoid brand names, we're going to use the generic disposer with an ER.

I know it sounds a little weird.

If you live in the United States, you either have a garbage disposer in your sink, or you at least have a friend or a relative with one in theirs.

According to the 2013 American Housing Survey, nearly half of all households have a disposer.

In other countries, these machines aren't nearly as common.

And until recently, the most I ever really thought about a disposer was as a kid, when my mom got mad at me for throwing cherry pits down ours.

But over the last couple months, I've become a little obsessed with the monster under our sinks and how despite the awful sounds it makes, the disposer quietly managed to become a staple of the American kitchen and changed the way we think about our food waste.

The story of the garbage disposer starts long before Jasper Indiana's experiment.

It even starts, you could say, before the invention of garbage.

It used to be that People didn't have much garbage.

They didn't create much garbage.

If something broke, you would take it back to the person who made it to get it fixed.

Or there would be people who specialized in repairs who would fix things.

Susan Strasser is a historian who studies consumerism, domesticity, and yes, garbage.

She says that up until the late 1800s, people were just much less wasteful.

People ate food scraps.

If you read books about how to run your household, people

are advised to, when they clear the table, save food.

And the expectation was that good food would be eaten by people.

Food scraps weren't thought of as a burden, but as an opportunity, a way to save for another meal or to repurpose into candles and soap.

The idea of wasting food was really anathema to most people.

Food that wasn't quite good enough for the people could be fed to animals.

There were pets, dogs, and cats.

But also, many, many people kept chickens even in urban and suburban areas, and chickens will eat pretty much anything and give you eggs in return.

But at the turn of the century, the commercialization of food made more of it available at a cheaper price, and that abundance made it easier for people to throw out their scraps.

Around the same time, lots of people were moving from the countryside into U.S.

cities.

And all that food waste was literally piling up on the street, creating not only a smelly problem, but a public health one.

Back then, many still believed that diseases like cholera were spreading through noxious odors, including those emanating from piles of garbage.

Garbage being a pretty technical term at the time that really did refer to perishable waste as opposed to rubbish that might have been less perishable products that were being thrown away.

Anna Zeta is a food historian at Virginia Tech.

She says that unlike the catch-all catch-all definition garbage has today, it used to refer specifically to organic waste, which, in case you haven't already caught on, is how I'm going to keep using garbage for the rest of this story.

Around the country, there wasn't much of an appetite by federal and state governments to take on the growing garbage problem.

Instead, the job of waste collection fell to individual cities and towns.

And so municipal regulations began to be developed in quite scattershot ways, very piecemeal in different localities to try to address what was happening with this garbage.

Some municipalities started collection services to haul their waste to a dump.

Others demanded citizens split up their kitchen refuse from their other waste.

The discarded food would get sent to local farmers who used it as feed for their hogs.

But there too, a lot of problems for health emerged in that a lot of so-called uncooked garbage could carry various kinds of pathogens that caused widespread disease and in the pigs themselves, some of which was feared would carry over into any humans who were eating the meat that came from the pigs.

By the early 1920s, these haphazard systems of garbage collection were struggling to keep up with 20th century consumerism.

Cities and towns were burning garbage, even throwing it in their local river.

And so into this maelstrom of detritus stepped the engineers at the General Electric Company.

A few communities had started grinding up their garbage in these massive machines and washing it down into their local sewers.

GE took this totally new concept, mixing sewage with food waste, and tried to expand on it.

If you could use a large-scale grinder to get rid of the town's garbage, could you build small household ones to eliminate garbage at the source?

So in 1930, two GE representatives traveled to Schenectady, New York to visit a sanitary engineer named Morris Cohn.

He agreed to help GE conduct their research and even started experimenting in his own home, pulverizing food in a meat grinder and flushing the results down the toilet.

And before long, all that flushing yielded a result.

They called it the disposal.

And here's how coarse particles like corn cobs get the works inside a general electric disposal.

In almost less time than it takes to tell you about it, they'll be whittled down to corn kernel size or smaller and given a one-way ticket down down the drain.

By the late 30s, people started getting very excited about garbage disposers.

Scientific American predicted that the disposer would make the garbage can obsolete.

An article in House and Garden magazine introduced readers to new garbage tech like rubber plate scrapers and waxed garbage pail liners, but its highest praise was for the disposer.

You're not going to have rats.

You're not going to have the smelly stuff in your kitchen.

You're not going to have the problems that come with food waste anymore because you're going to wash it down the drain.

Even with all this hype, companies like GE still didn't have what they really wanted, a test site, a place to prove that the disposer wasn't just a benefit for an individual household, but a bona fide improvement for an entire community.

Jasper would soon change all that.

I would?

Sorry, I wasn't talking about you.

Here's what I meant.

Jasper, Indiana would soon change all that.

Dad was an original thinker.

He was a creative person and a good problem solver.

And he was very health conscious, very civic-minded.

That's Jim Tinn again.

His dad was the mayor of Jasper back in the 40s and 50s.

At the time, Jasper was struggling with a ton of public health problems.

Rats and flies were a common nuisance in town.

There was an outbreak of swine cholera in 1947, which traced back to the garbage farmers had fed the pigs.

And this was followed quickly by the polio epidemic, which at the time, locals felt might be related to the flies buzzing around open troughs of garbage.

And so one day, Mayor Tin was walking with his wife in nearby Evansville when he stumbled on a solution to the town's problems.

He saw a disposal

in the Sears Robot display window.

The sign in the window read, say goodbye to your garbage can.

And in that moment, Mayor Tin saw an opportunity to change everything.

A week later, the mayor bought his very own garbage disposer.

The appliance and the installation ran him about $125 or about $1,500 today.

And like the highly technical, sophisticated sanitary engineers that came before him, the mayor just started chucking things down his disposer to test the results.

We put a disposal in our house.

I believe it was in 48.

Dad felt we had to lead and show the way, and so we put one in just to be able to show people that it worked.

Mayor Tin liked what he saw and started putting together what would come to be known as the Jasper plan.

The mayor envisioned a Jasper where every home had a disposer, where the city helped residents buy a disposer, where the disposer solved Jasper's garbage problem once and for all.

No other city in the country had ever tried to systematically install disposers, partly because the household disposer was still relatively new and actually pretty expensive.

But also partly because nobody knew what would happen after this much food made its way down the drain.

You know, this is something that had to be worked out between the companies making garbage disposers and the municipal engineers.

And the reason was that the municipal engineers were not sure that the sewers could handle the products of the garbage disposer.

Sanitary engineers were often split.

Some towns were confident that their sewers could handle ground-up garbage, but engineers in older, denser areas like Philadelphia and Boston had reservations.

There was a fear that the disposer would clog pipes and lead to expensive repairs.

And so some places, including New York City, actually moved to ban these newfangled machines.

But Jasper was willing to try and prove them wrong.

The city council was confident their disposer plan would work because they were already planning to build a new wastewater treatment plant.

They could just amend those plans and upgrade Jasper's sewers to accommodate for all this new incoming garbage.

And civic leaders weren't the only ones backing the Jasper plan.

After the son of a local newspaper editor contracted polio, he began using the Du Bois County Herald to praise Jasper's garbage disposer idea.

He hailed it as, quote, a boon to city sanitation, the results of which would be, quote, the beginning of a great national movement.

While it may seem silly to us now to think that a garbage disposer might help eradicate polio, at the time people were understandably scared.

It wasn't yet common knowledge that the disease mainly spreads from person to person.

Nevertheless, the Jasper plan was a chance for the city to do something big, to become the only place in the country to put an end to garbage.

The city council voted unanimously to do it.

The city council, the mayor, and the head of the sanitation, they all volunteered to put disposals in their home.

And I can remember the day when Dad took me to the town square when a semi-truck pulled up and had a little over a thousand garbage disposals on it.

Here's the thing about the Jasper plan.

It was billed as an option for residents, but in practice, it was effectively a mandate.

The city was going to refuse to pick up any trash with organic waste in it and ban garbage cans altogether.

So people would more or less have to buy a disposer.

The city helped finance them and even got residents a discount, but each disposer still sold for $75 or close to $1,000 today.

Jim Tin recalls this being a slightly dangerous time to be the mayor's kid.

Once in a while coming home from school, you know, some kids would confront us and sometimes there was punches thrown or shoving here and there.

I suppose that came from the conversation at their dinner table.

You know, maybe perhaps on the cost,

perhaps on the fact that they were kind of being forced.

Still, by February 1950, enough people had opted in that the city was ready to execute the final piece of the plan, the garbage ban.

And with that, the Tin family became a media sensation.

Just about every magazine, every major newspaper came to our house.

Then Life magazine, Look Magazine were big magazines back then.

Posts,

they all came to photograph my mother and my sister, usually putting garbage down to dispose of.

One of them, GE, touted the durability of their disposal.

And to prove that, they would put a Coke bottle down there.

And this is when Coke bottles were were heavy glass Coke bottles.

Just quick PSA, don't ever do this, like ever.

And they'd put it down there and grind it up, grind it to show that the disposal was very durable and there was nothing you could do to harm it.

With the Jasper plan in effect, nearly 95% of residents had a garbage disposer installed.

And because of all the press coverage, Mayor 10 became a sort of oracle for government officials looking to solve their garbage problems.

Cities in Michigan and Illinois started hatching their own versions of a Jasper plan.

And eventually, some 60 communities tried to go garbage-free.

I remember dad getting letters, phone calls from around the world, other mayors wanting to know, how did you do it?

Does it work?

All of that.

And that's the question a lot of people were asking.

Public health officials, newspapers.

Everyone wanted to know what happened in the town that tried to make garbage disappear.

After the break, the results of the Jasper Plan and what garbage disposers do for us today.

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The question of whether the Jasper plan worked depends on who you ask.

And that's because different people had different ideas of success.

So, for example, if you ask the folks over at General Electric, they definitely thought the plan worked.

You won't find many flies buzzing around Jasper, Indiana.

Jasper got rid of just about two-thirds of its flies.

Because Jasper got rid of just about all of its garbage.

What a fly needs to live on.

This is part of a larger advertising blitz GE undertook in 1970 to mark Jasper's 20th anniversary going garbage-free.

They ran ads about the town in Time, Newsweek, and The New Yorker that fall.

For 20 years now, General Electric has been grinding up Jasper's garbage and starving out Jasper's flies.

Men helping man.

General Electric.

The city itself, however, wasn't quite as confident as GE on the fly issue.

Herb Tin, who was by then the former mayor, told a New York Times reporter in 1974, let's get it straight right now.

There are flies in Jasper.

There were still flies.

You know, just not as many.

But that's the thing that kind of caught on in the press.

No flies in the city of Jasper.

But the fly issue was mostly a proxy for a much more ambitious goal of the Jasper Plan, to help stamp out diseases like polio and cholera.

And you can probably guess the garbage disposer didn't do that either.

What really helped keep Jasper's residents safe from getting sick were things like the polio vaccine and the construction of its wastewater treatment plant.

Here's Ana Zeta again.

You know, disease and poor health comes from so many factors that are beyond simply open garbage bins and alleyways that it's hard to imagine how the disposal could have been a decisive factor.

And so I do think some of these larger campaigns, like the one in Jasper, built on and profited from concerns like the polio epidemic and these individual fears that consumers had about how rising levels of waste might contribute to them getting sick or their family members getting sick.

In Jasper and around the country, the garbage disposer worked its way into post-war housing under the guise of public health and the elimination of garbage.

But even if companies like GE couldn't deliver on those promises, they were able to keep selling people on something else.

It's convenience.

When I walked through the Du Bois County Museum with Arthur Nordhoff, the local historian, that simplicity is exactly what he remembered.

So this says, this ad says, ask the teenagers, how did they work out?

Ask the teenagers who never had to take out the garbage.

So was that you?

Yeah, sure, because I wouldn't have to take it out.

And I lived in a regular house down by the hospital.

And so once a week, I'd have to take the garbage out to the garbage pail.

But not anymore.

Not anymore.

Not anymore.

These days, companies selling garbage disposers emphasize something else too, that the appliance doesn't only make cleaning up easier, but it's actually a sustainable solution for the problem of kitchen waste.

Yeah, I think that people have been led to believe that sending your food waste down the drain is beneficial and is much better than landfilling it.

And sadly, the truth is that it's not.

Claudia Fabiano works on the sustainable management of food at the EPA.

Last October, her team put out a report that firmly places the agency in the anti-disposer camp.

Sending food down the drain, it ranks equally with landfilling and incineration of food.

And those are really to be avoided if you can.

There are a couple reasons why the EPA would love if you didn't scrape your dinner plate into your sink.

But what it really boils down to is that a lot of energy is wasted when food goes through the wastewater system.

And all that ground up food emits a ton of methane.

In addition to that methane being released in the sewers, sending food down the drain also introduces more fats, oils, and greases to the sewer systems, which can cause blockages and increase maintenance costs.

And food waste in the sewer system can also cause pipe corrosion.

To date, there's still a real fear about the effects of garbage disposers.

Some countries have banned them and others try to discourage their use.

Even in New York City, which repealed its ban in the 1990s, you still almost never come across a disposer.

While the city's sanitary engineers say that the sewers could handle the ground-up waste, it's the pipes in the old buildings that people worry about.

But despite a lot of these drawbacks, the disposer has managed to persist in a lot of American homes, especially in Jasper.

And it's still a requirement for people to put garbage disposals into their any new home that's being built, or even existing homes, all of them have garbage disposals.

This is Bud Hauer Sperger, Jasper's current general manager of utilities.

Bud told me that Jasper's garbage disposer ordinance is still still technically on the books to this day.

But at some point, the city's resolve on the whole garbage ban piece of it just kind of fizzled.

Are you allowed to throw away like garbage or like food waste these days?

Yes, I don't think they inspect the trash bags.

Basically, there are some weight limits on how much a trash bag, full trash bag could weigh and the size of the trash bag.

But I don't think anybody inspects what's in there.

Jasper, like almost every other place in the country, hasn't been able to escape the realities of garbage.

But over the years, they built a system that works well enough for them and all their disposers.

On a walk through Jasper's wastewater facility, Bud showed me two of the ways they try to recapture some of the energy that's lost when food goes down the drain.

A couple things I didn't talk about in the office were the

anaerobic digester, that kind of dome structure over there.

We collect the methane gas off of the waste and we use that to

co-generate electricity plus we also use and as we walked through all the tanks and machines bud pointed out where jasper's wastewater gets filtered and processed and yeah it's not the prettiest sight but it was cool to see this up close Once the remnants of Jasper's organic waste are treated and separated from the water, it creates this almost compost-like mixture.

So I'm seeing like kind of like a muddy green, like, but then it sort of basically kind of just looks like soil at the end.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah.

And there's a...

What'd you say?

Good, dark soil.

I mean, it's got a lot of nutrients in that soil.

Oh, so that's going to be good for what you're doing.

In sanitary parlance, this slurry of treated sewage and food waste is known as biosolids.

But the more general term is sludge, which is also way more fun to say.

And in a lot of places, sludge gets thrown into the local landfill, same as if you were throwing your apple core in the garbage can.

In Jasper, though, they do something different.

They use it as fertilizer.

And they get it for free, basically.

The farmers do, and it kind of helps them so they don't have to put as much nitrogen and other kind of

chemicals on the field where they can use something like this, which is a little more natural.

Even though that sounds great, researchers worry that applying sludge back onto farmland could introduce pollutants into the groundwater.

At least one state, Maine, has actually banned the practice.

The EPA also says that while anaerobic digesters are a good source of renewable energy, using them doesn't cancel out all the methane that's released in the sewers.

Regardless, all of this sort of obfuscates a larger point.

We spend a lot of time thinking about how to build machines or find new ways of dealing with the remains of what we buy.

But there's a more effective way to keep garbage off the streets, out of the sewers, and out of the landfill.

It's figuring out ways to avoid creating food waste in the first place.

You know, we have this

desire to be good providers, right?

We want to make sure that we always have enough food on hand for us, for our kids, for the unexpected family that drops by and now all of a sudden I need to put food out for them too.

And I think being a good provider means make enough for everybody, but not so much that you end up throwing so much in the trash.

But the concept of creating less food waste in the first place is hard.

It requires all of us to take a second and think about what's going to happen to our garbage next, which isn't as easy as flipping a switch and watching it all disappear down the drain.

99% Invisible was reported this week by Jasper Davidoff and edited by Jason DeLeon, with additional production by Jacob Moldonato Medina.

Mix and sound design by Martin Gonzalez, music by Swan Real, fact-checking by Graham Haysha.

Kathy 2 is our executive producer.

Kurt Colstead is the digital director.

Delaney Hall is the senior editor.

The rezza team includes Chris Berupe, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Lay, Lajma Dawn, Joe Rosenberg, Gabriella Gladney, Kelly Prime, Sarah Bake, Nina Patuk, and me, Roman Mars.

The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence.

Special thanks this week to Martin Melosi, Ed Hollanden, Lily Geismer, Amy Vedra, and Sue Ellen Hoy, whose research on Jasper was a great resource for this episode.

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