Carte Blanche

hive. Workers in hard hats and uniforms were everywhere.
    The sheds, in neat rows like barracks, reminded Bond again of a prison or concentration camp.
    ARBEIT MACHT FREI . . .
    “This way,” Hydt called loudly, striding through a landscape cluttered with earth-moving equipment, skips, oil drums, pallets holding bales of paper and cardboard. Low rumblings filled the air, and the ground seemed to quiver, as if huge underground furnaces or machines were at work, a counterpoint to the high-pitched shrieks of the seagulls that swooped in to pick up scraps in the wake of the lorries entering through a gate a quarter-mile to the east. “I’ll give you a brief lesson in the business,” he offered.
    Bond nodded. “Please.”
    “There are four ways to rid ourselves of discard. Dump it somewhere out of the way—in tips or landfill now mostly but the ocean’s still popular. Did you know that the Pacific has four times as much plastic in it as zooplankton? The biggest rubbish tip in the world is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, circulating between Japan and North America. It’s at least twice the size of Texas and could be as big as the entire United States. Nobody actually knows. But one thing is certain: It’s getting bigger.
    “The second way is to burn discard, which is very expensive and can produce dangerous ash. Third, you can recycle it—that’s Green Way’s area of expertise. Finally, there’s minimizing, which means making sure that fewer disposable materials are created and sold. You’re familiar with plastic water bottles?”
    “Of course.”
    “They’re a lot thinner now than they used to be.”
    Bond took his word for it.
    “It’s called ‘lightweighting.’ Much easier to compact. You see, generally the products themselves aren’t the problem when it comes to discard. It’s packaging that causes most of the volume. Discard was easily handled until we shifted to a consumer manufacturing society and started to mass-produce goods. How to get the products into the hands of the people? Encase it in polystyrene foam, put that in a cardboard box and then, for God’s sake, put that in a plastic carrier bag to take home with you. Ah, and if it’s a present, let’s wrap it up in colored paper and ribbon! Christmas is an absolute hurricane of discard.”
    Standing tall, looking over his empire, Hydt continued: “Most waste plants extend over fifty to seventy-five acres. Ours here is a hundred. I have three others in South Africa and dozens of transfer stations, where the carters—the lorries you see on the streets—take all the discard for compacting and shipment to treatment depots. I was the first to set up transfer stations in the South African squatters’ camps. In six months the countryside was sixty to seventy percent cleaner. Plastic carrier bags used to be called ‘South Africa’s national flower.’ Not anymore. I’ve dealt with that.”
    “I saw the lorries bringing rubbish from Pretoria and Port Elizabeth to the yard here. Why from so far away?”
    “Specialized material,” Hydt said dismissively.
    Were those substances particularly dangerous? Bond wondered.
    His host continued, “But you must get your vocabulary right, Theron. We call wet discard ‘garbage’—leftover food, for instance. ‘Trash’ means dry materials, like cardboard and dust and tins. What the bin collectors pick up from in front of homes and offices is ‘municipal solid waste,’ or ‘MSW.’ That’s also called ‘refuse’ or ‘rubbish.’ ‘C and D’ is construction and demolition debris. Institutional, commercial and industrial waste is ‘ICI.’ The most inclusive term is ‘waste’ but I prefer ‘discard.’”
    He pointed east to the rear of the plant. “Everything that’s not recyclable goes there, to the working face of the landfill, where it’s buried in layers of plastic lining to keep bacteria and pollution from leaching into the ground. You can spot it by looking for the birds.”
    Bond followed his gaze toward the swooping gulls.
    “We call the landfill ‘Disappearance Row.’”
    Hydt led Bond to the doorway of a long building. Unlike the other work sheds here, this one had imposing doors, which were sealed. Bond peered through the windows. Workers were disassembling computers, hard drives, TVs, radios, pagers, mobile phones and printers. There were bins overflowing with batteries, lightbulbs, computer hard drives, printed circuit boards, wires and chips. The staff were