"One Man's Trash..."
A growing underclass of landfill miners eke out a living on yesterday's refuse. But legislators are keen to shut their operations down.
Ana Caldera operates her mining “dredge” at Roosevelt Regional Landfill, 30 July 2037.
Posted 12 August 2037 by Laura Oberbrunner, Features Editor.
"This is promising."
Ana Caldera watches over ribbons of pulverized waste as they run along the middle conveyor of her mining dredge. With calloused hands she indicates the shreds of paper making up most of the materials in this load. To me it looks much the same as what we've been seeing all day, so I ask her what makes this particular paper different.
"High grade, laminate cardboard," she says matter-of-factly. "Cell phone packaging. Means there's a good chance of finding rare earths."
Ana, 57, is a landfill miner or "dredger," one of a dozen or so who sift their way through the rolling piles that make up Roosevelt Regional Landfill in southcentral Washington State. It's a kind of work that's become increasingly visible across North America over the past few years, and one that's attracted ire from Western Pact and federal lawmakers alike.
About 2/3 of US landfill waste is made up of organic materials, and their breakdown produces methane for power stations across the country. But decades of lax sorting rules and slipshod enforcement has left millions of metric tons of inorganic materials behind as well; stuff like plastics, glass, and -- most importantly -- metals.
That's how the "dredgers" (a term referencing the workers' bespoke mining dredges, which was universally preferred by those I interviewed) make their living. As supply chain disruptions continue, and mines across North America have struggled to keep up with demand, landfill mining has become essential for picking up the slack. Ordinary metals like steel and aluminum are in demand, and rarer ones used in electronics manufacturing -- gold, tin, copper, neodymium, and others -- are at a premium.
According to Dr. Ike Cronin, an economics professor at the University of California in Berkeley, this form of grassroots recycling has been a lifeline for regional manufacturing firms.
“A decade ago you could buy screens from Uttar Pradesh, chips from Taipei, have everything assembled in Shenzhen,” said Dr. Cronin. “But the global economy isn’t on ‘easy mode’ anymore. That kind of interdependence is no longer an option.”
“Dredgers are the reason you can buy a smartphone off the shelf today. Period.”
Filling that gap, it turns out, is a thankless job. Most dredgers live in RV and tent encampments near their chosen mining sites, saving most of their money or sending it to their families. Working independently or in small cooperatives, the miners only get paid when they can sell their haul -- and though many metals are at all-time high prices in today’s market, they rarely see the full value. Intermediary materials brokers and recyclers buy the sorted waste, with rates depending on purity and consistency; anywhere from 75 to as little as 5% of market value. Less required refining means a better price, which has led some dredgers to try and do as much sorting as they can before handing off their goods.
“Sometimes a newbie will get a wild hair, attach a forge to his rig, maybe think that melting bits down is gonna get him rich,” Ana tells me over the din of her auger. “Most of ‘em get sick off the fumes. A couple guys have burned up their whole dredges doing that.”
“I play it safe,” she adds, pulling out a plastic drawer to show me. Inside is an assortment of black and silver computer chips, an array of sizes from smaller than a fingernail up to larger than a dollar coin. “Getting them off the PCB is usually plenty, I get a good price if there’s not too much resin left over.”
While still practiced in the Western Pact, dredgers operate in a legal gray area, and are sometimes forced to leave a given landfill by private security or local statute. Elsewhere in the US and Canada, many localities and regions have banned or criminalized landfill mining, citing injuries and deaths among miners, trespassing claims from private landfill owners, and at least one well-publicized fire.
Owen Bartell, a councilor representing Lane County, Oregon, has been one of the most vocal members of the Pact Assembly to call for a ban on landfill mining by individuals in the western states. He believes it’s past time for the Western Pact to outlaw the practice.
“What we have is a population of indigents and illegal immigrants, operating cobbled-together industrial machines in some of the most volatile conditions imaginable,” Bartell said. “They’re endangering sanitary workers and themselves. These people should be in assistance facilities or back in their home countries, not performing this so-called ‘mining.’”
Recently, Dynasty Minerals Inc, a Pact resource extraction firm, announced plans to develop landfill mining, with a pilot program slated to begin in early 2038. It’s worth noting that Dynasty Minerals was a primary supporter of Bartell’s election campaign, but when I asked him about a potential conflict of interest, the councilor insisted that these plans “proved his point.”
“This isn’t a conflict of interest, there’s no way it’s a conflict,” Bartell said. “If anything, this is just an example of how this should be done. Let the state handle these amateur miners, and let the experts handle the resource extraction.”
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