The Sultan Of Solid Waste -- The Razore Family Has Been Talking Trash For Three Generations

IN THE SUMMER OF 1988, Warren Razore climbed into a small airplane at Goldendale, Klickitat County, and took off in search of his future.

He soon wished he hadn't. Swooping low into one rural valley after another, the chartered plane bounced in the gusty winds off the Columbia Gorge. Razore's stomach began to churn. He gulped Dramamine while trying to focus on the task at hand.

When the plane finally landed, Razore still had not seen what he was looking for. Reluctantly, he agreed to see one more site - 30 miles upriver. They drove east along the river, turning at the tiny roadside village of Roosevelt, then winding five miles up a narrow side road to the top of a grassy ridge.

Razore immediately forgot his churning stomach. Before him was a shallow basin about two miles long and a mile wide, slightly tilted to the north, carpeted in brown grass.

To hear Razore tell the story, it was as if the clouds parted and the valley was bathed in a ray of light while the Mormon Tabernacle Choir broke into the Hallelujah Chorus.

In his mind's eye, Razore saw that valley filled with millions of tons of garbage - garbage from Bellingham and Spokane and Bellevue and Wenatchee and, of course, from his hometown of Seattle. He saw his future, that of his family and the family business that had become his charge.

"This," he recalled later, "was the greatest landfill site I had ever seen."

Four years later, all of this has come to pass. The grassy basin at Roosevelt has become what is known in polite circles as a "regional landfill" - carefully lined with layers of sheet plastic and geotextile, gravel and clay, subdivided into cells, mechanized and plumbed for future energy recovery.

All that's missing is the garbage from one city - his own. Warren Razore, Seattle's sultan of solid waste, is no longer keeper of the hometown rubbish.

For this, Razore blames what he calls "the revolution" - Seattle's bold, single-minded decision five years ago to get out of the garbage-burying business and become The Recycling Capital of the Universe. It is a revolution that a few skeptics, including Razore, now suggest may be at least premature, and, at worst, a costly environmental boondoggle borne by the city's ratepayers.

WARREN RAZORE IS A third-generation garbage man, heir to a family fortune encompassing real estate, bowling alleys and, most important, the lion's share of anything people in the Puget Sound area have discarded over the past 65 years. He, and his father before him, have earned a reputation as shrewd businessmen with a keen understanding of garbage.

For this, Razore makes no apologies.

"Some people are lawyers and some are newspaper reporters. This is what the Razore family does, and we do it well. We move a million pounds of garbage a day. We move trains a mile long, using containers we designed. We are a big-league operation."

It all started in the minor leagues. From about 1911 to 1920, Angelo Razore, Warren's grandfather, collected food waste around Queen Anne Hill and recycled it, in a manner of speaking, by feeding the food waste to the hogs at his farm on the site now occupied by Seattle Center. Angelo's young son, Josie, used a two-wheel cart to deliver milk, then picked up scrap greens to feed his milk cow.

In 1920 Angelo got homesick, packed up the family and moved back to Genoa, Italy. Son Josie went with him and stayed until 1928 when, fearing the rise of Mussolini's fascists, he returned to America and went into business with a friend in Bellingham.

"It was hell for Italians," Josie recalls. "People came over here and there was no work, so we did what we could."

That meant garbage. Josie got a three-year contract to collect Bellingham's trash at 15 cents a can. They loaded the stuff onto trucks, then onto a boat, hauled it out into the bay and dumped it on the outgoing tide.

By 1938, Josie was getting good at the business, and expanded southward with a bid for Seattle's contract. Here he was playing with the big boys, including Dave Beck and his powerful Teamsters union. Threatened by the union, Razore quietly merged with a trucking company and its fleet of 59 trucks and went to work.

As the nation launched into its post-war binge of consumption, garbage proved to be a growth industry. Year by year, the Razores expanded their empire under the banner of Seattle Disposal Co. By 1950, Seattle's residential contract was worth more than $1 million a year, plus $200,000 worth of side contracts and more in Kent and Des Moines and other Puget Sound communities.

As early as age 9, young Warren Razore worked for his dad, dispensing slop to the hogs at the family farm at what is now known as the Cedar Hills landfill. Later he worked on the trucks.

"You could always identify the neighborhood by the beer bottles," Razore recalls. "In West Seattle, it was Lucky Lager. In Rainier Valley, it was Rainier. In the Central Area, it was Miller High Life."

Whatever the brand, nobody asked or cared what happened to the stuff. Everything went to landfills, mostly along the shorelines of Puget Sound and Lake Washington. Seattle's garbage went to some of its most environmentally sensitive areas - in West Seattle, Interbay, Union Bay and Mount Baker.

Today we may shudder at the thought. But burying garbage was not a Razore policy; it was society's. Americans dumped their garbage the same places they sent their sewage: into the body of water at the bottom of the hill.

The problem was not landfills, but finding dirt to cover them with. So the Razores launched a side business, excavating for projects ranging from the Space Needle to the Interstate 5 freeway and, appropriately, Seattle City Hall.

Meanwhile, the Razores established their base in Southeast Seattle. In his spare time, Josie dabbled in real estate, picking up odds and ends from Northgate to the downtown waterfront, little investments that ultimately made more money than garbage. An avid bowler, he bought one bowling alley, then another, until he owned eight of them and a place in the Bowlers' Hall of Fame.

By the late 1950s, Seattle's poor housekeeping was beginning to show. Lake Washington had turned into a cesspool - not from the landfills, but the sewage. Local governments formed Metro to build a regional sewer system. Later, the city's landfills were closed, covered and converted to parks and parking lots. The Razores began hauling garbage farther to suburban and rural landfill sites such as Midway, Newcastle and Cedar Hills.

These, of course, proved to be short-sighted solutions. But as recently as the late 1970s, garbage was considered to be a problem not of ecology, but of aesthetics. Folks didn't care what happened to their garbage as long as they didn't have to look at it. So the Razores, like city officials, selected dumps that would be conveniently out of sight, and of mind.

In 1979 Warren Razore took over the company, merged with longtime associate Steve Banchero, and called it Rabanco Inc.

IN MANY RESPECTS, the younger Razore takes after his father. He has the same oval face, olive complexion and heavy-boned frame. He is fiercely private and oriented toward his family; his two brothers-in-law are involved in the family business, and he fully expects his sons to follow suit.

But Razore the Younger is also a creature of his town and his generation. He grew up in Seattle, graduated from Franklin High and Seattle University. He likes speed - skis and boats and especially things that go vroom. For several years, he sponsored professional race cars, competing coast-to-coast.

But none of this interferes with his business. And in the past few years, there has been little time for anything else. As Warren Razore took over the business, Seattle and other local governments were beginning to confront the issues swirling around their garbage. Second-stage landfills were filling up. Neighbors were beginning to complain about methane at the Midway dump. Skyrocketing real-estate costs made it difficult to find new sites close to town. Something had to be done.

There were experiments with high-tech solutions. Seattle and other cities explored the idea of burning the trash in costly incinerators, using the heat to generate electricity.

In the mid-1970s, Lane County, Ore., built a "Refuse Dry Fuel Plant" and hired Rabanco to operate it. The Rube Goldberg contraption lifted the county's garbage up a conveyer belt and dumped it into a horizontal shaft filled with swinging hammers, magnets, blowers and more. The idea was to pulverize the stuff, send the metal this way, the glass that way, and shred the remainder into a burnable confetti, which was trucked over to fuel the boilers at the University of Oregon.

It didn't work. The confetti left too much ash. "And we learned to expect an explosion every 29,000 tons or so - sort of spontaneous combustion," Razore recalls. "One day, the whole thing blew up. It's a miracle nobody was hurt."

Eventually, Seattle chose an even bolder route. For years, the city had been home to a grass-roots recycling movement, with private collection centers and a few entrepreneurs groping for innovative uses for other people's rubbish.

The Razores had been in the recycling business since World War II, when they collected truckloads of scrap metal to be converted to tanks and bombers. Relying mostly on the more homogenous waste from his commercial customers, the company made money re-selling scrap aluminum and other metals, newspaper and office paper.

Residential recycling, however, was a tougher proposition. Garbage was mixed, habits entrenched and there was little or no incentive to recycle.

Still, City Hall decided in the mid-1980s to undertake a two-stage campaign to reduce its garbage. First, the city would change its billing strategy. For years Seattleites had paid a flat fee for weekly garbage collection - regardless of how many cans were collected. Now the city would charge by the can; residents who generated more garbage would pay more.

At the same time, the city would offer "free" curbside collection of paper, aluminum and other recyclables, issuing separate containers to keep the good stuff from the bad.

The idea was to force people to pay the real costs of collecting and disposing of their wastes, and to create an economic incentive to recycle.

WARREN RAZORE WAS quietly skeptical. Having been in the recycling business for years, he knew the market for recycled paper was soft, and almost nonexistent for glass and paper. But he went along with it, buying the old steel plant at Third and Lander and converting it to one of the largest recycling centers in the nation, processing nearly 1 million pounds per day on his long-term city contract.

Meanwhile, he began searching for a new landfill, a safe and secure site capable of meeting the needs of Seattle and the region for decades to come.

Klickitat County was a natural. It is rural, with 16,000 people scattered over hundreds of miles of cheap, vacant land. It has a dry climate - less than 10 inches of rain a year. It has good highway and rail links to Seattle and Portland. Most important, the county was looking for new jobs and new taxes. They wanted a landfill.

That's how Razore ended up on that hilltop, gazing across his promised land.

As engineers studied the site, it turned out to be even better than they had imagined. Underlying the site is a 300-foot layer of clay. Gravel, dirt and clay, used to line and cover the garbage, are easily accessible from the surrounding hillsides.

Razore quickly negotiated a deal with the county. He would meet all state and federal environmental standards, employ local people, spend more than $1 million improving the road from the highway, and pump some $200,000 a month into the county treasury.

Approval came in barely a year - remarkably fast for a major environmental project.

But not fast enough for Seattle City Hall. In 1989, while Razore was still working on his new site, city officials called for bids for a new 38-year residential garbage hauling and landfill contract. In its first two years alone, that contract would be worth $12 million a year. Over 38 years, it would add up to $400 million or more and produce enough garbage to keep his new landfill busy for the rest of his life.

This time, however, Razore faced tough competition in the form of Chicago-based Waste Management Inc., the largest garbage company in the world, with more than $6 billion a year worth of business.

Razore dived into what became known as the Battle of Seattle. After half a century of doing business with City Hall, he felt he would get at least part of the contract. After all, Rabanco had its corporate headquarters in Rainier Valley and employed more than 400 people in the area, including 60 in that chronically depressed community.

In early 1991, the city awarded the contract to Waste Management and its older landfill in Oregon, directly across the river from Roosevelt. Razore lost the battle.

"It was an incredible disappointment," Razore recalls. He had bet the family business on his new landfill, only to be snubbed by his hometown.

City officials say they were not confident that Rabanco was up to the task. "Timing was critical," says Diana Gale, former director of the city's Solid Waste Utility. Razore is "a hands-on, entrepreneurial sort of guy, but not high-tech."

Razore simmers at that assessment. His landfill had been approved and was within weeks of opening for business. Gale now concedes that the site is environmentally as secure as the Oregon site. It is easily accessible by rail or truck - without crossing state lines. And Razore insists his bid was cheaper.

"The deeper we got into it, the more signs we saw that the solid-waste institution never intended to give us a fair shot," he says. "Instead, they paid more to go out-of-state for a less secure site. In the end, I think we paid the price for being local."

Bob Royer, the former deputy mayor hired by Razore to help make his case, figures it was a clash of styles: the successful hometown boy, handicapped by 50 years of political baggage, against the slick, nationwide corporate machine.

For all his years of business here, Razore has never been a popular figure at City Hall. He feels he and his father have been subjected to "innuendo" attached to their ethnic background and the number of vowels in the family name. "It's never out front," Razore says. "But it's there."

There is no foundation for any such innuendo. Razore's only known scrape with the law dates to an illegal $10,000 campaign contribution in 1971 to then-state Sen. August Mardesich. Officials later charged Mardesich with extorting money from garbage-disposal companies and other businesses, and Razore testified for the government.

Garbage companies "back East" may need to bribe officials for garbage contracts, Razore says. "But that's not the way we do business here."

Razore and his supporters feel his biggest problem is being the local success story, that city officials resent anybody getting rich on garbage. "You sense this frustration at the city that we make money on something that people throw away. They'd just as soon give those contracts to somebody from Chicago."

Not so, says Gale. Rabanco does a fine job of collecting garbage. But the company lacked the technology and "analytical ability" to handle Seattle's program, she says.

Either way, city officials may also have resented Razore's skepticism toward what he calls "the revolution." He recalls warning city officials against taking its recycling program too far, too fast.

IN ANY EVENT, RAZORE has survived his disappointment with Seattle City Hall. The company continues to hold the recycling contract for South Seattle, and Razore says he is "at least breaking even" on that business.

Meanwhile, Razore has won garbage contracts with Bellevue, King County, Snohomish County, Pierce County, Spokane, Grays Harbor and many more. In its third year, the Roosevelt landfill is burying a million tons of garbage per year, some of it coming from as far as Canada and California.

Razore savors opportunities to showcase his new Klickitat site. Hundreds of municipal officials have visited the glass gazebo on the ridge overlooking the site. From a distance, the operation looks downright tidy. The basin has been partitioned into cells that are landscaped and lined with layers of clay, heavy sheet plastic, fabric and gravel. A perforated pipe at the bottom eventually will collect leachate from the decomposition process, which will fuel a small power plant.

One by one, trucks back up to the edge and tip their loads into the dump, where the stuff is pushed and mashed into a compact layer, then covered with several inches of dirt.

A stroll through the landfill is a discouraging glimpse at a consumptive society. There are rolls of shag carpeting, a new pillow still in its plastic bag, a 300-watt halogen floor lamp, a plastic football helmet with an arrowhead insignia, scraps of Christmas wrapping paper, and the omnipresent trade names: Budweiser, Miller, Pepsi, Coke, Safeway.

Overall, the site is almost odorless - except for a peculiar black substance being spread over the top. "De-inking sludge," Razore explains with a wry smile. "That's the residue from a newspaper recycling plant." I'm complaining about the odor of my own labor.

The site seems to challenge some common assumptions. In two visits, I looked for the notorious disposable diapers, alleged to be wreaking havoc in our landfills. I never found a single diaper.

Plastic bags, however, are everywhere, laced through every truckload, blowing in the wind, caught up in the perimeter fence. But looks are deceiving, says Rabanco engineer Rick Morck. Plastics make up less than 5 percent of the mix.

"Sixty to 70 percent of the mix is organic," Morck says. "With the liner, that makes for a tremendous energy resource. Instead of a mummified repository, we have a biological reactor, which eventually will generate about 60 megawatts of energy - three times the needs of all of Klickitat County. And all from recycling."

Seattle errs, Razore says, by making its decisions based on the assumption that landfills are inherently evil, and recycling is inherently good. Policy makers need to use the marketplace to decide on an appropriate balance.

But Seattle City Hall has lost touch with economic realities, he says. Garbage is a commodity subject to the laws of supply and demand - like soybeans or oil. As more material hits the market, prices have plummeted. Newsprint, which had sold for as much as $130 a ton, now sells for less than $50. Other paper is worth as little as $10 a ton. Clear and brown glass goes for $33. Green glass has no market value at all; Rabanco pays to have the stuff hauled away.

And ratepayers are stuck with paying to make up the difference.

As a result, garbage pickup rates have skyrocketed from about $3 per month in the mid-1970s to an average of about $20 in 1993. Less than half of that money goes to pay the costs of garbage collection, hauling and landfilling.

But the city persists. Officials claim that 40 percent of residential garbage is being recycled. The next goal is 50 percent, then 60.

All of this might seem to bode ill for Razore and others who have invested in state-of-the-art landfills. If the recycling ethic wins out, what happens to those dumps?

Not to worry, Razore says. The nation, including Seattle, will be using landfills for many years to come.

Meanwhile, if Seattle decides it wants 100-percent recycling, he'll be there to help, and he'll make money doing it. But folks deserve to know what all of this is costing them, he says.

"This is a phenomenal time for my business," he says. "Five years ago the city set some recycling goals, and we achieved those goals far sooner than most people expected."

And what now? Recycling the first 10 to 20 percent of society's garbage makes sense, he says. It's cheaper than burying it.

Going from 20 to 30 percent may require some subsidy - at least for the present. But it probably makes sense anyway. But the next 10 percent may cost taxpayers $200 a ton, and then $300, or $500 a ton.

If that's OK with rate payers, it's OK with Warren Razore. Either way, his trucks will be there, doing what they do best, dutifully collecting what we don't want anymore, and making it disappear.

Ross Anderson is an editorial writer for The Seattle Times. Harley Soltes is Pacific's staff photographer.