原文
INTRODUCTION：THE TIPPING FLOOR
An alarm sounds. Blockage cleared, the line at Green Recycling in Maldon, Essex, rumbles back into life. A great churning river of rubbish rolls down the conveyor: Amazon boxes, splintered skirting board, crushed plastic bottles, sundry packets, newspapers by the hundred. I’m standing three stories up on a green health and safety gangway, looking down the line. The air is thick, sour, the incessant roar of the machinery punctuated by the shattering of glass. It’s an awful sight—and yet I’m mesmerized. Odd bits of junk catch my eye: a single discarded glove; a crushed Tupperware container, the meal inside uneaten; a lone photograph of a child, smiling atop an adult’s shoulders. But they’re gone in an instant. The line at Green Recycling handles 12 metric tons of waste an hour, and it’s almost lunchtime.
Green Recycling is a Materials Recovery Facility, or MRF. When your recycling truck finishes its rounds on collection day, its destination will likely be a facility like this one, a huge corrugated-steel building on the end of an industrial estate, not far from the sea. Outside, trucks filled with refuse line up to dump their loads in pre-marked bays. Below us, on the tipping floor, a man in an excavator grabs clawfuls of trash from towering heaps and drops it into the maw of an industrial bag shredder, which tears the bags open and spreads their contents across the conveyor. Along the belt, women in hard hats and acid yellow high-visibility vests deftly pick and channel valuables (bottles, cardboard, aluminum cans) into sorting chutes, which break off from the line like tributaries. The flow is relentless, the choreography balletic. It’s a production line, in reverse.
“We produce 200 to 300 metric tons a day,” Jamie Smith, Green Recycling’s general manager, yells over the din. Jamie’s a career waste man, forty years old, with mud on his boots, dark hair and a strong, square jaw. He knows this line, its tics and its rhythms. Every day he watches as the vast output of humanity rolls by on its way to the end.
“Our main products are paper, cardboard, plastic bottles, mixed plastics, and wood,” Jamie explains, loudly, as we climb up a staircase to the sorting line. Like most in the business, he pronounces MRF as “merf.” The conveyor passes through at hip height, the trash rolling by like a sushi buffet. None of the sorters raise their eyes. (“Females make the best pickers,” Jamie says. “I don’t know why, just do.”) To my untrained senses the flow is indistinguishable, a nonstop torrent of brown and beige. “We’ve had a big rise in boxes in the last couple of years, thanks to Amazon,” Jamie says, as if anticipating my thoughts. To the pickers, every item has an exact value, set that morning by a computer in the main office that tracks the international market for recyclables.
参考译文
遗忘之地
警报声响起。清除掉堵塞物后，位于英国埃塞克斯郡（Essex）马尔登镇上的绿色回收站的生产线重新恢复正常。一条由垃圾形成的河流沿着传送带滚滚而下：亚马逊的包装盒、破碎的踢脚板、压碎的塑料瓶、杂物包、成百上千的报纸。我站在三层楼高的绿色通道的安全舷梯上，俯视着前方。空气浑浊、充 满酸味，机器的轰鸣声不断，不时夹杂着玻璃的破碎声。这是一个可怕的景象 ——但却深深吸引了我。一部分奇怪的垃圾引起了我的注意：一只丢弃的手套； 一个压碎的特百惠容器，里面还有未吃完的食物；一张孤零零的照片，一个孩子坐在一个成年人的肩膀上微笑。但他们转眼间就消失了。绿色回收站的生产线每小时可处理12吨垃圾，不过现在已经快到午餐时间了。
绿色回收是一种材料回收设施，简称为MRF。当您的回收卡车在收集日完成日常回收任务时，其目的地很可能是像这样的设施，即位于工业园区尽头的一座巨大的波纹钢建筑，离大海不远。外面，装满垃圾的卡车排成一排，将货物倾倒在预先标记的分隔间中。在我们下面的倾卸区里，一名驾驶挖掘机的工人从高耸的垃圾堆中抓起一堆垃圾，然后将其放入工业级袋式破碎机的物料口中，破碎机将包装撕开并使其内容物散布在传送带上。沿着传送带，头戴硬礼帽、身穿黄色荧光背心的女工们熟练地将贵重物品（瓶子、纸板、铝罐）挑拣出来，并导入分拣槽，分拣槽就像支流一样从生产线上断开。尽管垃圾源源不断，分拣的整个过程却如芭蕾舞的舞蹈动作一样协调统一，优雅舒展，井然有序，是技术和艺术的结合。这是一条化整为零的反向生产线。
绿色回收站的总经理杰米·史密斯在喧闹声中喊道：“我们每天生产200到300吨。”杰米是名专职垃圾回收人员，四十岁，靴子上沾满泥巴，黑发，下巴强壮、方正。他对这条生产线上的每个控制终端、每一环节的生产节奏都了如指掌。每天，他目睹着人类制造的海量垃圾顺着这条生产线走向最终的归宿。
当我们爬上楼梯前往分拣线时，杰米大声解释道：“我们的主要产品是纸张、纸板、塑料瓶、混合塑料和木材。”与业内大多数人一样，他将MRF发音为“莫福”。传送带穿梭而过，高度约与人的臀部齐平，垃圾像寿司自助餐一样源源不断经过。没有一个分拣员抬起眼睛。（“女性是最优秀的分拣人员，”杰米说：“我不知道为什么，就是这样。”）对于我的感官来说，未经训练， 难以区分这种流动中的差异，只是棕色和米色的不间断的洪流。仿佛预料到了我的想法，杰米说道：“多亏了亚马逊，过去几年盒子的数量大幅增加。”对于分拣员来说，每件物品都有一个准确的价值，该价值是由主办公室的一台计算机在当天早上设定的，该计算机会实时跟踪国际回收物市场的价格。