Dirty Jobs (2005) s01e25 Episode Script
Garbage Pit Technician
1 I'm Mike rowe, and this is my job.
I explore the country looking for people who aren't afraid to get dirty You know your ship has come in when you get your name on your own garbage can.
Hardworking men and women who earn an honest living doing the kinds of jobs that make civilized life possible for the rest of us.
Now, get ready to get dirty.
Coming up on "dirty jobs," I'm back in Las Vegas to duplicate myself 65 times.
Me, me, me, me, me, me, me.
Not by magic or cloning It's a fine-art printing press, and I'm making lithographs.
It's a limited edition of me.
A lot of people already believe I'm limited.
Then, a sewer pipe can be a thing of beauty after it's busted up into little pieces and made into a building facade at a terra-cotta factory.
If you think this stuff is a pain when it's wet Is it normal to not be able to get this off your hands? Take the pain.
Take the pain? Wait till it dries.
Ow.
Ow.
And later, ever take a good look at what you're throwing in the trash? Well, in San Francisco, that's what these guys do every day.
We call it the biomass processing system.
Food waste is separated and turned into methane gas.
There's enough energy to power 1,000 households.
It's efficient, eco-friendly, and absolutely disgusting.
You get used to it.
Some things we're not supposed to get used to.
Captions by vitac captions paid for by discovery communications what happens in Vegas might stay in Vegas, but what happens inside s-squared art center travels all over the world.
This is a fine-art printing press where limited-edition lithographs are made that sell for hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars.
It's headed by master printer ray mazza, who learned his craft in Paris.
France is also where some of the company's top employees were born about 150 years ago.
I don't know about you guys, but I just can't get enough of me.
Me, me, me, me, me, me, me.
Look at me.
There I am again.
One of the very first publicity photos taken for "dirty jobs" and one of my favorite pictures of all time.
Look at that.
Something else, isn't it? Today, though, we're not gonna be taking pictures of me.
No.
We're gonna be making lithographs Of me.
We'd be making prints from the official "dirty jobs" poster.
We sent ray a copy ahead of time so he could begin the necessary prep work.
Lithography is an involved, painstaking process, and this was a way of getting a head start.
Rowe: So what am I looking at here? Well, we ran four colors so far.
These are all hand-drawn separations.
That's pretty cool.
You take this, essentially, or a smaller version, and an artist sits down and draws me.
And then you start filling in the colors one at a time.
How do you get my skin tone to be what it is? It's just a combination of colors? It's a combination of color.
We used a c-print, which is just a copy from the original, which is a guideline for us to use, and then we'll actually use mylars over that to actually get the separate colors.
Beforehand, we have to look at that c-print and the original and decide how we want to do the color breakdown, where we want to put the textures, where we want to put the drawings, how strong we want to make the colors.
Basically, what you're doing here is a limited edition of me.
A lot of people already believe I'm limited.
Drawings are done in grease pencil on a type of plastic sheeting called mylar.
Then the mylar is placed on top of an aluminum plate and exposed to 5,000 watts of ultraviolet light, which burns the image onto the plate.
Once this is done, the parts of the plate covered by the drawing will be able to hold ink.
Now, the ultraviolet process that we were just working with was obviously state-of-the-art.
This press looks like it's been around a few years.
This press is actually about 150 years old.
It's an antique printing press.
It's called a voirin printing press.
It's a french/italian-made press.
It's a flat-bed printing press, and all modern-day printing presses evolved from this press that we have in front of us now.
It's a monster.
What's it weigh? This press here probably weighs, approximately, 6 tons.
We have another larger one, which goes up to 12 tons.
That one over there? Yes.
The yellow, green, and red shades in the picture had already been printed.
Now, if you don't mind, I'd like to get the black plate ready.
If I can just get you started with mixing the color, can I go over and process that plate? You want to leave me alone with the colors? Usually, that's what we do, if All right.
But the blue shades were still left, and it was my job to mix the ink to match the artwork.
That's definitely blue.
Violet is kind of blue.
Ray had to go mix the black, so he left me alone since mixing ink is almost never dangerous.
However, when you're trying to match color by eye, it's almost never easy, either.
Is there orange in blue? Let's find out.
I think I'm creating a brand-new color in the spectrum.
Green that's what we need.
We need a little green.
There's green in blue, right? Ray? So, how do you feel about mixing the colors up? You feel a little confident? I feel like an insane kindergarten dropout.
And your color is As you can see, you're very, very, extremely dark.
I'm way too dark.
I don't remember what I had in the beginning.
I think I just went straight with this phthalo blue? And that looked pretty close.
I was just trying to darken it up a little bit, and then I went with the Violet, which is almost black, and then I came in with some of this ultra blue, which seemed somewhere in between.
Then I went with a little white to just take the edge off.
Figured a little orange 'cause it I don't know.
It was here.
It was easy to reach.
Now I had to add more transparent medium.
This lightens and increases the volume of the ink without changing its fundamental color.
I've never seen that style of mixing.
No? Well, ray, watch close.
Maybe you'll learn something.
You never really have it done until the very, very end.
It makes all these preliminary steps seem somehow What's the word? Pointless.
All right, Michael, what we're gonna do is we're gonna oil and grease up the press.
Be honest with me.
Is there something on my face? A little bit.
A little bit of blue.
This is the all-purpose grease lubricant.
True.
Good.
Not the first time I've seen this.
Grab your grease, grab your oil, and then hop on in.
Just watch where you step on the paper so you don't fall into the well.
Any of this stuff, you can step on.
This is all good? Yeah, it's all cast iron.
No problem with it.
Newer printing presses have state-of-the-art lubrication systems.
Old presses, like this one, have to be greased up the old-fashioned way, which is also known as the dirty way.
And I'd like to thank you for doing this 'cause usually the guys don't like doing this 'cause it's a little messy, so we appreciate your doing it this week for us.
I didn't say I liked it.
It's just, you know It's part of the cost of admission.
That's what you get when you get a day of cheap labor.
You can get it on the wheels.
You can get it on those rails down there.
Where the gears go.
A printing press without lubrication is just a paperweight.
Basically, if I can reach it, I should grease it? Exactly.
You know, just when I was thinking, "oh, finally a job I'm not gonna get too dirty.
" Wrong again.
Now what? Mazza: Now we're ready to start printing.
There actually will be printing.
Good.
Albert is the feeder, Toni is the catcher, and you're going to do what they call the conductor's work, which is the overall supervisor of the press.
Do you think it's wise to saddle me with a position of responsibility this early in my career? We'll keep an eye on you.
I think you're a very intelligent man.
I think you'll do really well with the whole process.
Nice of you to say.
There will be a little bit of pull.
It's not a lot, but just don't Will it be spinning as I'm doing it? It will be spinning as you're doing it.
Another reason why I should not be in a supervisory capacity.
Albert is aware that, if he sees something, he's not even supposed to wait for somebody to say, "stop.
" He just stops automatically.
If you see something like my arm being pulled through and my head following, just go ahead and flip some key switch.
Don't wait for the fancy director to say, "cut.
" In lithography, applying the ink in this way is called "charging the rollers.
" Our first print was a test on scrap paper to check the color blue.
This is what your work looks like on white.
Note to self, don't screw up the network logo.
Rowe: Where's my globe? Oh, there it is.
Yeah, see, the "dirty jobs" world falls apart as it flies through space, unlike their other little planets, which are always nice and clean and blue.
The blue looked good, so we went ahead and printed it on the edition.
Mazza: Now, basically, we'll keep an eye looking at the color.
If we start to see it go lighter, we'll go into the back, add a little bit more color to it.
Rowe: There are a lot of moving parts on the voirin press, so it's always important to make sure you know exactly where you're standing.
And that is the end of that.
That's the finished color.
We're all done with the blue, obviously.
You've done the green and the red and the What other colors are in there, ultimately? Well, we got the two face colors A brownish color and a reddish color yellow.
We have a green.
We have this blue and the black.
Now it was time to charge the rollers with the last color to be printed black.
The smell in the air now is different than the smell before.
It smells very pungent.
They started to use cleaning solution.
It's a California wash.
It's a little bit more refined than turpentine.
What you can do is you tell Albert to start charging it.
Albert, do me a favor.
Would you start charging it? Appreciate it.
All right.
In this process, you use all of your senses.
Nowadays the old-timers used to use their sense of taste, too.
We don't do that too much anymore.
They used to actually take the acids, put it on the tip of their tongue to test the bite of it How strong the acid was.
But in this process, you want to use everything.
I listen to the press.
I know how this press sounds.
Anybody who works around machinery will tell you that.
There's a certain sound that it's supposed to make, and if it's different, you know there's a problem somewhere or something needs to have adjusting.
You're using your sense of sight when you mix colors.
Absolutely.
The smell you just pointed out there's a sense of smell.
You know when something like that is going on.
Do you use your sense of humor? Sometimes I do.
Sometimes you have to.
Otherwise, the day goes very long.
New color, new test print to check it.
I like the black.
I look mysterious.
I look like a conflicted man.
Okay, now what I'm gonna do during the run, as you see, I'm gonna put a little more color on the top of your hair.
Can you put a little more hair on the top of my head? You want to give the word? What is the word? You got a special word? "Start them up.
" "Start them up" is the special key phrase? Actually, "go into the edition.
" Albert? When you have a moment, would you go into the edition.
What do you think, Toni? It looks good.
So your job as the catcher is to peel me off of the rubber, lay me down face first Yeah.
And then take some gray paper and put it on my back? Over and over.
So the colors won't run.
Right.
You must be sick of looking at me by this point, aren't you? [ Laughs .]
I hate to say it.
[ Laughs .]
I can take it.
Up until then everything was going smoothly.
I had a surefire cure for that.
That goes on there.
Mazza: Oh, oh! Stop, Albert.
What? What did I do wrong? You didn't pull it quick enough.
I didn't pull it quick enough? But she was in my way.
Now what happened to me? Now pull it.
Just give it a tug? Right.
All right.
You want to grab it with this hand, deliver it to this hand, slide this over, and then make it wrap around your thumb.
Why is everything so damn complicated here? She made it look She's just pulling it off and flipping it over.
Again, where you got the little tour jeté and the pirouette and the slide with the glide.
Next one is gonna go facedown.
Up.
Really? Wouldn't it go down? Wouldn't the face go down because it's No, because that's white, and if you put white If you put it facedown, then the black is gonna get on the white.
But it's the back of it.
It could still smear it.
You know what? Why would I argue with you? You've been doing this for a long time.
How long you been here? Since November.
A month? Well, never mind.
You and I are perfectly equipped to argue with one another.
Grab the bottom.
Pull it.
Pull, pull, pull.
Oh! Mazza: Aah! [ Grinding .]
Geez whiz! What happened? I thought it came back at you.
I didn't realize you were yanking the whole thing out.
You have to pull it off real quick.
Another key piece of advice.
Look at that.
See, this is like a rare coin.
Set this aside.
Play your cards right, I'll sign it for you later on.
[ Both laugh .]
I suck.
Get a little air.
Pull it right off.
Slide it in like that.
We're gonna flip it, though.
Oh.
When you say, "we," you mean you.
Okay.
Gonna give it a pull.
And that's gonna go like that.
Grab this end.
Yeah, flip it.
Right.
Good.
Good enough.
Pull.
Uh-huh.
Flip it.
Flip it.
Damn! Like that? No.
No? I get mixed up sometimes, too.
What do you think of that? Bad? It's a whole new style.
Thanks.
This side.
Albert, slow it a bit.
All right, let's all just take a pause.
What do you say? We don't have a "pause" button.
[ Laughs .]
Just around your thumb you're curling it like that.
Oh.
It looks easy, doesn't it? Why didn't you say so? What's this job called up here? Feeding.
Bring it down.
Feeding a litho press may look safe, but it's not.
If I wasn't careful, that metal bar moving up and down could have taken my fingers off at anytime.
Whoops! Wow.
See what they did to me there? That was Albert.
You got to pull it faster.
Albert is absolutely messing with me.
He waited till the last second.
Yeah.
But normally, I rate people on a percentage base for this, so in other words, if they were 99% accurate, it would not be good enough for feeding.
If they put one print out out of every 100 prints and you're running 500 prints, you have 5 prints off for every color.
If you have 10 colors, say, you have 50 prints that are wrong.
So even a 99% accuracy rate is not good enough.
And you're running prints Some of these prints sell for thousands of dollars.
We put very few extra on because of the cost of the paper.
So someone like Albert Albert runs in like a 99.
7 range, which is acceptable Maybe one off every, you know, 500 prints or something like that.
How do you run? I'm probably pretty close to a 99.
8, 99.
9.
Wow.
Where am I, you figure? Right now you're probably really in about a 92% bracket, 90% bracket.
Totally unacceptable.
Here comes the last one.
Last one coming.
It's a good one.
There it is.
The last step in lithography or any other print-making technique is hanging the finished prints to dry.
Well, I've been drawn and colored, stamped and pressed, rolled, greased up, and hung.
And here I will continue to hang for the next week or so with 65 of my favorite people, drying out.
Hey, I finally made it onto a lithograph Something else I can cross off the to-do list.
And a very Dirty Job.
Welcome to Lincoln, California, home to gladding mcbean a 760-acre factory that mainly produces sewer pipes.
But that's not all they make here, and believe it or not, sewer pipes are not why I'm here today.
Rowe: Small pipes Medium pipes Big pipes.
This is not a story about sewer pipes.
This is a story about old-world craftsmanship.
You see, our most famous buildings are starting to fall apart.
Classic facades are literally crumbling in front of our very eyes.
So what do you do when your gargoyle goes missing or your Griffin starts to crumble? You call gladding mcbean.
Since 1875, everything manufactured at gladding mcbean has been terra-cotta including ornate architectural facades covering some of America's most historic buildings.
To create one of these magnificent works of art it all starts in the plaster department, where I met Louis and Jesse.
We're gonna make a plaster model that's gonna be used to help create a mold? Correct.
What's the difference between a model and a mold? The model, what it is is a positive.
Then after we make the positive That's actually how the piece is gonna look in the building.
Then we take it from there and make a negative, which is the mold that we put the Clay into it to form a terra-cotta piece.
What's this thing called? We call it a horse.
Okay.
What's first? We get a bucket.
This is a bucket.
Go fill it with water.
This water is a little dirty, just so you know.
Now, is this called a "batch" of plaster, a "mix," a what? It would be a batch, yeah.
Okay.
Now what? Put it under the mixer.
Okay.
There we go.
Okay, so now you have your first batch.
Well, what will this actually be in real life, this thing we're making here? It'll be a model.
A model of what? A model made out of plaster.
[ Laughter .]
I mean, does Does anyone understand what the hell I'm talking Like, what's What's gonna It's gonna be in a building.
Uh-huh.
It could be part of a ledge.
It could be part of a window frame.
So that's what we're gonna end up with.
It could be.
It might not be.
It might not be.
Sometimes, you know Yeah.
We get a fragment.
We just duplicate it.
Who knows what they're gonna use it for? We don't really know what this is, do we? No.
That's the kind of honesty I appreciate on this program.
I don't know anything.
So we're just smearing this everywhere, basically? All right.
We need to run the horse now.
So this is called "running the horse.
" So now we're starting to form the outside edge.
Add more plaster.
Everywhere? Everywhere.
Decorative pieces like this one are often made before it's entirely known exactly where they're going to wind up.
They're designed in such a way that they can fit into any number of locations on the outside of a building.
Really? It just seems like such a messy thing to do.
I love that.
All right.
Okay.
And then you just slap it up there until it starts building up.
Uh-huh.
We're starting to get dirty.
It feels like we're doing something.
I couldn't tell you what.
Something to do with molds and models and horses.
Yeah.
I'm gonna get back to you on that negative-positive thing.
I still don't quite understand that.
You ever see that move "ghost"? Oh, yes.
Now you can really see it taking shape.
Oh, yeah! Now it's starting to look like something you might see on a building.
[ Chuckles .]
I'm hardening up here As they say.
Is it normal to not be able to get this off your hands? Like it hardens up, pulls all the hair out? Very painful? Just kind of scrape it off and take the pain.
Take the pain? Take the pain.
Ow.
Ow.
Ow.
Ow.
Every single one of those absolutely wrapped in hair.
Every single one pulls out a root.
Ow.
Ow.
Ow.
Ow.
That one really hurts.
Ow.
Ow.
Ow! Crap! Ow.
Aah Remember when I said this story wasn't about sewer pipes? I lied.
Sooner or later, everything is about sewer pipes.
Even making terra-cotta.
Because terra-cotta only has three ingredients Clay, water, and grog.
And grog, interestingly enough, is made out of little tiny broken pieces of terra-cotta.
Chemically, it's complicated.
But in terms of making it, the process is fairly straightforward.
Gladding mcbean makes grog from pipes that warp, crack, or otherwise get damaged while being fired.
I could make grog all day.
I pulled my grog.
This lack of waste makes terra-cotta a green process Everything gets used.
Grog works like an alloy.
It strengthens and helps control shrinkage during the drying and firing of the terra-cotta piece.
But technically, this material is still too large to be grog.
It all comes together here where the recycled terra-cotta is further pulverized through an automated system until finally, you get grog.
The grog is then mixed with Clay and water.
The Clay material produced is what will be used for the final terra-cotta piece.
Well, that was ugly.
Let's see if I got my technique here.
Push and twist, basically, right? All right.
How do you know when your pallet's full? It's full.
It's full.
Okay.
Rowe: So, this is the Clay that I took out of the plugging press before, and this is the This is the negative.
This is the outer shell of the positive that you're making.
Your earlier model that you made, this is the mold which we're going to pump the Clay into.
It's all backwards, more or less.
It's reversed.
That's why it's a negative.
It's a reverse of what you did earlier.
So, this is Gilberto, and he's going to help us fill this with Clay.
A thickness of about an inch and a half.
It's got to dry evenly, so your thickness has to be also within its measurements.
What's this thing called? It's just a regular cutter.
We call it a cutter.
Oh, I see.
You cut it with a piece of piano wire there.
That's what it is String wire.
Yeah, regular old All right.
So, basically, you're just, like, making pie crust.
That's right.
So now he's going to show you how he's going to throw it in there, and then he's going to have to spread it with his fist.
He's punching it.
He's forming it.
He's forming it into the mold.
So, the goal of all of this Get the air out of the Clay, and then fill up every little crevice.
I think I got it.
We take this nameless thing, draw it through here.
Cut out a hunk.
It gets pretty heavy.
You don't have to cut a big piece, you know.
Oh, no.
Go big or go home.
That's what we say, Gilberto.
There you go.
And roll it.
All right.
Okay? Put it around there.
Right there.
There you go.
There we go.
Now, with your fists, you can start spreading it.
All right.
There you go.
Perfect.
Perfect.
Who's your daddy? This a one-man job or a two-man job? It's a one-man job.
One man.
And yet, here we are, three of us, still working on this damn thing.
There's no end in sight.
All right, that looks good.
It's beautiful.
That's not bad.
What we have here is a work of art.
That's what we have.
You ready? Okay.
After drying for 45 minutes, the mold is removed.
So, we started out with a plaster positive, turned that into an upside-down negative, now, just like that, it's a positive again.
In real time, it would sit here for two weeks hardening.
Then it would go off for glazing.
Let's pretend it's already hardened, and glaze.
All right, Mike.
We're in our glazing area now.
So, this is the What is this? Is this like It looks like a pedestal for something? This is It's going to be on the top Almost to the top of the roof.
It's going around the building.
And what we need to do here is make sure that it's clean.
Okay.
It takes this little guy in here? Uh-huh.
We just got to make sure that we get the whole piece.
Right, because if you glaze on top of the dust, the glaze would just come off.
It won't stick to the piece, that's correct.
And when we fire it, it will just curl right away from the piece.
Well, how do you know when you have it all? Because I've been in the same spot here, and it just You see how that looks right there? That looks excellent right there.
But look there's dust still coming off.
What we're going to do is after we brush it, then we're going to throw some air.
Oh, okay, good.
It looks like you've done this before.
All right, we're ready to spray it now.
Ready to spray.
We're ready to put the glaze on it.
Okay.
This is Larry.
He's been with us for about 30 years, also.
Let's watch Larry go.
Is this something I can do? You know what? Not on this piece, because this is an actual piece that's going to the building.
How much would you say this will cost when it's all done? That piece, we're probably talking about 700 bucks.
Oh.
Yeah, you probably want to keep me away from that.
Yeah, and not only that, if we have to remake it, we would have to wait another month for it to go through, and that would delay the project.
I don't need that kind of pressure.
He's got it.
He's done with it.
So this piece is now officially glazed.
It's officially glazed, and it's ready to be put into the kiln.
Remember, terra-cotta is an Italian word.
It means "fired earth.
" We've seen the earth.
Here's the fire.
Take a look.
This thing is called a tunnel kiln.
It's 420 feet long, and inside, 2,100 degrees.
Each piece will be fired here for 10 hours.
And so we have pieces like this.
This sat on the fireman funds building in San Francisco, built by gladding mcbean back in 1914.
Look at it.
Classic, timeless, beautiful.
Just don't tell anybody there's a little sewer in it.
Well, here we are, back at the San Francisco dump Again.
And today, we're going to meet the unsung heroes in a revolutionary energy-making process that you will not believe.
Well, as dumps go, some places smell worse than others, I suppose, and this place right here smells pretty doggone bad.
Ken, would you agree? I do.
Ken is the, uh, operations manager? I'm the operations manager of s.
F.
Recycling and disposal.
So, why are we standing in front of these reeking mounds of rotten food? This is part of a system that we call the biomass processing system.
What we do here is we take this rotten food, and we're going to put it through this 830 trommel.
This machine here actually screens this material down.
After it comes out of the trommel, it goes into the grinder and actually turns into a kind of a green, sludgy material.
What do we do with the green, sludgy material? It's broke down and put into a digester, and from the digester, it's actually converted into energy.
There's enough energy in this material right here to power 1,000 households.
Who else is doing this? Nobody.
So the San Francisco dump is on the cutting edge of making rotten food usable in an energy-efficient way.
Absolutely.
Can you do anything about the stink? No.
Where do we put the stuff that's bad? Just throw it to the side, and then we pick it up later.
This kind of stuff Wood no good? Nope.
Abel's in charge of discarding all the non-recyclable garbage that the trommel can't handle.
I'm in charge of standing up.
Keep the cardboard, throw the plastic.
This, no good.
That's no good.
Two phones.
One for me, one for you.
Yeah, maybe we can call each other.
Sure.
Plastic not good.
Both: Three! Abel, people throw out a lot of food.
That's what we're here for.
Waiter, there's a shell in my rice.
Would it be wrong? Rotted.
Oh.
We got peppers and turnips and tomatoes and pears.
I saw some yams, some rice, some fish, some short ribs.
We're set.
Beef it's what's for dinner.
So, it's pretty straightforward.
This kind of thing is good.
This is definitely not edible.
All right, what do we do now? Now, let's walk out and get the machine started.
Good.
It doesn't get much dirtier than this, I would suppose.
Does it? I wouldn't say that.
He wouldn't say that.
Gentlemen, start your trommels.
Rowe: The trommel basically works like a giant mouth.
The food gets dumped in, some of it gets chewed, some of it gets swallowed, and some of it gets spit out.
There's a big magnet underneath that conveyor belt that will grab on to knives, forks, spoons The kind of thing that you wouldn't want to swallow.
Once the contaminants have been removed from the garbage, everything is dumped down through that hopper and gets run through this grinder.
The grinder is basically where the trommel chews the food Where the teeth are.
This is what chewed food looks like.
From here, it goes up that conveyor belt behind me and into the truck, where it's carted off to the stomach, essentially.
What's that? You want to look inside the truck? What you're looking at here is a truckload full of chewed food.
From here, this smelly load will be driven to a digester, which is essentially a stomach, where it will be broken down and turned into a highly flammable form of methane gas sufficient to provide enough energy to keep 1,000 households running.
And so, the energy crisis is solved With another dirty job.
At the other end of the trommel, the larger pieces Food, cardboard, anything biodegradable Goes into another truck to be processed into compost.
It seems like the trommel does everything.
Which begs the question This is Nathan.
What are we doing here? Nathan: As the bigger stuff comes through, we're recycling all the plastic bottles, cans, kind of the same sort of deal we did in the pile.
So, we're just looking for more stuff that we missed in the pile? Exactly.
As well as material that can't be recycled.
I'm not an expert, but it seems like this is moving pretty fast.
As you do it, you get used to it.
Very repetitive.
Some things, I think, we're not supposed to get used to.
The front-loader feeds the trommel 80 tons of food every day.
The trommel is hungry.
Well, what do we do when we get something that's not supposed to be in here? You grab it and put it in one of the bins.
The garbage bin and a recycle bin.
Well, this I'm probably in the wrong spot.
You probably are.
This is the money spot.
I'll pick up what you leave behind.
All right, so, this goes in Recyclable, the first one.
The first one.
I thought it was a head.
Got to be quick.
You really do.
Oh, that's bad right there.
Recycle.
You married? No.
Girlfriend? Got a girlfriend.
What's she think of this whole deal? It's a dirty job.
Yeah.
Got rusty nails flying through here at 20 miles an hour? Dude, you're out of your mind.
That looks cute on you.
How do you know when we're done? Oh, I guess that would do it.
That would do it.
So, uh All right.
That wasn't so bad, really.
I mean, it was not good.
Now it's time for cleanup.
Who cleans up a dump? That's our job.
I'm going to follow you, man.
Grab your tools and follow me in.
Is that a power-washer? That's it.
I don't this is a This is a stick with a hook on it.
I've never been in a trommel before.
It's going to be great.
This is just weird.
How's it smell? It doesn't smell good.
No? No, no, it doesn't smell good at all.
Nothing about this is pleasant.
Now I understand what was happening, kind of.
These are the bristles? Those are the brushes that are on the exterior that knock everything out of the screen when it's turning.
You mean this thing? Yeah, the metal screening.
So, all of the food and all of the stuff, it's getting like, extruded through this? Right below you is another conveyor belt that picks everything up and takes it out to that conveyor out there.
What do you reckon this is here? Liver.
Ugh.
Wait a minute.
I think this is intestines.
Maybe you're right.
Maybe it's a liver.
What do you think Liver, small intestine? I couldn't tell you.
You can tell me.
I'm your friend.
[ Laughs .]
I don't know what it is, man.
Okay, um Wow.
I guess, maybe, a little less chatter, a little more work? Oh, you lost your face shield, didn't you? A bad day to be you.
Can you see through yours? No, I can't see a thing.
But you know what? I don't want to see anything.
Is it me, or is it stinking worse and worse? I think we just knocked some stink loose.
Trommel's all clogged up.
That's the problem.
I think some intestines just fell down my fancy tyvek suit.
Oh [bleep.]
Once again, I broke a perfectly good tool.
I wonder where we can throw this away.
If I only had a no-good, dirty, rotten, skanky, misshapen hoe.
Now, imagine that You're on the inside of a giant dinosaur's mouth.
That's basically what this is.
Your job is to get all of the plaque from between its teeth.
That's how I prefer to look at things Metaphorically.
The problem with the garbage here in the 830 trommel is that it has formed an almost impenetrable hermetic seal against the side of this contraption.
So in an effort to further facilitate the removal of said garbage, I'm soaking it down with a power-washer.
When a garbage disposal backs up for a couple of hours, it's bad.
When it backs up for two or three days, it's horrible.
And when it backs up for about six weeks, it's a trommel.
I see no real appreciable improvement.
Try to look at it this way The human body takes in food and converts that food into a highly flammable gas.
That's been going on for centuries.
And it's a scientific fact that if a person is so inclined, they can light their farts on fire.
Now, this is not a practice we either subscribe to or recommend, but it is possible.
And that's essentially what's going on here.
The 830 trommel is the first step in the mechanized process of converting unused food into a highly flammable gas, and then ultimately into a source of energy that we can all benefit from.
On the one hand, we're lighting farts on fire.
But on the other hand, we're saving the world And getting very dirty.
Dirty jobs is brought to you every week by a group of hardworking Hollywood rejects that can't seem to hold down a regular job.
But make no mistake about it, the show is programmed by you.
It's your ideas that keep us on the air, so if you have a good one, go to discovery.
Com/dirtyjobs right now.
Make it fun.
Make it dirty.
Just make it fast.
We're about dry.
My name's Mike rowe.
My name's Mike rowe.
My name's Mike rowe.
[Bleep.]
Damn, I hate my name.
Greased up, lubricated, and hung.
Well-hung.
Well, actually Oh, you [ Laughter .]
On that side.
Okay, can you do the one on the left? Pbht!
I explore the country looking for people who aren't afraid to get dirty You know your ship has come in when you get your name on your own garbage can.
Hardworking men and women who earn an honest living doing the kinds of jobs that make civilized life possible for the rest of us.
Now, get ready to get dirty.
Coming up on "dirty jobs," I'm back in Las Vegas to duplicate myself 65 times.
Me, me, me, me, me, me, me.
Not by magic or cloning It's a fine-art printing press, and I'm making lithographs.
It's a limited edition of me.
A lot of people already believe I'm limited.
Then, a sewer pipe can be a thing of beauty after it's busted up into little pieces and made into a building facade at a terra-cotta factory.
If you think this stuff is a pain when it's wet Is it normal to not be able to get this off your hands? Take the pain.
Take the pain? Wait till it dries.
Ow.
Ow.
And later, ever take a good look at what you're throwing in the trash? Well, in San Francisco, that's what these guys do every day.
We call it the biomass processing system.
Food waste is separated and turned into methane gas.
There's enough energy to power 1,000 households.
It's efficient, eco-friendly, and absolutely disgusting.
You get used to it.
Some things we're not supposed to get used to.
Captions by vitac captions paid for by discovery communications what happens in Vegas might stay in Vegas, but what happens inside s-squared art center travels all over the world.
This is a fine-art printing press where limited-edition lithographs are made that sell for hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars.
It's headed by master printer ray mazza, who learned his craft in Paris.
France is also where some of the company's top employees were born about 150 years ago.
I don't know about you guys, but I just can't get enough of me.
Me, me, me, me, me, me, me.
Look at me.
There I am again.
One of the very first publicity photos taken for "dirty jobs" and one of my favorite pictures of all time.
Look at that.
Something else, isn't it? Today, though, we're not gonna be taking pictures of me.
No.
We're gonna be making lithographs Of me.
We'd be making prints from the official "dirty jobs" poster.
We sent ray a copy ahead of time so he could begin the necessary prep work.
Lithography is an involved, painstaking process, and this was a way of getting a head start.
Rowe: So what am I looking at here? Well, we ran four colors so far.
These are all hand-drawn separations.
That's pretty cool.
You take this, essentially, or a smaller version, and an artist sits down and draws me.
And then you start filling in the colors one at a time.
How do you get my skin tone to be what it is? It's just a combination of colors? It's a combination of color.
We used a c-print, which is just a copy from the original, which is a guideline for us to use, and then we'll actually use mylars over that to actually get the separate colors.
Beforehand, we have to look at that c-print and the original and decide how we want to do the color breakdown, where we want to put the textures, where we want to put the drawings, how strong we want to make the colors.
Basically, what you're doing here is a limited edition of me.
A lot of people already believe I'm limited.
Drawings are done in grease pencil on a type of plastic sheeting called mylar.
Then the mylar is placed on top of an aluminum plate and exposed to 5,000 watts of ultraviolet light, which burns the image onto the plate.
Once this is done, the parts of the plate covered by the drawing will be able to hold ink.
Now, the ultraviolet process that we were just working with was obviously state-of-the-art.
This press looks like it's been around a few years.
This press is actually about 150 years old.
It's an antique printing press.
It's called a voirin printing press.
It's a french/italian-made press.
It's a flat-bed printing press, and all modern-day printing presses evolved from this press that we have in front of us now.
It's a monster.
What's it weigh? This press here probably weighs, approximately, 6 tons.
We have another larger one, which goes up to 12 tons.
That one over there? Yes.
The yellow, green, and red shades in the picture had already been printed.
Now, if you don't mind, I'd like to get the black plate ready.
If I can just get you started with mixing the color, can I go over and process that plate? You want to leave me alone with the colors? Usually, that's what we do, if All right.
But the blue shades were still left, and it was my job to mix the ink to match the artwork.
That's definitely blue.
Violet is kind of blue.
Ray had to go mix the black, so he left me alone since mixing ink is almost never dangerous.
However, when you're trying to match color by eye, it's almost never easy, either.
Is there orange in blue? Let's find out.
I think I'm creating a brand-new color in the spectrum.
Green that's what we need.
We need a little green.
There's green in blue, right? Ray? So, how do you feel about mixing the colors up? You feel a little confident? I feel like an insane kindergarten dropout.
And your color is As you can see, you're very, very, extremely dark.
I'm way too dark.
I don't remember what I had in the beginning.
I think I just went straight with this phthalo blue? And that looked pretty close.
I was just trying to darken it up a little bit, and then I went with the Violet, which is almost black, and then I came in with some of this ultra blue, which seemed somewhere in between.
Then I went with a little white to just take the edge off.
Figured a little orange 'cause it I don't know.
It was here.
It was easy to reach.
Now I had to add more transparent medium.
This lightens and increases the volume of the ink without changing its fundamental color.
I've never seen that style of mixing.
No? Well, ray, watch close.
Maybe you'll learn something.
You never really have it done until the very, very end.
It makes all these preliminary steps seem somehow What's the word? Pointless.
All right, Michael, what we're gonna do is we're gonna oil and grease up the press.
Be honest with me.
Is there something on my face? A little bit.
A little bit of blue.
This is the all-purpose grease lubricant.
True.
Good.
Not the first time I've seen this.
Grab your grease, grab your oil, and then hop on in.
Just watch where you step on the paper so you don't fall into the well.
Any of this stuff, you can step on.
This is all good? Yeah, it's all cast iron.
No problem with it.
Newer printing presses have state-of-the-art lubrication systems.
Old presses, like this one, have to be greased up the old-fashioned way, which is also known as the dirty way.
And I'd like to thank you for doing this 'cause usually the guys don't like doing this 'cause it's a little messy, so we appreciate your doing it this week for us.
I didn't say I liked it.
It's just, you know It's part of the cost of admission.
That's what you get when you get a day of cheap labor.
You can get it on the wheels.
You can get it on those rails down there.
Where the gears go.
A printing press without lubrication is just a paperweight.
Basically, if I can reach it, I should grease it? Exactly.
You know, just when I was thinking, "oh, finally a job I'm not gonna get too dirty.
" Wrong again.
Now what? Mazza: Now we're ready to start printing.
There actually will be printing.
Good.
Albert is the feeder, Toni is the catcher, and you're going to do what they call the conductor's work, which is the overall supervisor of the press.
Do you think it's wise to saddle me with a position of responsibility this early in my career? We'll keep an eye on you.
I think you're a very intelligent man.
I think you'll do really well with the whole process.
Nice of you to say.
There will be a little bit of pull.
It's not a lot, but just don't Will it be spinning as I'm doing it? It will be spinning as you're doing it.
Another reason why I should not be in a supervisory capacity.
Albert is aware that, if he sees something, he's not even supposed to wait for somebody to say, "stop.
" He just stops automatically.
If you see something like my arm being pulled through and my head following, just go ahead and flip some key switch.
Don't wait for the fancy director to say, "cut.
" In lithography, applying the ink in this way is called "charging the rollers.
" Our first print was a test on scrap paper to check the color blue.
This is what your work looks like on white.
Note to self, don't screw up the network logo.
Rowe: Where's my globe? Oh, there it is.
Yeah, see, the "dirty jobs" world falls apart as it flies through space, unlike their other little planets, which are always nice and clean and blue.
The blue looked good, so we went ahead and printed it on the edition.
Mazza: Now, basically, we'll keep an eye looking at the color.
If we start to see it go lighter, we'll go into the back, add a little bit more color to it.
Rowe: There are a lot of moving parts on the voirin press, so it's always important to make sure you know exactly where you're standing.
And that is the end of that.
That's the finished color.
We're all done with the blue, obviously.
You've done the green and the red and the What other colors are in there, ultimately? Well, we got the two face colors A brownish color and a reddish color yellow.
We have a green.
We have this blue and the black.
Now it was time to charge the rollers with the last color to be printed black.
The smell in the air now is different than the smell before.
It smells very pungent.
They started to use cleaning solution.
It's a California wash.
It's a little bit more refined than turpentine.
What you can do is you tell Albert to start charging it.
Albert, do me a favor.
Would you start charging it? Appreciate it.
All right.
In this process, you use all of your senses.
Nowadays the old-timers used to use their sense of taste, too.
We don't do that too much anymore.
They used to actually take the acids, put it on the tip of their tongue to test the bite of it How strong the acid was.
But in this process, you want to use everything.
I listen to the press.
I know how this press sounds.
Anybody who works around machinery will tell you that.
There's a certain sound that it's supposed to make, and if it's different, you know there's a problem somewhere or something needs to have adjusting.
You're using your sense of sight when you mix colors.
Absolutely.
The smell you just pointed out there's a sense of smell.
You know when something like that is going on.
Do you use your sense of humor? Sometimes I do.
Sometimes you have to.
Otherwise, the day goes very long.
New color, new test print to check it.
I like the black.
I look mysterious.
I look like a conflicted man.
Okay, now what I'm gonna do during the run, as you see, I'm gonna put a little more color on the top of your hair.
Can you put a little more hair on the top of my head? You want to give the word? What is the word? You got a special word? "Start them up.
" "Start them up" is the special key phrase? Actually, "go into the edition.
" Albert? When you have a moment, would you go into the edition.
What do you think, Toni? It looks good.
So your job as the catcher is to peel me off of the rubber, lay me down face first Yeah.
And then take some gray paper and put it on my back? Over and over.
So the colors won't run.
Right.
You must be sick of looking at me by this point, aren't you? [ Laughs .]
I hate to say it.
[ Laughs .]
I can take it.
Up until then everything was going smoothly.
I had a surefire cure for that.
That goes on there.
Mazza: Oh, oh! Stop, Albert.
What? What did I do wrong? You didn't pull it quick enough.
I didn't pull it quick enough? But she was in my way.
Now what happened to me? Now pull it.
Just give it a tug? Right.
All right.
You want to grab it with this hand, deliver it to this hand, slide this over, and then make it wrap around your thumb.
Why is everything so damn complicated here? She made it look She's just pulling it off and flipping it over.
Again, where you got the little tour jeté and the pirouette and the slide with the glide.
Next one is gonna go facedown.
Up.
Really? Wouldn't it go down? Wouldn't the face go down because it's No, because that's white, and if you put white If you put it facedown, then the black is gonna get on the white.
But it's the back of it.
It could still smear it.
You know what? Why would I argue with you? You've been doing this for a long time.
How long you been here? Since November.
A month? Well, never mind.
You and I are perfectly equipped to argue with one another.
Grab the bottom.
Pull it.
Pull, pull, pull.
Oh! Mazza: Aah! [ Grinding .]
Geez whiz! What happened? I thought it came back at you.
I didn't realize you were yanking the whole thing out.
You have to pull it off real quick.
Another key piece of advice.
Look at that.
See, this is like a rare coin.
Set this aside.
Play your cards right, I'll sign it for you later on.
[ Both laugh .]
I suck.
Get a little air.
Pull it right off.
Slide it in like that.
We're gonna flip it, though.
Oh.
When you say, "we," you mean you.
Okay.
Gonna give it a pull.
And that's gonna go like that.
Grab this end.
Yeah, flip it.
Right.
Good.
Good enough.
Pull.
Uh-huh.
Flip it.
Flip it.
Damn! Like that? No.
No? I get mixed up sometimes, too.
What do you think of that? Bad? It's a whole new style.
Thanks.
This side.
Albert, slow it a bit.
All right, let's all just take a pause.
What do you say? We don't have a "pause" button.
[ Laughs .]
Just around your thumb you're curling it like that.
Oh.
It looks easy, doesn't it? Why didn't you say so? What's this job called up here? Feeding.
Bring it down.
Feeding a litho press may look safe, but it's not.
If I wasn't careful, that metal bar moving up and down could have taken my fingers off at anytime.
Whoops! Wow.
See what they did to me there? That was Albert.
You got to pull it faster.
Albert is absolutely messing with me.
He waited till the last second.
Yeah.
But normally, I rate people on a percentage base for this, so in other words, if they were 99% accurate, it would not be good enough for feeding.
If they put one print out out of every 100 prints and you're running 500 prints, you have 5 prints off for every color.
If you have 10 colors, say, you have 50 prints that are wrong.
So even a 99% accuracy rate is not good enough.
And you're running prints Some of these prints sell for thousands of dollars.
We put very few extra on because of the cost of the paper.
So someone like Albert Albert runs in like a 99.
7 range, which is acceptable Maybe one off every, you know, 500 prints or something like that.
How do you run? I'm probably pretty close to a 99.
8, 99.
9.
Wow.
Where am I, you figure? Right now you're probably really in about a 92% bracket, 90% bracket.
Totally unacceptable.
Here comes the last one.
Last one coming.
It's a good one.
There it is.
The last step in lithography or any other print-making technique is hanging the finished prints to dry.
Well, I've been drawn and colored, stamped and pressed, rolled, greased up, and hung.
And here I will continue to hang for the next week or so with 65 of my favorite people, drying out.
Hey, I finally made it onto a lithograph Something else I can cross off the to-do list.
And a very Dirty Job.
Welcome to Lincoln, California, home to gladding mcbean a 760-acre factory that mainly produces sewer pipes.
But that's not all they make here, and believe it or not, sewer pipes are not why I'm here today.
Rowe: Small pipes Medium pipes Big pipes.
This is not a story about sewer pipes.
This is a story about old-world craftsmanship.
You see, our most famous buildings are starting to fall apart.
Classic facades are literally crumbling in front of our very eyes.
So what do you do when your gargoyle goes missing or your Griffin starts to crumble? You call gladding mcbean.
Since 1875, everything manufactured at gladding mcbean has been terra-cotta including ornate architectural facades covering some of America's most historic buildings.
To create one of these magnificent works of art it all starts in the plaster department, where I met Louis and Jesse.
We're gonna make a plaster model that's gonna be used to help create a mold? Correct.
What's the difference between a model and a mold? The model, what it is is a positive.
Then after we make the positive That's actually how the piece is gonna look in the building.
Then we take it from there and make a negative, which is the mold that we put the Clay into it to form a terra-cotta piece.
What's this thing called? We call it a horse.
Okay.
What's first? We get a bucket.
This is a bucket.
Go fill it with water.
This water is a little dirty, just so you know.
Now, is this called a "batch" of plaster, a "mix," a what? It would be a batch, yeah.
Okay.
Now what? Put it under the mixer.
Okay.
There we go.
Okay, so now you have your first batch.
Well, what will this actually be in real life, this thing we're making here? It'll be a model.
A model of what? A model made out of plaster.
[ Laughter .]
I mean, does Does anyone understand what the hell I'm talking Like, what's What's gonna It's gonna be in a building.
Uh-huh.
It could be part of a ledge.
It could be part of a window frame.
So that's what we're gonna end up with.
It could be.
It might not be.
It might not be.
Sometimes, you know Yeah.
We get a fragment.
We just duplicate it.
Who knows what they're gonna use it for? We don't really know what this is, do we? No.
That's the kind of honesty I appreciate on this program.
I don't know anything.
So we're just smearing this everywhere, basically? All right.
We need to run the horse now.
So this is called "running the horse.
" So now we're starting to form the outside edge.
Add more plaster.
Everywhere? Everywhere.
Decorative pieces like this one are often made before it's entirely known exactly where they're going to wind up.
They're designed in such a way that they can fit into any number of locations on the outside of a building.
Really? It just seems like such a messy thing to do.
I love that.
All right.
Okay.
And then you just slap it up there until it starts building up.
Uh-huh.
We're starting to get dirty.
It feels like we're doing something.
I couldn't tell you what.
Something to do with molds and models and horses.
Yeah.
I'm gonna get back to you on that negative-positive thing.
I still don't quite understand that.
You ever see that move "ghost"? Oh, yes.
Now you can really see it taking shape.
Oh, yeah! Now it's starting to look like something you might see on a building.
[ Chuckles .]
I'm hardening up here As they say.
Is it normal to not be able to get this off your hands? Like it hardens up, pulls all the hair out? Very painful? Just kind of scrape it off and take the pain.
Take the pain? Take the pain.
Ow.
Ow.
Ow.
Ow.
Every single one of those absolutely wrapped in hair.
Every single one pulls out a root.
Ow.
Ow.
Ow.
Ow.
That one really hurts.
Ow.
Ow.
Ow! Crap! Ow.
Aah Remember when I said this story wasn't about sewer pipes? I lied.
Sooner or later, everything is about sewer pipes.
Even making terra-cotta.
Because terra-cotta only has three ingredients Clay, water, and grog.
And grog, interestingly enough, is made out of little tiny broken pieces of terra-cotta.
Chemically, it's complicated.
But in terms of making it, the process is fairly straightforward.
Gladding mcbean makes grog from pipes that warp, crack, or otherwise get damaged while being fired.
I could make grog all day.
I pulled my grog.
This lack of waste makes terra-cotta a green process Everything gets used.
Grog works like an alloy.
It strengthens and helps control shrinkage during the drying and firing of the terra-cotta piece.
But technically, this material is still too large to be grog.
It all comes together here where the recycled terra-cotta is further pulverized through an automated system until finally, you get grog.
The grog is then mixed with Clay and water.
The Clay material produced is what will be used for the final terra-cotta piece.
Well, that was ugly.
Let's see if I got my technique here.
Push and twist, basically, right? All right.
How do you know when your pallet's full? It's full.
It's full.
Okay.
Rowe: So, this is the Clay that I took out of the plugging press before, and this is the This is the negative.
This is the outer shell of the positive that you're making.
Your earlier model that you made, this is the mold which we're going to pump the Clay into.
It's all backwards, more or less.
It's reversed.
That's why it's a negative.
It's a reverse of what you did earlier.
So, this is Gilberto, and he's going to help us fill this with Clay.
A thickness of about an inch and a half.
It's got to dry evenly, so your thickness has to be also within its measurements.
What's this thing called? It's just a regular cutter.
We call it a cutter.
Oh, I see.
You cut it with a piece of piano wire there.
That's what it is String wire.
Yeah, regular old All right.
So, basically, you're just, like, making pie crust.
That's right.
So now he's going to show you how he's going to throw it in there, and then he's going to have to spread it with his fist.
He's punching it.
He's forming it.
He's forming it into the mold.
So, the goal of all of this Get the air out of the Clay, and then fill up every little crevice.
I think I got it.
We take this nameless thing, draw it through here.
Cut out a hunk.
It gets pretty heavy.
You don't have to cut a big piece, you know.
Oh, no.
Go big or go home.
That's what we say, Gilberto.
There you go.
And roll it.
All right.
Okay? Put it around there.
Right there.
There you go.
There we go.
Now, with your fists, you can start spreading it.
All right.
There you go.
Perfect.
Perfect.
Who's your daddy? This a one-man job or a two-man job? It's a one-man job.
One man.
And yet, here we are, three of us, still working on this damn thing.
There's no end in sight.
All right, that looks good.
It's beautiful.
That's not bad.
What we have here is a work of art.
That's what we have.
You ready? Okay.
After drying for 45 minutes, the mold is removed.
So, we started out with a plaster positive, turned that into an upside-down negative, now, just like that, it's a positive again.
In real time, it would sit here for two weeks hardening.
Then it would go off for glazing.
Let's pretend it's already hardened, and glaze.
All right, Mike.
We're in our glazing area now.
So, this is the What is this? Is this like It looks like a pedestal for something? This is It's going to be on the top Almost to the top of the roof.
It's going around the building.
And what we need to do here is make sure that it's clean.
Okay.
It takes this little guy in here? Uh-huh.
We just got to make sure that we get the whole piece.
Right, because if you glaze on top of the dust, the glaze would just come off.
It won't stick to the piece, that's correct.
And when we fire it, it will just curl right away from the piece.
Well, how do you know when you have it all? Because I've been in the same spot here, and it just You see how that looks right there? That looks excellent right there.
But look there's dust still coming off.
What we're going to do is after we brush it, then we're going to throw some air.
Oh, okay, good.
It looks like you've done this before.
All right, we're ready to spray it now.
Ready to spray.
We're ready to put the glaze on it.
Okay.
This is Larry.
He's been with us for about 30 years, also.
Let's watch Larry go.
Is this something I can do? You know what? Not on this piece, because this is an actual piece that's going to the building.
How much would you say this will cost when it's all done? That piece, we're probably talking about 700 bucks.
Oh.
Yeah, you probably want to keep me away from that.
Yeah, and not only that, if we have to remake it, we would have to wait another month for it to go through, and that would delay the project.
I don't need that kind of pressure.
He's got it.
He's done with it.
So this piece is now officially glazed.
It's officially glazed, and it's ready to be put into the kiln.
Remember, terra-cotta is an Italian word.
It means "fired earth.
" We've seen the earth.
Here's the fire.
Take a look.
This thing is called a tunnel kiln.
It's 420 feet long, and inside, 2,100 degrees.
Each piece will be fired here for 10 hours.
And so we have pieces like this.
This sat on the fireman funds building in San Francisco, built by gladding mcbean back in 1914.
Look at it.
Classic, timeless, beautiful.
Just don't tell anybody there's a little sewer in it.
Well, here we are, back at the San Francisco dump Again.
And today, we're going to meet the unsung heroes in a revolutionary energy-making process that you will not believe.
Well, as dumps go, some places smell worse than others, I suppose, and this place right here smells pretty doggone bad.
Ken, would you agree? I do.
Ken is the, uh, operations manager? I'm the operations manager of s.
F.
Recycling and disposal.
So, why are we standing in front of these reeking mounds of rotten food? This is part of a system that we call the biomass processing system.
What we do here is we take this rotten food, and we're going to put it through this 830 trommel.
This machine here actually screens this material down.
After it comes out of the trommel, it goes into the grinder and actually turns into a kind of a green, sludgy material.
What do we do with the green, sludgy material? It's broke down and put into a digester, and from the digester, it's actually converted into energy.
There's enough energy in this material right here to power 1,000 households.
Who else is doing this? Nobody.
So the San Francisco dump is on the cutting edge of making rotten food usable in an energy-efficient way.
Absolutely.
Can you do anything about the stink? No.
Where do we put the stuff that's bad? Just throw it to the side, and then we pick it up later.
This kind of stuff Wood no good? Nope.
Abel's in charge of discarding all the non-recyclable garbage that the trommel can't handle.
I'm in charge of standing up.
Keep the cardboard, throw the plastic.
This, no good.
That's no good.
Two phones.
One for me, one for you.
Yeah, maybe we can call each other.
Sure.
Plastic not good.
Both: Three! Abel, people throw out a lot of food.
That's what we're here for.
Waiter, there's a shell in my rice.
Would it be wrong? Rotted.
Oh.
We got peppers and turnips and tomatoes and pears.
I saw some yams, some rice, some fish, some short ribs.
We're set.
Beef it's what's for dinner.
So, it's pretty straightforward.
This kind of thing is good.
This is definitely not edible.
All right, what do we do now? Now, let's walk out and get the machine started.
Good.
It doesn't get much dirtier than this, I would suppose.
Does it? I wouldn't say that.
He wouldn't say that.
Gentlemen, start your trommels.
Rowe: The trommel basically works like a giant mouth.
The food gets dumped in, some of it gets chewed, some of it gets swallowed, and some of it gets spit out.
There's a big magnet underneath that conveyor belt that will grab on to knives, forks, spoons The kind of thing that you wouldn't want to swallow.
Once the contaminants have been removed from the garbage, everything is dumped down through that hopper and gets run through this grinder.
The grinder is basically where the trommel chews the food Where the teeth are.
This is what chewed food looks like.
From here, it goes up that conveyor belt behind me and into the truck, where it's carted off to the stomach, essentially.
What's that? You want to look inside the truck? What you're looking at here is a truckload full of chewed food.
From here, this smelly load will be driven to a digester, which is essentially a stomach, where it will be broken down and turned into a highly flammable form of methane gas sufficient to provide enough energy to keep 1,000 households running.
And so, the energy crisis is solved With another dirty job.
At the other end of the trommel, the larger pieces Food, cardboard, anything biodegradable Goes into another truck to be processed into compost.
It seems like the trommel does everything.
Which begs the question This is Nathan.
What are we doing here? Nathan: As the bigger stuff comes through, we're recycling all the plastic bottles, cans, kind of the same sort of deal we did in the pile.
So, we're just looking for more stuff that we missed in the pile? Exactly.
As well as material that can't be recycled.
I'm not an expert, but it seems like this is moving pretty fast.
As you do it, you get used to it.
Very repetitive.
Some things, I think, we're not supposed to get used to.
The front-loader feeds the trommel 80 tons of food every day.
The trommel is hungry.
Well, what do we do when we get something that's not supposed to be in here? You grab it and put it in one of the bins.
The garbage bin and a recycle bin.
Well, this I'm probably in the wrong spot.
You probably are.
This is the money spot.
I'll pick up what you leave behind.
All right, so, this goes in Recyclable, the first one.
The first one.
I thought it was a head.
Got to be quick.
You really do.
Oh, that's bad right there.
Recycle.
You married? No.
Girlfriend? Got a girlfriend.
What's she think of this whole deal? It's a dirty job.
Yeah.
Got rusty nails flying through here at 20 miles an hour? Dude, you're out of your mind.
That looks cute on you.
How do you know when we're done? Oh, I guess that would do it.
That would do it.
So, uh All right.
That wasn't so bad, really.
I mean, it was not good.
Now it's time for cleanup.
Who cleans up a dump? That's our job.
I'm going to follow you, man.
Grab your tools and follow me in.
Is that a power-washer? That's it.
I don't this is a This is a stick with a hook on it.
I've never been in a trommel before.
It's going to be great.
This is just weird.
How's it smell? It doesn't smell good.
No? No, no, it doesn't smell good at all.
Nothing about this is pleasant.
Now I understand what was happening, kind of.
These are the bristles? Those are the brushes that are on the exterior that knock everything out of the screen when it's turning.
You mean this thing? Yeah, the metal screening.
So, all of the food and all of the stuff, it's getting like, extruded through this? Right below you is another conveyor belt that picks everything up and takes it out to that conveyor out there.
What do you reckon this is here? Liver.
Ugh.
Wait a minute.
I think this is intestines.
Maybe you're right.
Maybe it's a liver.
What do you think Liver, small intestine? I couldn't tell you.
You can tell me.
I'm your friend.
[ Laughs .]
I don't know what it is, man.
Okay, um Wow.
I guess, maybe, a little less chatter, a little more work? Oh, you lost your face shield, didn't you? A bad day to be you.
Can you see through yours? No, I can't see a thing.
But you know what? I don't want to see anything.
Is it me, or is it stinking worse and worse? I think we just knocked some stink loose.
Trommel's all clogged up.
That's the problem.
I think some intestines just fell down my fancy tyvek suit.
Oh [bleep.]
Once again, I broke a perfectly good tool.
I wonder where we can throw this away.
If I only had a no-good, dirty, rotten, skanky, misshapen hoe.
Now, imagine that You're on the inside of a giant dinosaur's mouth.
That's basically what this is.
Your job is to get all of the plaque from between its teeth.
That's how I prefer to look at things Metaphorically.
The problem with the garbage here in the 830 trommel is that it has formed an almost impenetrable hermetic seal against the side of this contraption.
So in an effort to further facilitate the removal of said garbage, I'm soaking it down with a power-washer.
When a garbage disposal backs up for a couple of hours, it's bad.
When it backs up for two or three days, it's horrible.
And when it backs up for about six weeks, it's a trommel.
I see no real appreciable improvement.
Try to look at it this way The human body takes in food and converts that food into a highly flammable gas.
That's been going on for centuries.
And it's a scientific fact that if a person is so inclined, they can light their farts on fire.
Now, this is not a practice we either subscribe to or recommend, but it is possible.
And that's essentially what's going on here.
The 830 trommel is the first step in the mechanized process of converting unused food into a highly flammable gas, and then ultimately into a source of energy that we can all benefit from.
On the one hand, we're lighting farts on fire.
But on the other hand, we're saving the world And getting very dirty.
Dirty jobs is brought to you every week by a group of hardworking Hollywood rejects that can't seem to hold down a regular job.
But make no mistake about it, the show is programmed by you.
It's your ideas that keep us on the air, so if you have a good one, go to discovery.
Com/dirtyjobs right now.
Make it fun.
Make it dirty.
Just make it fast.
We're about dry.
My name's Mike rowe.
My name's Mike rowe.
My name's Mike rowe.
[Bleep.]
Damn, I hate my name.
Greased up, lubricated, and hung.
Well-hung.
Well, actually Oh, you [ Laughter .]
On that side.
Okay, can you do the one on the left? Pbht!