APRIL 16–22, 2015
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VOL. 40 NO. 15
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MADISON, WISCONSIN
n SNAPSHOT
‘A pretty violent operation’
ISTHMUS.COM APRIL 16–22, 2015
BY NOAH PHILLIPS n PHOTO BY ERIC TADSEN
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Madison’s Alter Metal Recycling has a panoply of nightmarish equipment. Industrial shears, shredders and balers stand in the yard amid 10-ton heaps of eviscerated beater cars, aluminum cans and other scrap. It’s a gorgeous spring day, crisp and bright. Chad Awbrey, facility manager, stands outside his office with his hard hat, safety glasses and vest. “These are the nice days when you like being in the scrap business, when you can get outside, walk around,” says Awbrey, who has worked at Alter for 11 years and has spent the last three in Madison. “It’s not so much fun when it’s 20 below.” Springtime is when business picks up here. This yard, about 15 acres on Madison’s east side, is a shredding facility. Feeder lots send truckloads of cans, cars and other less recognizable metals here to be ground up and processed. Alter gets metal from both industrial sources and peddlers.
“We can weigh rail cars along with trucks,” Awbrey says, gesturing to a massive scale where a pickup full of about a dozen clothes driers has just pulled up. The truck scale weighs in 20-pound increments, measuring the weight of the entire pickup and its cargo. After inspection and unloading, the driers are put onto a 30-foot-long conveyor belt, which delivers them into a fearsome shredder the size of a house, with a tower on top. “It drops down into the shredder itself,” explains Awbrey. “There’s an in-feed chute; it’s got a big rotor on it, with six rows, and there’s hammers that are in a bell shape, and then those hammers spin around and punch the material through grates.” “It’s a pretty violent operation,” he says. The final products are jagged pieces of steel the size of a fist, which are pulled from the detritus by massive magnets. These will then be shipped by rail to steel mills. One 100-pound drier might yield 80 pounds of steel.
“Everything that’s left over goes through another process downstream that can separate aluminum and stainless steel. We [also] have people on belts that pick copper out,” Awbrey says proudly. “At that point in time there’s virtually no metals left. And if there is, then it’s money that we’re losing because we’re not recovering enough.” Inside another warehouse, boxes of copper wait to be loaded onto another conveyor belt, into another chute, where a big ram will compress them. There’s a constant hum of machinery in this room, punctuated by crashes of clanging metal. Boxes of Christmas lights sit waiting to be stripped for their valuable copper. Next to the light boxes are 10-foot high piles of wire that have already been stripped out. Beer can tabs litter the floor. Outside there is a mountain of aluminum cans — Awbrey estimates that it weighs around 100,000 pounds. At 24 cans to a pound, that’s 2.4 million cans. “Our baler was down last week,” says Awbrey nonchalantly. “We’re a little behind.” n
ALTER METAL RECYCLING 4400 SYCAMORE AVE. Founded: 1898 IN DAVENPORT, IOWA Ferrous metals processed: 6,000 TO 10,000 TONS A MONTH Nonferrous metal processed: 750 TO 1,000 TONS A MONTH Percentage of shredded metal from car bodies: 40 Number of employees: 41 Metals accepted: STEEL, STAINLESS STEEL, COPPER, BRASS AND ALUMINUM Wisconsin facilities: 17 Total facilities: 52
n NEWS
Dude, where’s my cheap compost? Dane County ends program loved by gardeners BY MOLLY STENTZ
For more than 20 years, Madison and Dane County worked together to provide something local gardeners adore: cheap compost. Each year, city crews collected batches of leaves that residents raked into the parkways and curbs and delivered them to county parks. County workers rotated and managed the compost piles and ran the material through screens to remove trash. They made the finished compost available to the public – home gardeners and developers alike. The program kept the leaves out of the lakes and the landfill, and turned them into valuable garden nutrients or landscape material for new housing developments. Madison-area residents could buy the low-cost compost at sites in Verona and Westport. On many Saturday mornings in May, residents lined up waiting to fill trailers, trucks or even hatchbacks with compost. An entire pickup truck load ran just $10. But last year, Dane County announced it would be closing the compost sites after losing its main customer, the city of Madison. George Dreckmann, recycling coor-
dinator for Madison, says the city withdrew from the program after fees skyrocketed. “The county increased our annual fee from $51,000 a year to $250,000 a year,” he says. “So faced with that increase, we looked to see if there might be alternatives that cost less.” The city will still pick up leaves from the curbside and pay to compost them. Only now, it is delivering them to a local business, which makes and sells the compost. A three-year contract with DeForest-based landscape company Circle B will cost the city between $160,000 and $185,000 annually. “It was definitely going to be less than what the county would charge us,” Dreckmann says. Dane County solid waste manager John Welch says the county was subsidizing the program and had to charge more. “The rates were raised to reflect the true cost of operating the compost program,” he says. “We never raised rates in 20-plus years, despite our labor and operating costs going up. Our fuel cost went up 700% in that time.” The county compost sites were not supported primarily by tax dollars, but by the “tipping fees” that garbage haulers pay to dump waste at the county landfill. The county ran the compost sites, Welch says, “because it’s the better, more
responsible thing to do, composting these materials, rather than landfilling them.” There is also a 1993 state law banning the landfilling of yard waste. Dreckmann suspects the recent expansion of Dane County’s Rodefeld landfill prompted the $200,000 composting fee
increase. “This was an attempt to recoup some of the revenue they were anticipating but that was sacrificed during the landfill negotiation,” he says. Welch disputes that. “We had to look at the landfill expansion and the entire solid waste operation and say, okay, there’s a
‘The work that 21st century librarians do’ Saving our outdated media from the dump
ISTHMUS.COM APRIL 16–22, 2015
BY ALLISON GEYER
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Last month, UW-Madison researcher Richard Bonomo found himself in need of a Betamax player. This might seem a strange equipment need for someone who works in the UW Fusion Technology Institute, where scientists are attempting to achieve nuclear fusion, which one day may prove essential to serving the clean energy needs of future generations. But Bonomo recently came across a forgotten cache of tapes containing research data on the mining of lunar helium 3 — a non-radioactive isotope used in advanced fusion reactions that’s rare on earth but abundant on the moon. “I wanted to digitize it before it became impossible to do so,” Bonomo says. Like other forms of magnetic storage media, Betamax tapes have a relatively short lifespan, lasting only a few decades before they deteriorate. The problem is, who the heck has a Betamax player anymore? Outdated and obscure, the technology was all but vanquished by VHS after an intense video formatting war in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Rather than trying his luck at the local
scrap yard, Bonomo turned to the UW TechPartners email list to see if any of its 1,000 or so members could help him out. Turns out a few technophiles had Betamax players lying around. Somebody even offered up an ancient U-matic (an analog recording videocassette format from the late 1960s). “These machines are disappearing very fast,” Bonomo says. In the meantime, data formats continue to progress, and the amount of data continues to increase. Do Bonomo’s Betamax tapes hold the secrets to lunar helium 3 mining that will help usher in a glorious new era of post-fossil fuel peace and prosperity? That remains to be seen. But thanks to the technology community at UW, the information he found will survive and benefit future generations. At a research institution the size of the UW, there’s a “staggering” amount of information in need of a digital archiving upgrade, says Dorothea Salo, a faculty associate in the UW School of Library and Information Studies. If people don’t act fast, many of the records will be lost forever to the garbage pile. “The thing about old media is, it’s sometimes impossible to get your hands on playback equipment,” she says. “It’s a huge and growing problem.”
And it isn’t just an academic problem — think of all the irreplaceable home movies and dusty boxes of precious photographs stored in attics and garages across the world. Google vice president Vint Cerf has recently sounded the alarm about this exact problem, warning of a “forgotten generation” brought on by “bit rot,” or the gradual, inevitable obsolescence of technology.
Luckily, Salo is working on a solution: She and her students have created a Rube Goldberg-type apparatus to help people save their outdated media by transitioning them into modern formats. The contraption, known as Recovering Analog and Digital Data (RADD for short), is tucked away in a back corner of the SLIS library in Helen C. White Hall.
new reality here. With all the services we are providing, and want to continue to provide, here’s the reality of what it costs. How do we pay for it between all the services we provide and all the revenues we collect? It made the most sense to say, this is what it costs to run the compost operation. It should be able to stand on its own. And the users of the compost program should be paying for the compost program.” Many residents who use community gardens lack their own land to grow food for their families. For years, they received free deliveries of the city-county compost, paid for by the nonprofit Community Action Coalition of South Central Wisconsin and hauled for free by the city. Some gardeners now worry they won’t be able to get fertilizer. “I think the city really needs to support community gardens and the infrastructure that is needed,” says Sue Rosa, a gardener at Quann Community Garden on Madison’s south side. “People need access to land to grow food.” Joe Mathers is the former community garden coordinator for Community Action Coalition. The group no longer oversees
the garden program, but Mathers has been volunteering his time working with a group of gardeners to find resources. “Compost is going to happen this year, but it’s going to happen differently.” He’s getting bids from Purple Cow, a Middleton-based company that also makes plantbased compost from municipal leaf collection, as well as Circle B. The county will dispense the remainder of its compost for free on April 20 to 25 at both the Westport and Verona sites. Meanwhile, the city is still providing leaves to Olbrich Gardens to create leaf mulch. However, this is a much smaller program, and compost is a better fertilizer than mulch. Dreckmann stresses that Madison will still offer compost to the public, starting in May. It just costs more now. While a pickup truck load — roughly two cubic yards — used to cost $10 from the county, Circle B will sell a cubic yard of compost for $29.50 at 6402 Loftus Rd. in DeForest. For an extra $35, it will deliver a minimum of two cubic yards. A dumptruck load of compost, which used to cost $100, will now cost $200, says Dreckmann, adding the city can deliver. “We don’t charge to deliver it, but they have to pay the fee for the material.”n
6RPHGD\ right now. Ali’s
is …
Made up of salvaged and recycled equipment, it looks a bit like a technological Frankenstein’s monster — it can play vinyl records, VHS and cassette tape; scan books; and read 3 ½-inch floppy disks (although the older ones get persnickety), 100MB ZIP discs, memory cards and 35mm film slides. Soon, Salo hopes to add a reel-to-reel tape machine, a 250MB ZIP drive, a SyQuest Jaz drive and an 8-inch floppy drive. “This is the work that 21st century librarians do,” she says. There’s a certain nostalgia that comes from interacting with old technology, and in many ways RADD is a friendly reminder of memories and experiences from bygone eras.
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APRIL 16–22, 2015 ISTHMUS.COM
“People regret throwing away their [tech] garbage,” says Eric Schatzberg, a UW history of science professor. Vinyl LPs are back in vogue, high-end audiophiles covet tube amplifiers, and dirigibles may be making a comeback. But at the same time, lots of today’s technology still gets thrown away. People who swear that modern machines just don’t hold up as well as older models aren’t
making it up — as equipment gets more advanced, it often gets cheaper and harder to take apart and fix, Schatzberg says. As a result, people now more often replace their technology instead of repairing it. “We’re alienated from technology in the sense that it’s unfamiliar to us,” Schatzberg says. “We don’t open things up and take them apart anymore.” At the intersection of technology’s ubiquitousness and the design concept of “planned obsolescence” lies an odd paradox: Our relationship with tech is increasingly intimate, but our understanding of it is increasingly superficial. It’s the reason we don’t mourn a broken cell phone the same way we do a broken-down classic car. But even as devices seemingly fade into obscurity, old technologies never truly die: They serve as building blocks for future iterations. “It’s important to remember that technology has been around even before the human species,” Schatzberg says. “Early hominids had stone tools. It’s an essential part of what makes us human, but it’s also always been changing — sometimes slowly and sometimes more quickly.” n
9
n COVER STORY
There’s the glam side of Earth Day, where people plant trees, count birds and listen to Neil deGrasse Tyson speak on climate change. Then there’s the more unseemly side of saving the earth: garbage. What do we do with all the trash we generate? Where does it go, and does it go where it should? Are we doing our best to keep it out of the landfill? In this issue, we take a closer look at our complicated relationship with waste. We survey the scene at a local scrapyard (“Snapshot,” page 4), interview city recycling czar George Dreckmann (below), get up close and personal with compost (stories on pages 8, 18 and 19) and illustrate our garbage “by the numbers” (opposite page). Plus we sample some “trashy” dishes (page 24), catch up with Garbage, the band (page 23), interview a fashion upcycler (page 46) and take a look at those who are saving obsolete technology (page 8). Whatever you do, don’t throw this issue in the trash. Read, re-read, recycle!
‘Anything that can lighten our carbon footprint is okay.’ GEORGE DRECKMANN: THE INTERVIEW By Joe Tarr ISTHMUS.COM APRIL 16–22, 2015
George Dreckmann didn’t grow up wanting to be Madison’s garbage
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and recycling guru.
His first ambition was to be a teacher, but when he graduated from UW-
Madison in 1988, there weren’t many teaching jobs available.
A temporary job with the city’s streets department seemed like the perfect
place to cool his heels until a teaching job opened up. At the time, the city would pick up just about anything that fit into a trash bag left on the curb, including lawn and plant clippings. That year, the county banned yard waste from the landfill.
continued on page 19 ➡
Garbage by the numbers WHAT WE TOSSED IN 2014
By Allison Geyer
plastic bags 4 tons aseptic packaging 8 tons rigid plastic 62 tons milk jugs 197 tons other HDPE (#2 plastic) 158 tons
steel cans
348 tons
LEAVES AND YARD WASTE
#3-#7 plastic 197 tons
aluminum cans
225 tons
PETE (#1 plastic) 473 tons
other metal
household batteries 4.2 tons vehicle batteries 47 tons mattresses and box springs 38 tons Styrofoam 39 tons
102 tons
22,341 tons
computers, TVs and electronics
GLASS
188 tons
4,832 tons
UNRECYCLABLE MATERIALS
appliances and scrap metal 669 tons
food scraps
and other organics 239 tons
CARDBOARD
48,051 tons
2,816 tons
MIXED PAPER
3,622 tons
BRUSH AND LOGS 12,977 tons
NEWSPRINT 5,132 tons
to landfill 136,454 TONS
1,020 TONS
32,440 TONS
430 TONS
of solid waste dumped at the Dane County Landfill of construction and demolition waste sent to a facility in Appleton for recycling
77 TONS
of electronics collected and sent to a Janesville facility for recycling
to compost
to recycle
MADISON TOTALS
of asphalt shingles collected and sent for recycling into asphalt pavement
MADISON
of hazardous waste collected for proper disposal by Clean Sweep
Pellitteri Waste Systems
COUNTY TOTALS
4,000 HOMES
D A N E
The city of Madison diverted an estimated
68 TONS
of material for reuse during the student move-out
DANE COUNTY DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC WORKS SOLID WASTE DIVISION AND THE CITY OF MADISON STREETS AND RECYCLING DEPARTMENT
Rodefeld landfill
C O U N T Y
168 TONS of materials were recycled through the Madison Stuff Exchange reuse web page
DAVID MICHAEL MILLER
APRIL 16–22, 2015 ISTHMUS.COM
In 2014 the Dane County landfill site (Rodefeld) generated 702.5 million cubic feet of landfill gas. The gas was used to generate about 29.5 million kilowatt hours of electricity, enough to power
Circle B Mulch
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n COVER STORY
George Dreckmann: ‘We can’t decide to recycle something because we think it’s going to be a good idea; we have to be able to make something out of it.’
LAUREN JUSTICE
More program delays PIERRE-PAUL PARISEAU
ISTHMUS.COM APRIL 16–22, 2015
Madison’s recycling coordinator
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has given up waiting. George Dreckmann had hoped to have a citywide composting program up and running before he retires next January, but he knows the city will never make that deadline. “It’s been moved back a year every year for the last three years,” says Dreckmann, the city’s recycling coordinator. “I can’t gauge the political commitment to this. I just don’t know. There are other projects deemed to have greater importance in terms of the use of the city’s capital.” For the program, the city needs to build a biodigester — estimated at $12 to $18 million. It would pay for itself in about 15 years by reducing the amount of trash the city sends to the landfill (at a cost of around $50 a ton).
CURBSIDE COMPOSTING INITIATIVE WOULD RECYCLE FOOD WASTE By Joe Tarr In 2013, city workers collected 190,400 tons of garbage from 74,347 households and 500 to 700 businesses (many businesses and apartment buildings of eight or more units use private haulers for their trash). Of all the garbage the city collects, 69% — more than 131,000 tons — was kept out of the landfill by recycling in 2013, Dreckmann says. If the city had a full-scale composting program in place, it could keep 80% of its garbage out of the landfill, Dreckmann calculates. Were the program up and running, residents would separate food waste and soiled paper products like napkins, coffee filters and pizza boxes the way they now separate recycling. The food waste would then be put into the biodigester, where it would be turned into methane, which can be used to fuel vehicles or generate electricity, and fertilizer, which it can sell.
The city began a pilot composting
program in 2011 to see how it might work. The project currently includes 500 households, 23 businesses and Emerson Elementary School, Dreckmann says. Their food waste is shipped to a biodigester at UW-Oshkosh. This early effort is not quite up to snuff. The refuse that the city is getting in the pilot is contaminated slightly with noncompostable plastic and small amounts of glass, Dreckmann says. Because of this, much of it is now going to the landfill. Dreckmann is working on a fix. If Madison had its own biodigester, it could easily deal with these contaminants. But the Oshkosh facility is trying to generate high-end fertilizer to sell to home gardeners, so it can’t have plastic or glass in it. “We wouldn’t be as dependent on the high-end market,” Dreckmann says. “We’d
be looking [at selling] to the agricultural market, the construction market, using it in highway road projects. In a lot of highways projects, you can have up to 30% contamination. I’d hope we wouldn’t be running that high. But it’s a much more forgiving market than for a rose garden.” If Madison had built the biodigester a couple of years ago, it would have been in the vanguard of eco-friendly cities. But now, many other cities have either built them or have plans to. “I know this process. I’m frustrated with it, but it is what it is. I wear blinders when it comes to how to spend our money,” Dreckmann says. “But I’m not paid to make those decisions. The project lost some of its urgency when we were able to get the landfill expanded.”n
➡ continued from page 16 Dreckmann was given the difficult task of going around and informing residents they could no longer dump lawn refuse onto the curb. “We were going to do something unpopular, and I was hired to stand in front of the fan,” Dreckmann explains. But he loved the education component of the job and found a way to sell the new policy without pissing off too many people. Driving around in his Ford pickup, he’d stop at houses and tell residents he would take their current load of yard trash, but after that, they’d have to stop. “I figured out a way to make it look good, which might be why I have the job I do now,” he says. Since then, Dreckmann has become a Madison institution. As the city’s recycling coordinator, he’s overseen the implementation of curbside recycling and helped pave the way for a proposed composting program. About to turn 65, Dreckmann plans to retire in January. Isthmus caught up with him to ask him what he’s learned about garbage during his unexpected career. When he started in the industry, the country was facing a garbage crisis, with alarms that there was no room left for land-
fills. That crisis turned out to be exaggerated, but it spurred a recycling boom, which had benefits. “For a lot of people, the shortage of landfill space was really secondary to the real reason for recycling, which is resource conservation,” Dreckmann says. “There’s no imminent crisis, partly because we’ve pulled all this stuff out of the landfills.” The rise of recycling in Dane County, for instance, has helped extend the life of its current landfill by 30 years. Still, even in a city like Madison, where people are devoted to recycling, plenty of things end up in the landfill that shouldn’t be. “Ten to 15% of the trash we [send to the landfill] could be recycled,” he says. “People put it in the wrong bin. We know, for example, that when the recycling cart is full, and people have some recycling left, they’ll put it in the trash.” So what happens when you throw the wrong thing in the wrong bin? “The garbage fairy comes up and slaps you silly,” Dreckmann jokes. Actually, trash that is dumped into a recycling bin will eventually be sorted out at the recycling center, although “there’s a cost to that.” During Dreckmann’s career, he’s seen a shift in which items are most valuable for recycling. Aluminum cans remain a big income generator, selling for $1,600 a ton. But, he adds, “Back
in the day, I never thought I’d be getting more money from plastic than aluminum.” Still, with the recent drop in oil prices, the amount of money plastic fetches has declined. Newspaper was once a big revenue generator for the city, but as physical newspaper subscriptions have declined, so too has this once-reliable market. “We aren’t going to have a paperless society, but we have a less-paper society,” he says. The changes demonstrate a reality of Dreckmann’s job. “We can’t decide to recycle something because we think it’s going to be a good idea; we have to be able to make something out of it,” he says. “We are not an environmental program, we’re commodity aggregators. We have to have a product we can produce from this material.” As easy-to-recycle materials get replaced, recycling programs face problems. For instance, the market for glass has declined, but Madison still uses a lot of glass because, says Dreckmann, “we like beer.” So the city has to ship its glass farther, at a higher cost. At the same time, new forms of plastic that are replacing glass often have multiple layers, which make them harder to recycle. Nevertheless, Dreckmann sees these changes as beneficial. They’re being done to reduce
packaging, which means it takes less fuel to ship them, reducing carbon emissions. “Climate change to me is the most pressing issue on the planet. It’s more dire than, ‘Will Iran get a nuclear weapon?;” he says. “Anything that can lighten our carbon footprint is okay, even if we have to put a little more in the landfill.” Although Dreckmann has loved his job, he’s ready to move on. He’d like to return to his earlier ambition, and give substitute teaching a try. He wants to climb Machu Picchu and raft through the Grand Canyon before he’s 70. He suffers from Crohn’s disease, a condition that is aggravated by stress. Dreckmann, as spokesman for the city streets division, also deals with snow emergencies, and those who complain about how the city deals with them. “If it wasn’t for winter, I’d probably stick around for a couple more years. It’s winter that wears me out,” says Dreckmann. “Crohn’s won’t kill me, but it can make my life miserable. That happens more in January than in July.” He adds: “I’m looking forward to just being a person who rolls his recycling cart out once a week.” n
Could a composting toilet be right for you? MADISON SAYS ‘NO’; MONONA SAYS ‘MAYBE’ There hasn’t been a huge outcry
2008. She uses the yurt as a studio for her dance, Pilates and other classes. “When I built it, I wanted to make as many green choices as possible,” says Aldrich, who is passionate about water conservation. She started the Lake Monona Water Walk in 2012 to raise awareness. “In a time of global water shortage, we’re flushing away potable water, decent water. It’s a crime,” she says. Monona does not allow composting toilets per se, but Aldrich fought and received a variance by arguing that composting toilets don’t fall under Monona’s plumbing code because they don’t use water or require plumbing. The code is geared toward abolishing septic systems and outhouses in favor of modern sewage systems. Aldrich argued, moreover, that composting toilets aren’t producing waste that isn’t going into the sewer; they convert that waste into compost before it ever leaves the toilet.
Aldrich did a lot of research before she selected her self-contained model from Sun-Mar. She was so pleased with it, she became a local dealer for them. Waste goes into a drum below the seat, along with bulking material and enzymes that aid in breakdown. Turning the drum also aids in breakdown. A fan evaporates urine and carries away odors — there’s less smell than conventional toilets, Aldrich says. Most people use them in cabins, says Aldrich, but they’re also great for outbuildings like boathouses, or even “on a boat or in an RV.” “They’re simple. Not much can go wrong,” she says, other possibly than with the fan. “But you can replace the fan without replacing the toilet.”
A self-contained Sun-Mar composting toilet features a rotating drum and, below, a finishing chamber. Aldrich says that while the resulting compost is safe to use on a vegetable garden, Wisconsin law requires that it be disposed of at a landfill. That might also seem a waste. But Aldrich says the toilet is so effective at reducing what goes into it, not much compost is generated anyway. n
➡
APRIL 16–22, 2015 ISTHMUS.COM
from Madison residents demanding the right to install composting toilets. The toilets, which turn solid waste into compost, are lauded by proponents because conventional toilets waste water with each flush. Older toilets use 3 to 7 gallons of water per flush, and even new low-flow toilets use 1.5 gallons per flush. According to the EPA, toilets account for the largest percentage of household indoor water usage. But Madison does not allow composting toilets, period, says George Hank of building inspection. They violate both the health code (7.321) and the plumbing code (18.36). Basically, if there’s a sewer, you have to use it. The tiny house village on East Johnson Street initially wanted to use composting toilets, but were denied. Dianné Aldrich of Monona fought to have a composting toilet allowed in the yurt she constructed in her backyard in
By Linda Falkenstein
19
n COVER STORY
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General Public: $35 Tickets at: isthmustickets.com
inside Dane County’s Waste Transfer Station. Had the facility’s doors been open, water spritzed from a ceiling-mounted sprinkler would push the particulates to the concrete floor, clearing the air. “We’ll have better dust control in the new facility,� explains Mike Rupiper, special projects and materials manager with the county’s Solid Waste Division. “We’ll have to, because we’ll have more people working inside.� Built in 2010, the 20,850-square-foot transfer station at the county’s landfill on Highway 12/18 is slated to be transformed this year into a full-fledged sorting and recycling center. The new facility is being constructed with an eye toward saving taxpayer money while reducing the county’s ever-shrinking carbon footprint. Currently, the station is a depot for waste materials from area construction and demolition sites, which are then hauled by semi to Appleton’s Landfill Reduction and Recycling, to be reconstituted into various goods. But once the station is modified, the sorting and recycling will occur onsite, eliminating the cost and emissions of transporting the waste 848 miles to Appleton — eight semi loads traveling roundtrip per day. “There will be a big savings to the environment,� Rupiper says. The modifications, approved as part of this year’s capital budget, will cost an estimated $3.6 million. Jason Salisbury, president of Landfill Reduction and Recycling, says that sorting and recycling onsite means more exposure for the services rendered by his company, which will oversee day-to-day operations at the new facility for the next 10 years. “What we found here in Appleton is that there is a lot more participation the more visible we are,� he explains, adding that he wouldn’t be surprised if construction and demo waste began making its way into Dane County. “We definitely intend to grow the business.� And that’s good news for taxpayers. “The more material we can bring in, the more money we can make,� says Salisbury.
“That’s mutually beneficial.� Less than five years old, the transfer station was built to help remove recyclable materials from the waste stream, especially construction and demolition waste, which accounts for roughly 30% of the landfill’s annual trash intake, according to solid waste and recycling manager John Welch. Rupiper says bids will go out this summer and, if all goes well, the renovated facility will be fully operational by fall. The new facility will include a 7,500-square-foot addition to the building’s east side and a conveyor belt to transport the waste to a sorting platform. Once sorted, the various materials will get shipped elsewhere, where they will get processed for future use. Currently, the waste is loaded into a compactor, where it is baled and then loaded onto a semi trailer to be shipped to Appleton. Rupiper says most of the lumber becomes boiler fuel or landscape mulch, while drywall is converted into agricultural gypsum, and metals are recycled into an assortment of new products and tools. Salisbury says that while his company will bring some of its corporate staff to Dane County, he expects between 20 to 25 jobs will open to area residents once the facility goes online. “If it kicks off like it did in Appleton, we could be running two shifts instead of one,� he says. The new waste transfer station is one of several innovative programs to come out of this year’s capital budget. Solid waste managers are also testing technology designed to capture and sell the carbon dioxide created as byproduct of garbage decomposition. And in addition to studying the feasibility of capping retired landfill cells with solar-power-producing membranes, the landfill’s compressed natural gas program will fuel an increasing number of vehicles in the county fleet. n
FOOD & DRI NK ■ SPORTS ■ MUSIC ■ STAGE ■ SCREENS
Version 20.0
LIZ LARIBEE
Garbage readies new material two decades after hit debut BY MICHAEL POPKE That moment stuck with Vig. “In hindsight, it was a really bad name,” Vig acknowledges with a laugh. He’s on his cellphone en route to a Garbage recording session in Southern California, where he now lives. “But it made sense to us, because there was a lo-fi aspect to some of our earlier tracks. That remix work was the basis for Garbage.” Those early tracks — featuring Vig on drums, Marker, Madison multi-instrumentalist Duke Erikson and, come 1994, Scottish singer Shirley Manson — blurred elements of hiphop, fuzz pop and film music with surprisingly commercial-friendly results. On the surface, Garbage bore little resemblance to Spooner and Fire Town, the roots-rock bands Vig and Erickson had played in previously. “We threw all
of these crazy sounds into a big noisy pot, and then threw the pot against the wall to see what would stick,” Vig says. “And that’s really been the Garbage sensibility all along.” Though it may not be obvious, Erikson, 64, says his musical history with Vig played a big role in the evolution of Garbage. “What we learned in Spooner, we applied to Fire Town,” he says. “We gleaned ideas from those bands for Garbage. Garbage is much the same band as Spooner and Fire Town, in that we’re just trying to write good songs and do interesting things with the music.” Critics and fans adored Garbage, which is why the band has sold more than 17 million albums worldwide since the release of 1995’s self-titled debut. Recorded at Smart, the album went
quadruple-platinum and spawned the MTVready singles “Stupid Girl” and “Only Happy When It Rains.” Over the next decade, Garbage made three more albums at Smart Studios (1998’s Version 2.0, 2001’s beautifulgarbage and 2005’s Bleed Like Me), each selling fewer copies than the previous one. (Smart closed in 2010, long after Vig moved west; the space is now home to a new studio, Clutch Sound.) By late 2005, amid rumors of a breakup, Garbage announced a hiatus that lasted about 18 months. “We were all just physically exhausted,” Erikson says.
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APRIL 16–22, 2015 ISTHMUS.COM
Not many bands take their name from a derogatory comment describing how a piece of music sounds. But that’s exactly what happened in the case of Garbage — a group with Madison roots that formed in 1993 during alt-rock’s glory days. “I was working on a remix for Nine Inch Nails,” recalls Butch Vig, 59, about one of the many projects he did for high-profile artists after producing Nirvana’s 1991 industryaltering album Nevermind. “There were a lot of distorted drum tracks and feedback, with really no music.” Someone at Smart Studios, the Madison recording facility Vig founded with future Garbage guitarist Steve Marker, walked in and said the remix sounded “like garbage.”
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n FOOD & DRINK
The galvanized metal lid that Famous Dave’s All-American BBQ Feast is served on is the closest this deliciousness will ever come to a garbage can.
PAULIUS MUSTEIKIS
Madison’s trashiest dishes! From tongue-in-cheek to actual tongue
ISTHMUS.COM APRIL 16–22, 2015
BY MAX MILLER
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Madison may well have a reputation as a holier-than-thou local food bastion, but it’s also proud home of the White Trash Burrito at Burrito Drive. This irreverent conglomeration of, admittedly, junk food wrapped in a tortilla celebrates the highly processed ingredients that food purists love to hate — Tater Tots, Spam, baked beans and Velveeta cheese. And that’s okay (once in a while). For one thing, it proves that Madison doesn’t always take itself so seriously. And it heads our list of Madison’s “trashiest” foods. This sampling of old childhood flavors melds into a sticky mass of surprising deliciousness. Plus, it’s served with an upscale chili ketchup salsa that has a nice spicy kick. The baked beans offer a little sweetness and give the whole burrito balance. It’s easy to find yourself liking this burrito far more than you’d expect. Famous Dave’s also has some fun with the concept with its All-American Feast — a smorgasbord sampling of nearly the entire menu, served cheekily on a large trashcan lid. A whole rack of smoked ribs a whole roasted chicken, pulled pork, brisket, corn, coleslaw, baked beans, and french fries.
The St. Louis-style ribs are nicely smoky and come out already well sauced, but Famous Dave’s also provides a nice array of sauces at the table. It takes a lot of work and care to make brisket tender, but the kitchen puts in that work. The smoke ring penetrates deep into the meat. The “Wilbur beans” have a lot of flavor from the flecks of smoked meat throughout; overall, there’s a satisfying balance of sweet, smoke and spice. It’s a platter to feed the whole family, and the family can still reasonably expect to take home a doggie bag. It may come on a trash can lid, but none of that smoked goodness will end up in the trash. Different in spirit are the dishes that began as ways to extend the life or usefulness of ingredients and keep food out of the refuse bin. Offal, skin, tendons, organs and stale starches are often treated like trash and thrown away, but in the right hands, they can be turned into beloved dishes. The French name for french toast is “pain perdu,” or “lost bread,” and the dish originated as a way to use up stale loaves. Madison Sourdough Co. makes an incredible french toast by soaking its day-old sourdough in va-
BURRITO DRIVE n 310 S. Brearly St., 608-260-8586
nilla custard, which has a lot more sugar then most recipes call for. This gives the outside a satisfying caramelized crunch. Topping it with caramel apple compote, real whipped cream and toasty almonds makes this some of the best pain perdu in Madison. Bread pudding is another great way to use up stale bread. A Pig in a Fur Coat’s dessert Pandoro bread pudding is one of the finest in Madison. Originally from an old family recipe, it now changes with the seasons. The dried bread, transformed with custard, might also boast different nuts, spices and dried fruits, even caramel and white chocolate. The necessity of using the whole animal has always been a staple of peasant cooking. Heritage Tavern makes headcheese from their own farm’s pigs. Headcheese is a pig’s head that’s boiled until all of the meat and assorted bits are so tender that it falls off the bone. Then the bones are removed and the bits are cut up and placed into a loaf pan. The thick broth is added, and the whole loaf is chilled into a solid block. Heritage cuts these into slices, breads and fries them in one of the best presentations of headcheese around. Menudo is a classic Mexican dish utilizing parts of the cow most Americans would throw
FAMOUS DAVE’S n 900 S. Park St., 608-286-9400
MADISON SOURDOUGH CO. n 916 Williamson St., 608-442-8009
A PIG IN A FUR COAT n 940 Williamson St., 608-316-3300
HERITAGE TAVERN n 131 E. Mifflin St., 608-283-9500
TAQUERIA SABOR QUERETANO n 4512 E. Washington Ave., 608-249-0877
in the trash. Beef tripe and meaty joints are cooked for four to eight in a chili-based broth. This is a dish traditionally made by a whole family working together to feed a crowd for a celebration. Menudo can often be found on weekends at authentic taquerias. Locally, Taqueria Sabor Queretano serves it with a thick chili-beef broth, with the tripe and tendons cooked until they are unimaginably tender. And tongue, another part of the animal that the squeamish might toss, is available at Sabor Queretano as a filling for tacos and, yes, burritos. Once again, trash is transformed to treasure. n
n EMPHASIS
Saving T-shirts from the trash Mo O’Grady upcycles discarded textiles into fashionable wears BY AIMEE OGDEN
You may have seen Mo O’Grady’s Mojowear clothing line during your Saturday visits to the Dane County Farmers’ Market or while shopping at Anthology on State Street. O’Grady has been on the local business scene for 10 years, first making printed T-shirts and then launching her own line of handmade upcycled clothing. She took some time away from her shears and serger to discuss the inner workings and inspiration behind Mojowear. What motivated you to start upcycling? A friend and I came up with the idea of making T-shirts with phrases on them. After she got another job, I took over the business, and I had this huge pile of messed up Tshirts. I thought it was a shame to just throw them away. So I started researching ideas for what to do with them, and I started making skirts. They did so well — it hit at a time when people were really interested in reuse.
Is the ecological impact of used clothes a big motivator for your work? I do pay quite a bit of attention to how I can use my entire item. People will give me bags of stuff and I reduce that down to an eighth of what they’ve given me, because I can use almost everything in my piece. I even turn the pieces that I don’t use into rugs. I try to use every T-shirt I can and do what I can to keep garbage out of landfills.
Where do you find your materials? At this point so many people know what I do that whenever I go out to meet people for a drink or dinner I come home with a bag of clothes. At times I’ll get a little picked over and I’ll go to Goodwill, especially in winter when I work with sweaters. But my workshop looks like a hoarder’s paradise right now!
Does the design for an item come first or the material? I wouldn’t really call myself a designer so much as that I get inspired by my materials. It’s a very organic process — I own a sewing machine called a serger that cuts and wraps the edge at the same time, so I don’t need to cut patterns. I don’t need to have a concept before I start; I’ll just take something that’s really interesting to me, cut out that piece, and add to it from there.
What’s your biggest seller in your clothing line? If I was to pick one thing, it would be Wisconsin-themed skirts. But it comes and goes; people just seem to be happy with what I make, which makes me happy. n
Mo O’Grady’s daughter, Neeva O’Grady, wearing her mom’s upcycled clothing, Mojowear, from the Wisconsinthemed skirt line.
O’Grady’s work can be found at the Dane County Farmer’s Market, at Anthology, 218 State St., or through her Etsy shop, which is accessible through her website berniesgirl.com.
What’s USAgain? The ‘other’ bin for textile reuse
ISTHMUS.COM APRIL 16–22, 2015
BY LINDA FALKENSTEIN
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You may have seen the green, white and blue bins in area parking lots and figured them for another Goodwill pickup spot. It’s not unusual to see junked chairs and other household items leaned against them on Monday mornings. But the USAgain boxes are not for broken chairs or gently used toys. And it’s not Goodwill. USAgain, which describes itself as “a green for-profit company,” collects and resells textiles to keep them out of landfills. The company has 14,000 bins in 19 states, 10 in the Madison area. In addition to clothes and shoes, USAgain accepts hats, purses, gloves, belts, bedding, sheets, blankets, drapes and towels. According to its website, USAgain re-
sells the discarded clothes it collects “to places where there is a great need for these items, supporting the local and global economy in the process. By exporting textiles to struggling countries we generate revenue, create green jobs here in the U.S. and abroad, and help to improve the well-being of people in America and around the world.” Other reports have cast doubt on the company’s practices. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 15.7% of textiles were “recovered” in 2012 (that figure does not include clothes that were reused as clothes). Fabrics can be recycled into rags and mops, paper, insulation and other building materials. Some leftovers of natural fabrics like cotton are composted, according to the EPA. Madison uses USAgain for its shoe recycling
program; the company has bins at the city’s Badger Road and Sycamore waste sites. “The stuff we get is not very good, and they will take it,” says city recycling coordinator George Dreckmann, though he adds he would prefer working with a local concern. USAgain is not the only way to donate your used clothes and textiles in town. Nonprofits Goodwill, St. Vincent de Paul and the Community Action Coalition Clothing Center (1717 N. Stoughton Rd.) accept wearable clothing. Goodwill and St. Vinny’s also accept fabric for scrap that is “not wet, mildewed or chemically contaminated,” for eventual recycling. n
LAUREN JUSTICE
Everything you always wanted to know about diapers... The cloth version, improved, thanks to a local company
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BY CANDICE WAGENER
New parents and those expecting might want to take a look at more than just their carbon footprint, and evaluate their “bottom� print, so to speak. According to the EPA, the average baby will go through about 8,000 diapers — which last for centuries in landfills. After giving birth to her first child in 2003, Nicki Maynard was committed to using cloth diapers, but wanted to wash them herself instead of using a diaper service. She had a hard time finding the kind of cloth diaper she wanted in Madison, so she started ordering them herself in bulk. This quickly caught the attention of other moms. That’s how Maynard wound up being a large-scale producer of cloth diapers and other reusable items. “I never really meant it to be a business,� she says, though her background was in business administration and finance. But her ad hoc diaper distribution grew from reselling diapers to manufacturing diapers and accessories and supplying a wide variety of products under five different brands. The company is owned by Maynard and her husband, Jesse, and operated out of a 12,000-square-foot facility in New Glarus. The original brand, Nicki’s Diapers, offers a variety of reusable diaper covers and cloth inserts, as well as swaddle blankets, all made in the New Glarus facility. The brand participates in a “Buy One, Give One� program where, for every diaper purchased, a baby item is donated to families in need. The Planet Wise brand specializes in reusable wet/dry bags, snack and lunch bags, and garbage bags, all of which have a waterproof lining patented by Maynard.
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CANDICE WAGENER
Imagine Baby includes even simpler versions of cloth diapers, training pants and other accessories. Best Bottom Diapers are the simplest version of the cloth diaper. Invented by Maynard, they feature an insert that snaps right in. She also designs prints for various fabrics. Finally, the My Swim Baby line specializes in reusable swim diapers. Items are available through the company’s website (and at many stores throughout the country). A west-side retail shop gives customers the chance to touch and feel items, as well as seek advice from knowledgeable staff, all parents themselves. n
Featuring the Midwest’s largest selection of perennials, hostas, and ornamental grasses
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Open April 18: Weekdays 9-7, Saturday & Sunday 9-6 4062 Cty. Rd. A, Stoughton, WI / Call 608 873 8329 www.theflowerfactorynursery.com
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Nicki Maynard (above) and her company’s best-selling Best Bottom diapers and antimicrobial wet/dry bag.
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