The Tough and Dirty Work of a Clean Climate Future
By Joshua Roubik
Published November 6, 2023
I began my environmental law career at a landfill in Flagstaff, Arizona. I was a fresh graduate of the Environmental Engineering program at Northern Arizona University, and I was lucky enough to be given a chance to run the Hazardous Products Center (affectionately called “HPC”) at the Cinder Lakes Landfill. When I came to the HPC, I was ready to change the world and saw this as the first step. I learned that the HPC and the landfill had been changing the world long before I arrived.
The HPC accepts every sort of household hazardous waste from around Flagstaff. In addition, it takes in TVs, electronics, and batteries to be recycled. It is the end of the line for everything that no one wants to think about or see. The HPC is a vital part of the trash disposal in Flagstaff; it sorts and removes batteries to prevent fires and keeps liquids from entering the landfill and, eventually, the groundwater. It is a place where no one wants to spend too much time, and most of all, it is dirty and challenging work.
My experience with the environmental movement before the HPC had been what you see on TV—the loud speeches, protests, and the signing of the Paris Climate Accords. These are the moments that get people excited and motivated. The moments that drive civic participation and election turnout. I owe everything I have to these moments and am so grateful for the people creating them. But what happens at a landfill outside of Flagstaff, and landfills all over the country, is an environmental movement few are ever lucky enough to witness.
The employees at Cinder Lake Landfill are the best of the best. To the untrained outsider, they are regular, ordinary people who bury trash all day. Nothing could be further from the truth. They are some of the best construction workers, hydrologists, and surveyors you will ever meet. Constantly tweaking, rebuilding, and analyzing the slope of the landfill, the trash's density, and the landfill's height. They work as a cohesive group to complete a highly engineered structure that keeps our trash contained, out of our water, out of the woods, and out of our minds. Their whole job is to protect our environment. Yet, you will never find most of them at a climate protest.
Large portions of my time were often spent trying to convince them that they should care about climate change or tactfully guiding them to the conclusion that we should be doing more. I never seemed to gain any ground or convince a single person. The problem was that they were sold the same environmentalism as I was. But for them, the loud speeches, protests, and Paris Climate Accords are not exciting and inspiring moments. They see those same protests and speeches as an extension of a government that has already failed them. The events that inspired me to get my hands dirty at the HPC proved to them that the government would eventually force them to live their lives in a specific way.
Once I stopped trying to convince them, I had the pleasure of speaking with these workers about their lives and their work. Every one of them understood what we were doing there. They understood that we had to do our job properly to protect their home and the woods they love as much as I do. They understood that this work protects future generations and their work has ramifications if done improperly. If they didn’t contain the wind-blown litter properly, they were the ones in the woods cleaning it up. When a battery caused a landfill fire, they spent hours putting out the fire. They went through training to protect the stormwater on the site, perfected spill containment, and understood how a well-built landfill protected the area's groundwater.
Their job is to protect the environment everyday, and they put their lives on the line to do so. The most dangerous jobs in America are the ones that no one wants to have to think about. Miners, delivery drivers, construction workers, and power line installers are all in the top ten most dangerous jobs, alongside trash and recycling collections.[1] These are the people mining the metals necessary for the clean energy transition, constructing new energy-efficient buildings, installing power lines to create a more reliable energy grid, and managing our waste.
My time at the HPC taught me that the environmental movement was alive and well here. It is the landfill operators starting work at 6:00 a.m. to keep the woods clean. It is the HPC staff remixing paint for eight hours a day to give it away for free. It is perfecting the landfill’s slope, protecting stormwater, and turning off idling trucks. The guys at the landfill might never be found at a climate protest, and they didn’t need to. They get up every morning and live it.
The autoworkers, the solar panel installers, and the landfill operators are complicated people with families they want to protect, and they see their jobs as an extension of doing that. They protect their environment so their kids can hike, hunt, fish, and enjoy the outdoors like they did when they were kids. They might not call it climate change, they might not show up at a protest, but they understand how to protect the environment better than most ever will.
The modern environmental movement must include the landfill operators. It has to be an open invitation for everyone to join the fight. The environmental movement on TV is essential for driving systemic change vital to solving the climate crisis, but without the workers implementing that change, they’re just nice ideas. Our way forward must have well-paying, technical jobs in which people can take pride—jobs with tangible results that make a difference. We cannot afford to lose the workers in the trenches, doing the dirty and hard work every day. I don’t know the solution to creating a system that utilizes this forgotten group in the transition to what is necessary to halt the climate crisis, but I do know that when we do, thousands of brilliant, resilient, hardworking men and women will be ready to get to work.
[1] The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, Civilian occupations with high fatal injury rates (last visited: Nov. 6, 2023), https://www.bls.gov/charts/census-of-fatal-occupational-injuries/civilian-occupations-with-high-fatal-work-injury-rates.htm.