Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 26, 1992 TAG: 9201280332
SECTION: ECONOMY PAGE: 14 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ED SHAMY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
TRASH: ECONOMY'S TRUE MEASURING STICK
He has shoveled the booms and bulldozed the busts. Wayne Andrews has, since 1975 or so, had a sea gull's-eye view of the Roanoke Valley economy. He drives a front-end loader at the regional landfill.Here beats the pulse of the local economy. Throw it all - the merchandise, the unemployment, the productivity, the interest rates, exports, imports, Dow Jones Industrials and the price of soybean meal on the Chicago Board of Trade - into the top of the meat grinder. Flip the switch. In the end, it gets mixed into one big batch and dumped at the landfill.
We call it garbage and it is the single most telling indicator of the state of our economy.
To our landfill all waste must flow, a great equalizer and a melting pot of production and consumption, manufacturer and service sector, private, publicly traded and government.
There are two schools of thought at the dump: One saying the recession is a mirage, the other claiming we're in this doo-doo up to our rumps.
Proponents of the former cite statistics: In 1991, about 5 percent less trash, by weight, was buried in the landfill than in the previous year. The argument may seem to buttress the claim that we are deep in a serious economic downturn. But don't forget that it didn't rain between August and November and dry garbage weighs a whole lot less than wet garbage.
The other camp relies more on feel and counts Wayne Andrews among its professors.
Andrews sees few signs of recession.
On a midmorning earlier this month, Andrews cedes that it has been a slow day. The hangar-sized shed in which he works is empty. But, he warns, wait for the 11 a.m. rush.
Almost to the minute, garbage trucks start to rumble in at the stroke of 11, lining up at the scale and then roaring to the cavernous shed to unload.
Within minutes, kaleidoscopic mounds of garbage wait for Andrews to dispatch them to the afterlife.
"LOOK AT THAT PILE!" shouts Andrews over the growl of his machine and the grind and thunder of the trash trucks unloading nearby. "THAT'S GOT TO BE COMING FROM SOMEWHERE!"
Paint containers pop beneath the 6-foot wheels of Andrews' scooper. Glass shatters. Wood snaps. He shovels the piles onto conveyors leading into monster garbage compactors. Once baled, the tailings of the valley economy ride to their final resting place - just a short drive a way - on flatbed trucks.
For three hours, the convoy of garbage trucks flows into the landfill.
If we're floundering economically, it has escaped the keen eye and the 'dozer blade of Wayne Andrews.
Likewise for the Roanoke County trash-truck driver who has just hauled in 12,000 pounds of garbage from homes along U.S. 221.
"If you knew times were hard, and were trying to make ends meet, would you be throwing out good clothes?" he asked, climbing into his truck cab. On the seat are five pairs of women's jeans he has rescued from the garbage. They are new.
William Ziegler, who drives a trash truck for Roanoke City, is hauling waste from Garden City. His truck weighed better than 18,000 pounds on the scales.
"Usually, there's a lot less [garbage] in the wintertime, but it's been running heavy this year. We're running heavy," said Ziegler.
Lately, Ziegler has seen an elderly woman scouring his routes just ahead of his truck. She picks through the garbage for recyclables - aluminum cans, mostly - and then neatly replaces the lids on the trash cans.
But she's just one person.
"If you put all the people who recycle over here," he said, pointing to one corner of the shed, "and put all the people who don't over there, you'd have a whole lot more people over there."
Ken Beachum, who works the scales at Cycle Systems off Franklin Road, sees conflicting evidence. He sees lots of industrial-type scrap metals, and truckloads of cardboard and newsprint.
Recent months, though, have brought smaller vehicles, such as pickups and vans. Even cars, and some of them are Buicks and Chryslers and higher-priced models. They're carrying smaller loads, gleaned from fence rows and basements. Often the hopeful faces of a woman, man and child beam up at him in his glass-sided booth at the scales, hoping for report of a heavy load or a high price. Prices for scrap, though, are measured in quarters and dimes - not in dollars.
Even aluminum, long the unchallenged profit king of recycling, has nose-dived. Just a year ago, a pound of aluminum-drink cans - about 26 of them - paid 28 cents. For many reasons, all complex, some international, that price has sunk to 17 cents per pound.
Ronnie Hall buys aluminum for Reynolds Metal at Shaffers Crossing. He's seen cans filled with sand. With pebbles. He's seen rocks and bricks and a dead raccoon inside bags of cans, as can-sellers try to add to the weight.
Hall's fingers are sensitive as any scale. He ferrets out the impostors.
He, too, said aluminum cans have come to him in the trunks of Mercedes and Cadillacs - signs that penny-pinching is being practiced on every rung of society's ladder.
One trash-truck driver, whose route includes the Wal-Mart store south of Roanoke, says recession seems to have hit that store. Last summer, he was called to pick up fully packed compactors at the store once a week.
He visits now once every two weeks, even once every three weeks.
Wayne Andrews is not swayed by the arguments that see recession lurking behind every half-empty garbage pail.
He sees as much trash as ever. He sees people throwing out recyclables, not by the can or the liter bottle, but by the ton.
If these were truly lean times, Andrews reasons, there would be more recycling, meager though the earnings might be.
There's a pulse at the landfill, anybody can see it.
Figuring out what it means, that's the hard part.