The headquarters of Saubermacher stood out on the periphery, a diamond on the landscape, predicting the growth of the city of Graz. This high-tech, environmentally-friendly structure expressed the pursuit of being environmentally friendly with water-pipes that cooled the space in the summer, rather than AC, and an efficient lighting system that detected movement, so no energy was wasted in an empty room. Aside from the structure’s energy considerations, the office had a notable amount of art, all focused or made from recycled materials. The building was filled with great art, the origin of which were explained by the primary sharehold having a son who was artists living in New York. The largest artwork in Ziehenberger’s office was a photograph of tetra-briks flattened and bound into a giant cube. Tetra-briks, Gerhard explained, were primarily incinerated into energy. I started the conversation with Gerhard Ziehenberger, the Chief Operating Office of Saubermacher about the state of recyclables.
Saubermacher processes many materials into secondary raw materials, which were used in construction industry. Most of the clients were located in Austria and Central Europe. Television glass got shipped to Indonesia, where a manufacturer still produced that type of unit. In general, Saubermacher’s business was efficiency framed as high recovery.
Like many European countries, the rate of consumption was increasing in Austria. This was a function of wealth. But the areas of consumption are not merely individual habits but marketing techniques. Ziehenberger used the example of perfumes bottles. A perfumery might overspend on extra glass in order to make their product more appealing. A portion of this cost was passed on to the consumer, but the spending was mostly justified in luxury cost of the product and relatively low percentage of the cost for materials. As an aspect of branding, I understood his supermarket example, but I wondered if a similar calculation existed in the green economy: upfront costs equating to long term savings. And if so, did the Saubermacher headquarters also fit within the logic he was explaining. That is, wasn’t the ecological disposition of the building also a branding element of Saubermacher?
On January 1, 2018, China ceased accepting the garbage and recyclables of Europe and the North America. Surprisingly, Gerhard hadn’t requested my questions in advance, which allowed me to divert from the predictable statistics and small talk that most companies are prepared to deliver and ask how these secondary raw materials ultimately made it back to China, since that was the origin of most consumer materials in Austria. He prefaced the recycling situation in Austria, as well as Europe, was in a period of transition, due to Chinese new policy known as the Golden Sword. The landscape was new and industry and policy were still responding. Exactly what would happen was unclear, but Ziehenberger was optimistic that a new circular economy would develop in Europe. That meant not only recycling everything that was consumed in Europe, but producing everything that was consumer in Europe as well. How this would happen, or what this world would look like was not obvious. To me, this seemed an impossible regression to the era predating the Silk Road.
I asked what percent of waste was recycled and surprisingly, Gerhard, the Chief Operating Officer, said he didn’t know the exact figures. However, the European Landfill Directive prohibited any municipal waste from being landfilled. Half of everything that was put in municipal waste was recycled and the other half was turned into energy. By diverting waste from landfills, Austria had diminished most of the methane byproduct of waste to almost zero.
Gerhard believed that ultimately, Austria’s environmental practices had very little impact in the world and that it was up to bigger players, like the U.S. and China, to change their policy. This was something strange to hear, especially as individuals struggled to make sense of the impact that just one person, nonetheless 8 million people, had on the planet. Butt Ziehenberger didn’t mean to say this in a way to discourage recycling: his intent was to put a sense of scale into the equation of a lost cause. The position that Austria should take, he emphasized, was to export their knowledge to developing countries, thereby extending their impact. The question was who would hire the companies, as they were the entities that put the scientific knowledge to use. Was he alluding to the need of non-commercial, non-governmental entities to introduce the ecological practices abroad?
Plastics were a particularly difficult sector to recycle, in part due to the down-cycling characteristic, massive pollution issue in the seas and rivers, but also due to volatility of the cost the main ingredient: crude oil. Saubermacher had explored into this enormous deluge several times but could never determine that operating in it made financial sense. The EU in general was a loss as to what to do with post-consumer plastics. The movement toward higher regulation to discourage the use of plastics includes a future ban on plastic bags and plastic straws. This aims to change behavior as well as substitute inferior materials with better materials.
Behavior and general perception were the biggest hurdles to recycling and a better planet. He shared the anecdote of riding in a truck in Oman and seeing the driver throw a coke can out of the window. He asked the driver if, after driving the same route 100 times, he would feel horrified to see the cans in the desert. The driver replied, ‘I never drive the same route twice.’
The other perception that is unconstructive was the belief that Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Denmark were ecologically-inclined due to their wealth. He scoffed at this, saying only “If you live in a country where people can afford an iPhone, they can afford to be ecological.” I would add that the reverse was true: their wealth was a function of their success in dealing with biopolitical issues, including clean water, air and land.
Ziehenberger was anticipating the future initiatives of recycling organic waste. As wealth was increasing, Austrians were throwing away more organic waste. Saubermacher hoped to first turn this into a biofuel and compost the remaining waste. The other technologies that were on the horizon were the production of proteins through the use of black soldier flies that could process organic waste. As farm food or pet food for turtles, Gehard suggested the wide future of BSF larva; he even echoed the potential of human consumption.
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I wasn't sure which side of the street I was to meet Walter Felber. Two men, who appeared homeless stood together on one side while I walked between the stations on both sides, looking for a man who would be looking for someone else. Each tram that came and went offered a possibility to filter out the bystanders or bring Walter. I made long eye contact with each man who looked over fifty as he passed, waiting for a sign of a yield. Fifteen minutes went by and one of the homeless men was now sitting on a bench, so I asked the other man, who was looking down the street if he was Walter Felber, he said 'Yes' and that we should go inside the church to talk. He meant “warm up.”
In the church he started talking about the rampant political corruption in Graz while I asked myself whether the topic was relevant for me to film, or how might I direct the conversation toward the Speicherkanal. His storytelling went in the opposite direction, taking me back to his time in Vienna and how and why he had even come to Graz forty years ago.
Then he said, "This is what the sewer looks like," and took out a large piece of paper; my signal to start recording. He began drawing a profile view with the cars, streets and buildings above, toilets connected to the drains and the sewer river. I filmed as he continued the drawing and, seeming satisfied with the layout and filled with a renewed, directed purpose, handed me the paper and said, "So, let's go into the sewer."
Leaving the church I asked, "We're not going to go to jail for going into the sewer, are?" He looked at me with a short glance of confusion then walked outside. The entrance to the Grazbach, or where the Grazbach was sent underground, was near a Billa supermarket. Since the time I was looking for Walter, at least one employee had been standing outside on smoke break, exploiting the system. I glanced at the young man who was smiling as Walter began to climb over the fence. Walter sat atop a concrete fence and carefully lifted one and then a second leg over, balancing on his ass long enough to strike a luge pose. Then he turned to me, nodded in beckoning, walked to a cement stairway and turned to me again before descending down to a metal ladder and into the Grazbach.
The creek made a half meter cascade down before being covered by the city’s ground level. Felber didn’t give much of an explanation, just named the canal and said that it led down to the Mur. I thought he said we would go the entire sewer length as we entered. He pointed out a dead pigeon on the walkway and said we had to be careful because there were noxious gases. As we went further into the canal, which was completely unlit other than the dwindling daylight to our backs, he pointed out a dead rat in the path. The camera was at the highest ISO and widest aperture when I asked him if he had brought a flashlight. I could hear him feeling out the pathway with his feet. He stopped just as my eyes were adjusting to the near blackness; “no, I didn’t bring a light. This is probably far enough, let’s go back.”
We headed out and up and across the street and through Sank Leonhard to what I presumed was this cafe in which Walter had his work hung on exhibit. Instead, he brought me to his apartment building, up several flights of stairs and into his dwelling, a crowded two-bedroom apartment full of ideas and art. His son lived below him, his ex-wife below his son. I wasn’t sure whether this was a short layover and I should enter or if this was the final stop and I misunderstood his work being in a cafe. I stood in the entrance as he brought panel after panel of his System Felber®, a workflow for the management of solid waste, out to show me. Should this be part of the video? Should I record this?
Walter showed me his office, a room with a desk that had once been a central location for thought and work, now a load-bearing structure for stacks of cardboard trays reaching to the ceiling, exactly the same cardboard tray as I had seen in Joachim’s apartment, occupied the space. I felt like this room was a time portal, a worm hole into my own possible future. Does the System Felber® apply to collections?
Adjacent to Walter’s office was his art studio, which was equally “occupied,” though the cardboard boxes were substituted with canvases. He had a passion for figure studies. The walls were covered salon style; the floor and table stacked with more works. Daylight trickled in as I tried to follow my camera with different works to which Walter called attention. One painting he showed me was an original Bauhaus that had been painted over with a portrait of a Bauhaus founder. A print out of a photo of the man was on hand to prove the veracity of his claim. We stayed for about an hour in his apartment, each of us trying to locate a needle of value in a haystack of his lived space. Random, human and ultimately confusing, the meander continued until I began to excuse myself in order to go to Schaumbad in order to print my book. To this he remarked that we had yet to see his work on display.
During the ride downtown and cappuccino at s’Auenbrugger, the conversation slipped in and out of relevance to the topic of sewers or solid waste management. At one point Walter was talking about Venezia and Puerto Marghera and paralleling how Mussolini’s relative was killed due to poor engineering, suggesting it was too early to consider the battle finished; a moment later he was recounting a basketball match he had coached and encountering the players, who recognizing him decades later. The a long shot at the last second had won the game.
In the final peel away from the extended afternoon, Walter demanded to show me a new invention that was making its way around the city of Graz: electrical heaters. At first I didn’t know what he was talking about; we hastily walked through Gries looking into the windows of restaurants–Walter trying to recall where he had last seen this monstrosity–entering one establishment he pointing out this terror of wasted energy. I disappointed him when I mentioned these were very common in the US and New York, even as they are known fire hazards.
Walter Felber and his system were one man's attempt at entering a mature industry of waste management, which was dominated by corporations, such as Saubermacher. Walking home it occurred to me that the reason why basically no one outside of the waste management industry knew, nonetheless were talking about, China's new policy of not accepting waste was because this was precisely an industrial problem. Just four decades earlier, much of the developed world was concerned about landfills, how they would fill up, how our garbage would overflow into the street, and now no one worried about that now, except for environmentalists. Industry formed, matured and developed. It had evolved toward resource management, which was good, but it was unfortunate that human behavior, such as lowering consumption rates, couldn't have occurred instead. And then I realized that the issue of global warming will likely take the same route. All of this talk about regulation, changing individual habits would have only a minor impact because certainly we'd never achieve the global consensus needed to fix our problem. Some industry may be regulated, as the CFCs in the 1980s, but that would equate to the issue becoming an industrial concern. Rather than curbing behavior, more likely a global climate change industry would arise and begin to profit from this problem, not unlike how Joachim talked about those who profited from collecting barrels of shit. In this near-future, few would discuss or worry about the state of the world’s climate, beside those who work in the industry. That was the cynical faith I had in capitalism.