No subject

About this time, Robert Boucher walked into the room - no suit, no tie,
clear blue eyes, and a Starbucks of iced green tea. We shook hands, then
sat in silence. I had less than an hour and a long list of topics to
cover, but before we could get to my questions we needed Alvin Thomas,
Synagro's chief legal counsel, Boucher had insisted we have a lawyer
present for the interview, and I had some suspicion why: aside from a
variety of human-waste-related litigation, Standard & Poor's had
recently downgraded Synagro's corporate credit rating on $287 million of
outstanding debt. There was plenty to be paranoid about and, as it
turned out, a great deal to keep under wraps. A few months after I left
Houston, one of the world's largest private equity firms, The Carlyle
Group, purchased Synagro Technologies for $776 million.

Robert Boucher grew up in Dover, New Hampshire - "117 miles of sewer
lines and one wastewater treatment plant", he said. His father sold
garbage trucks, containers, and equipment, and Bob worked summers for
Dad, cleaning out used cans and repainting them. He went to Northeastern
to play offensive guard but soon dropped out and went to work in the
family business.

A company called American Waste gave him his first stab at management,
and Boucher began to ascend the corporate ladder. He eventually landed a
job at Allied Waste, one of the largest general waste companies in
America. This was big-money garbage, and Boucher found himself in charge
of $1.5 billion in revenues. After he'd spent a number of years at
Allied, bankers came knocking on his door. They recognized a man they
could trust with the future, and they made Boucher chief operating
officer of Synagro. In 2003, he became CEO.

I asked how he perceived human waste in terms of the US economy.

"I think of it from the service aspect", said Boucher. "Running my
business as efficiently as possible keeps our shareholders happy. Our
customers are happy. Our bankers are happy."

But what about the actual substance?

"The material we handle is tougher than garbage", he said. "People don't
want to think about it. When you flush your toilet, you take it for
granted - until the day it comes back at you. Then you have to deal with
it. When you go to the commode, that's the end of the process for you
but the beginning for us. We make it go away."

I told him that Roman and Saxon soothsayers believed they could prophesy
through the art of scatomancie. Like those ancient adepts, could Boucher
analyze the shape of human waste and predict the future?

"We handle material that not a lot of people are interested in today",
he said. "It's a blocking-and-tackling-type business, a plug-along. Very
utilitylike. It's not sexy."

Clearly, Boucher was evading the question. He did not want to let on
about the car fuel and cement.

"How about energy?" I asked. "When would waste emerge as an alternative
to gasoline?"

He told me that in Europe they burn it, which produces the same amount
of energy as slag coal. Maybe 5,000 British thermal units per cubic
pound. Then he lifted the glass of NYOFCO pellets. My pellets.

"Let's get our arms around this", he said. "I can't tell you this is an
energy business, from the standpoint of reusable fuel. There's not
enough volume."

Not enough volume?

Boucher shook his head.

That took a while to sink in. Not enough volume meant no filling up the
tank. No lightbulbs,  "No lightbulbs", said Boucher.

But what about big pharma? What about DEET and Chanel?

He shook his head.

No penicillin recovery? No decaffeinated sludge?

He shook his head.

What about metal reclamation"? Wasn't this pellet some sort of renewable
source of aluminum and chromium?

"It's almost a non-detect", said Boucher.

Clearly, he took me for a fool. He had plenty of reasons to conceal what
he and his cronies were up to. He was playing dumb, and I was falling
for it. His lawyer looked up from his notes and waited for my next
question. What was my next question? I checked the list. What about
building materials?

"It turned out not to be so cost-effective", he said. "Land applications
have been done forever because they make sense".

I demanded that he prophesy.

"How far into the future?"

"Twenty years", I said.

"Everyone wants the black box to make it disappear", he said. "But
that's not what happens. One hundred years from now will they have iPods
that make pellets? Sure. Apple will have bought us. They'll have tie
vapor box". Then his voice dipped beneath sarcasm. "Twenty years is not
enough. Twenty years is nothing."

And he gave me the look. Perhaps he was appalled by my ignorance,
perhaps he didn't care, but he understood his product and knew the
notion of its glorious future was but another symptom of our desire to
deny. Despite the primitive and absurd fantasy that we might refine what
lay dark within ourselves and reform it into something fabulous, there
was no glorious future of waste. There was only this world of shit.

I had no more questions but could not bring myself to leave. So we sat
without saying anything for a long time. Eventually, Boucher began to
reminisce about first-class travel across America. He flew a lot, and
whenever he took his seat on a plane the small talk would begin, and the
question would arise: What do you do for a living?

"I tell them", recalled Boucher. "And inevitably they say, 'Wow. What a
great business.'"

_____

Frederick Kaufman is the author of A Short History of the American
Stomach (Harcourt, 2008). His last article for Harper's Magazine,
"Debbie Does Salad", appeared in the October 2005 issue.

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