Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair

In 1990 Jo Hanson and the San Francisco Waste Transfer and Recycling Station instituted an artist-in-residence program. Since then, 145 professional artists and 40 students have participated and created art “from materials that had been abandoned as worthless, unworthy waste” (189). Artists like Niki Ulehla, who created a Dante’s Inferno marionette show from items found in the dump, Nathaniel Stookey, who composed the symphony Junkestra to be performed by the San Francisco Symphony on instruments he made from trash, Andrew Junge, who built a Hummer automobile from the dump’s collection of plastic foam, and Hector Dio Mendoza, who constructed a 17-foot-high junk mail pine tree have used the program for 30 years to artistically display waste.

Recology, which owns the facility, is the nation’s foremost organic composter and among the largest employee-owned companies. Aided by San Francisco’s mandatory composting laws, Recology transforms restaurant and yard waste into compost that it sells to California’s vineyards, creating a closed-loop system. Humes lauds San Francisco’s progressive efforts in this cause but comments that it seems to give San Franciscans license to waste and notes that San Franciscans generate more per capita waste than the national average.