By DENNY KAILL

As the weather warms up, you may find yourself on the ferry going to the mainland but as you get out of your car to go upstairs you are assaulted by a foul odor.

Eeeyu, what is that smell?

You look around and there is a big truck and trailer with only a canvas cover on the top. The smell is coming out of that truck. Several times a week, your rotting garbage goes on the road — close to 400 miles of a truck-to-train-to-truck journey to a landfill in Oregon operated by the Waste Management Corp. Every year, about 10,500 tons of garbage from San Juan Island goes to that site at a cost of $72 a ton.

That smells like a lot of money to me.

A couple months ago (cold: no odor) I got curious about just what happens to the stuff, especially given the controversy surrounding our own “waste management.” So after introducing myself to Nick, the driver of one of those trucks, and telling him what I wanted to do, I followed him to Seattle near Georgetown and a train yard where a huge loader lifted the container off the truck bed and placed it on a rail car. When that train is loaded with other containers from the Seattle area, the train is chugged out of Seattle, down to Oregon and east along the south side of the Columbia River to Arlington where it turns inland about 10 miles. Another loader lifts the container off the rail car onto another truck trailer and that truck drives up to the fill area where then a hydraulic “tipper” lifts the whole trailer — fragrant contents and all — spilling it over an area where it is bulldozed, compacted and eventually covered with a suspicious looking black material.

In a video I watched, the black material was called “waste soil” from “industrial cleanup.” The narrator said the working area was covered at night with this material and it “keeps the birds away.” When the area is complete, however, he said there is a final cover which will be seeded back to natural grasses.

Waste Management has the contract to haul San Juan’s garbage and recyclables. It is huge. WM has hundreds of facilities in the U.S. and Canada: collection operations, transfer stations, landfill sites (the one in Arlington is 13,000 acres) and, to their credit, waste-to-energy plants (burning methane to generate electricity) and recycling plants.

I visited a WM recycling plant too. Cascade Recycling Center in Woodinville. I arranged for a tour and, arriving a little early, I wandered around the conference room and was looking at some charts and other information and saw a notice to employees from the president. The time I was there was close to Thanksgiving and the letter was a cheery message about families enjoying the holiday. The letter went on to suggest, if the employee was planning on taking his family out to a restaurant, that upon finishing their meal that he look around when leaving the restaurant to see if the dumpsters were from Waste Management. If they were from another company, however, the employee was encouraged to return to the restaurant to suggest to the manager that he change his garbage collection to WM and that he would not return to the restaurant until they were. Upon reading this, I gave thanks that I was not in the restaurant business.

A few minutes later my tour guides arrived, Rita Smith and Katie Salinas. Then, while being briefed on the tour I was introduced to Richard Stevens, the personnel manager. When I mentioned that I was from San Juan Island, he laughed and said they always knew when a load came from San Juan because it held a lot of glass bottles! I don’t think he meant fruit juice containers.

Before going into the plant, I was given a presentation and watched TV monitors showing the stages where different materials were separated. My guides were very enthusiastic about the process. They said WM was concerned about reducing waste and considered itself a very “green” company. Rita said some people think that separated recycle material just gets mixed in with the garbage but this does not make economic sense; recycled materials are worth money. Aluminum is the “cash cow,” then there’s tin and steel cans, glass, newspaper, mixed paper, cardboard and plastics. Every month, they separate about 8,000 tons. Of that, 250 tons a month is from San Juan Island. The county pays Waste Management $35 a ton to haul recycled material.

With hard hats and day-glo vests, we entered the plant where a conveyor of raw material goes through magnets that grabs tin cans, then a degausser that shoots aluminum cans into a bin, a glass breaker (noisy!), and other clever devices that separate paper, cardboard and other fiber. Rita said people are usually pretty good about keeping recycled material clean and less than 5 percent ends up as contaminant. About a dozen people work the conveyor, pulling out plastic bags and other non-recyclables and separating different plastics into bins.

The plant tour took about a half hour. When finished, we returned to the conference room where my guides answered any questions I had about the process and I was asked to fill out an opinion survey. I have to say, I was impressed with the effort and efficiency of the plant. For taking the tour, I was awarded a couple of gifts made from recycled material: a spatula and a pencil made of recycled paper money.

I know what you’re thinking and, no, it wouldn’t unroll.

— Denny Kaill is a former commercial artist. He lives in Friday Harbor.