New York, NY —
Recycling is the law of the state, and New Yorkers are used to seeing blue and green bins in their communities and at public agencies. But not in the subway system. New York City Transit has a completely different way of sorting its trash. WNYC has learned that Governor Eliot Spitzer’s administration now wants the MTA to consider putting bins on subway platforms. But as WNYC’s Beth Fertig reports, the agency thinks it’s already got the most efficient way of recycling its riders’ trash.
Slideshow: Trash on the Tracks
REPORTER: It’s isn’t hard to imagine what kind of waste is being left in the subways.
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REPORTER: Newspapers make up a huge part of the trash on subway platforms, and even the tracks. And yet, there are no recycling bins in any of the 468 subway stations. John Rodriguez of Brooklyn is typical of many riders when asked what he does after finishing HIS newspaper.
RODRIGUEZ: Throw it in the garbage pail.
REPORTER: And where do you think it goes?
RODRIGUEZ: Garbage dump.
REPORTER: Well, not exactly. Every day, about 30 tons of trash from the subways gets trucked to All American Recycling in Jersey City. The plastic bags are torn open and their contents are released onto two long conveyer belts.
GANNON: You got MTA cards in there, you got Coke bottles in the MTA, you have food items, plastic coffee cups.
REPORTER: Bill Gannon is the general manager for All American. There are 25 workers standing here along the length of the two conveyer belts wearing gloves and masks. Gannon says they’re sorting out the REAL trash from whatever can be recycled.
GANNON: The good stuff would be the newspapers. We’re now trying to recycle the plastic bags. Some of the plastic bottles we try and recover. The corrugated that’s in there. And those are the main items which we actually take out.
REPORTER: Which is how much of this waste? GANNON: Right in the 40 percentile
REPORTER: That’s right. Gannon says 40 percent of all of the trash that’s hauled away from the subways is able to be recycled, once his workers go through it by hand. That’s about 71-hundred tons of the 17,050 that are removed each year from the stations. The rest of it goes to a landfill. But Governor Eliot Spitzer’s Administration questions whether the MTA could get a higher rate by putting recycling bins on its subway platforms. Judith Enck is Deputy Secretary for the Environment.
ENCK: Recycling is not rocket science. But it is essential that we have good source separation programs right at the outset and not these questionable programs where you try to pull out newsprint that’s stained with coffee grinds, and mustard and broken glass that’s just not the efficient and effective way to do it.
Other mass transit systems in San Francisco, Boston, Chicago and Washington DC all have this kind of source separation, with newspaper bins in or right outside their train stations. But MTA officials insist that wouldn’t work in the city subways. With 468 stations that are open 24 hours a day, Assistant Chief Operations Officer Michael Zacchea says New York City Transit needs to get all of its trash moved out quickly and cheaply.
ZACCHEA: To add a number, a multiple number of receptacles to include metal, glass or plastic plus the refuse would tremendously complicate that removal process. Changes would have to be made in the consist of the trains, the refuse trains that remove the refuse. And there’d have to be changes made to how the recyclable materials would be removed from system.
REPORTER: Zacchea says having separate trucks hauling the trash and recyclables to different facilities would cost more money AND leave a bigger carbon footprint because of the gas required. But Judith Enck disagrees. She believes separating the recyclables on the platform would help the MTA save money.
ENCK: You’d have much better quality material so you’d command a higher market price, for the material, cause you won’t have newsprint with mustard and coffee grinds on it.
REPORTER: And if the recycling plant sells more materials at a higher price, she says the MTA would pay less to dump its remaining trash in a landfill. It now pays about 80 dollars per ton.
But New York City Transit and its recycling partners aren’t convinced. At All American Recycling, Bill Gannon points to the bales of paper that were sorted out of the subway garbage.
GANNON: If you look carefully you’ll be able to make out the MTA cards.
The paper contains some metro cards and even a few plastic bottles that weren’t properly sorted. But Gannon says that doesn’t prevent him from getting a very good price for newsprint – between 90 and 100 dollars a ton. Even if Gannon’s plant got pure newspaper, Mike Zacchea of New York City Transit says the sales price would only go up about 10 dollars per ton.
ZACCHEA: If the paper product that was coming out of the transit system, the subway system, were a better quality his marginal ability to make another dollar would be small. Transit’s cost to produce that cleaner grade would be in labor, infrastructure improvements, operational impact and also we believe, based on experience, a lower volume.
REPORTER: Zacchea is referring to a pilot program New York City Transit tried in the 1990s. Recycling bins were placed at 8 subway stations. But the diversion rate was only 13 percent. Critics say it wasn’t a big enough program to draw any conclusions and that New Yorkers are much more conscious now about recycling.
Zacchea says New York City Transit also recycles its steel and that subway trash is a small fraction of its garbage. And he says new technologies – such as optical scanners that can see every shred of paper – might help recycling facilities recover even more than 40 percent of subway trash. But if collecting everything at once and sorting it later is really the best way to recycle, there’s one question he had trouble answering.
What should the average customer who has a newspaper and a water bottle do with their trash?
ZACCHEA That’s a great question, if I say throw it out at home then I’m advocating source separation recycling at home and that’s a problem. I live in a community that has that, we have Mondays and Wednesdays as refuse and Tuesdays as recycling and there’s two trucks and two crews and I don’t get it. In my mind one truck picking up everything and doing a very good job of sorting the recyclable from the waste would be most efficient, in my view, way to do it and the most environmentally friendly.
The Governor’s office might beg to differ. The state’s Department of Environmental Conservation will be having more talks with the MTA about its recycling program, now that the transit authority has appointed a new commission devoted to sustainability. For WNYC I’m Beth Fertig.