A Day at the Recyclers

Jason Fulford recently traveled to Tennessee for the Green Guide magazine to photograph the path a plastic bag takes when recycled at Wal-Mart. He spoke with us about the sites, the road food and his experiences.

What did you enjoy most about this shoot? What most caught your eye?

I'm curious about how things are made, the process—and how things are broken back down. There were four different stages: the Wal-Mart, the MRF [material recovery facility], the Morristown facility and the makeshift studio in my hotel room. I don't know if any were more enjoyable. I really enjoyed the whole job.

One thing that struck me about Memphis in general is that it still felt very regional in a way I don't feel in other parts of the country. There still seemed to be a lot of businesses around and older architecture and people were super friendly. A lot of this country is starting to feel the same—architecturally, what people talk about and how they talk about it—and Memphis seemed a bit outside of that to me.

As for the MRF, one of the first things you notice are these big piles, just these mountains of stuff. You have a mountain of coat hangers, a mountain of plastic, a huge mountain of cardboard from locals picking up cardboard from the side of the road. While I was there, I saw three pick-up trucks pull up full of cardboard. Then, outside of the building you see these mountains of giant cubes in which all of these materials are baled.

James Downey from the MRF has been in recycling since the 1970s. He told us a lot of stories and was interested in problem solving. He once received a load of contaminated Slim Fast, though they'd already been canned and boxed. So, first of all he recycled all the cardboard. Then he shredded the cans, catching the contents and recycling that into compost, and then he recycled the cans for their aluminum.

Did you have any difficulties?

The only thing that remained mysterious was the last step in Morristown at the plastic recyclers. Because it was one of a kind and used a proprietary process, we could only shoot the machine that processed the bags from one angle. The machine was hot and humid and it vented steam into the room, giving out these huge clouds. The end product was the shredded material that you saw photographed, and that material is converted into pellets.

Besides the shoot, what else stuck with you?

In Memphis, we had some really good barbecue. We went to Central Barbecue, which was not really a hole in the wall but in that direction, and it was really amazing. The Little Tea Shop is a "meat and three" kind of place (a couple of their specialties are turnip greens and corn bread). If you go there for lunch you get a real cross section of society—local politicians, lawyers, construction workers, tourists. It's a pretty small place and they were having a birthday party with these women in hats. There was an old pharmacy that had a soda fountain, Wiles-Smith Drugs, and that place was really fun. The food you get there is like when you're ten years old and go to a friend's house and it's the food their mom serves you. Then there's the Civil Rights Museum in the hotel where Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. We really had full days, up at the crack of dawn, back long after dark.

We visited The Pink Palace, a mansion (made from pink granite) built by Clarence Saunders, the guy who developed Piggly Wiggly. He lost it before it was finished, so the city bought it and it now has everything from a shrunken head to Elvis' military uniforms.

We also had a good time in Nashville—we saw the Parthenon, a replica built in the '30s in a park. It was supposed to be temporary, but they recast the plaster in aggregate and it's a really strange sight with a statue of Athena in the middle of it.

You've got an eye for grittier material. Does your work tend to focus on older, distressed items?

Not always, I don't have any hard and fast rules like that. It's nice sometimes if a picture is "almost perfect" in whatever way that that happens, whether it's a compositional element or the lighting or something having to do with one of the objects. When you're shooting still lifes, you're usually placing things really carefully. If you stop at the right point the picture is a lot better.

Lastly, did this change the way you use plastic bags?

I think about it every time I'm offered a bag, and after this job it's probably hammered into my head just a little bit more. It definitely affected me.

I came away with two main points in terms of things that I learned about recycling. One was physically how it works, and the second was learning a little bit more about why it happens. Recycling doesn't happen because people think it's good for the world, it happens because garbage is a commodity. If you have a company and advertise you recycle, your customers will probably like you better.