Only 10 percent of New York City's trash waiting for pickup is stored in containers, the rest sits in trashbags piled on the street. Christopher Robbins, contributor to Streetsblog and Clare Miflin, executive director for the Center for Zero Waste Design, talk about why New York City is particular in this way, and programs that could cut waste and clear sidewalks.
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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. In our series this year, bringing on all 51 members of the New York City Council, one of the most common answers when we ask what constituents call the Council Members about is sanitation, dirty streets. For example, here's last week's Council guest Kevin C. Riley from District 12 in the Northeast Bronx answering my question. Councilmember, since you took office in January, what's the number one thing that your constituents contact your office about?
Kevin C. Riley: Sanitation.
Brian Lehrer: Really?
Kevin C.Riley: Sanitation man, it's the abundance of garbage that's plaguing our community.
Brian Lehrer: Councilmember Kevin C. Riley on last week's show. The problems with trash in New York range from rats to unsightliness, to environmental injustice when so many landfills and incinerators are located in lower-income communities of color. Well, as it happens, Streetsblog has a very deep dive article that's global in scope about garbage on the New York City streets and what might be done about it, including an idea that you might not like on first blush that maybe New Yorkers should pay for having the city pick up the trash like New Yorkers pay for water. It's a climate and other pollution strategy to the less trash we generate, the less we pay. Some people call it pay-as-you-throw.
Another idea, underground containers so there aren't plastic trash bags everywhere on the street waiting for trucks to come on pick up day. New York and learn from other less prestigious places. Apparently, the article says the greatest thing richest city in the world is being embarrassed by other municipalities when it comes to how we generate, sort, store, and recycle the more than 1,200 tonnes of waste handled by the sanitation department every day. With us now, Streetsblog contributor Christopher Robbins who wrote the article, and Clare Miflin, an architect and the founder of the Center for Zero Waste Design. Hi, Chris and Clare, welcome to WNYC.
Christopher Robbins: Morning, Brian, thanks so much for having us.
Clare Miflin: Yes, great to be here.
Brian Lehrer: Clare, be patient. I'm going to go through some of the overview and surprising history of garbage pickup in New York that the article describes, and then we'll bring you in on some of your center's ideas. Chris, let's start with the overview you have in the article of how much trash the sanitation department picks up every day and where it goes because most people just think about putting it out, and then they're happy when the garbage trucks take it away. How much roughly and where does it go?
Christopher Robbins: Right. The top of your intro there, it's not 1,200 tonnes, it's more than 12,000 tons every day, and we're just talking about residential trash in this conversation. The commercial trash pickup is a whole different ballgame. Every single day sanitation department picks up more than 12,000 tons of trash, residential trash multiple times a day throughout the week in all five boroughs. A disturbing amount of that trash is trucked out of town to landfills and incinerators in low-income communities. This costs us a lot of money, more than $430 million every year to just move the trash out of town.
Back in, I believe it was 2010, the City Council passed a law setting the goal that, "Okay, 33% of our total amount of trash by 2022, we're only going to divert--" I'm sorry, I'm getting mixed up here. 2010--
Brian Lehrer: I have it here from your article, I'll help you out by quoting you.
Christopher Robbins: Yes. [chuckles] Thank you.
Brian Lehrer: You compare us to other cities. You write that San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles all have astronomically more success so far at kicking the landfill habit than New York does, 60% to 80% of what they call diversion of their waste averted compared to just 17% on these diversion rates. What does that refer to?
Christopher Robbins: That's the percentage of waste that we are not sending to landfills. That's percentage of waste that we're either recycling or that were as in like bottles, cans, or through organics recycling. Actually, that number has dipped from 17.6% to 16.7% recently. Again, our goal back in 2010 was 33%. We have just really been stuck for a very long time in the same system where we can't show the same diversion rates as other cities across the country and across the world.
Brian Lehrer: Your article reminds us that Mayor de Blasio set a goal of zero waste to landfills by 2030. Obviously, here we are just eight years out from that and we're not headed very quickly in that direction. I just want to invite you to make one more point about landfills and incinerators, which your article points out, which is that they're typically in low-income communities across America. Where geographically does New York City's garbage wind up going?
Christopher Robbins: Well, two years ago, Politico did a fantastic series on this, on the failure of the city to get its diversion rate up. They actually went to these communities in upstate New York, but they're also in communities across the south, like in Alabama. I remember, as a kid growing up in Virginia, as a high school student, I learned that Virginia took in a staggering amount of trash from New York City. That's just because there's just nowhere in New York City to store the trash. I would also note that there's an incinerator in Newark, New Jersey, that some of our trash goes to. Again, our trash is being burned, and then that particular matter is being sent into these communities.
It doesn't have to be this way.
Brian Lehrer: Just before we bring in Clare with some ideas on how it doesn't have to be this way, everywhere, there are plastic trash bags on the street, that homeowners are building staff put out when it's pickup day, but you give us some really interesting history in your article that I didn't know, which is that plastic trash bags used to be illegal until ironically, a sanitation strike in the 1960s. Why were they illegal and what happened in 1968?
Christopher Robbins: The classic New York City trash can is the Oscar the Grouch trash can, it's the metal bin with the metal lid. That was dominant on New York City streets. That was the health department's mandated trash can for a very long time because it was seen as sanitary, it did its best to keep the rats out, but it was also really loud, and really heavy. When the sanitation workers' strike started in early 1968, it was a nine-day strike, all those metal cans were full. New Yorkers had nowhere to put their garbage. Mayor Lindsay actually designated certain intersections across the city where people could take their trash and burn it in the streets.
Brian Lehrer: Wow.
Christopher Robbins: In the midst of this crisis, the chemical companies donated 200,000 plastic bags at a current-day cost of around $80,000. The city saying, "Hey, you can store your garbage in these plastic bags until the sanitation strike is over." Well, people loved the bags because they were lightweight. When sanitation workers went back to work, they appreciated that they didn't have to haul these heavy trash bins to the truck and then back to the curb, so it stuck, and we've been addicted to plastic trash bags ever since.
Brian Lehrer: That's where this idea of metal containers comes in, and where Clare Miflin from the Center for Zero Waste Design comes in, quoted in the article. Clare, I see from the article that you help property owners strategize better ways to handle their waste, and you cite one building in Lower Manhattan on a block with 1,600 units and 1,600 garbage bags put out on the street. Can you describe that block and what it represents city-wide?
Clare Miflin: Yes. Actually, that block is in Chelsea. We did do work in the financial district, and there are a lot of bags down there, but this particular block is London Terrace, 24th Street between 9th and 10th Avenues. There's 1,600 to 1,700 apartments, and we observed the waste being set out one morning, the recycling and trash day, and there were over 1,000 items put out, mostly bags and bailed cardboard. It took building staff about couple of hours to get everything up onto the sidewalk.
They were bringing it up mainly in rolled containers like the carts with the wheels on the bottom. Then, they made these big piles which are currently on the street, not the sidewalk because there's scaffolding, and then it took three sanitation trucks an hour and a quarter to lift those bags into the back of the truck, and then the building staff had to clean up afterwards. One of our ideas here is those rolling carts could just be brought out, the truck comes and it tips them in the back of the truck. That's what happens all over the world. South America, Asia, Europe, everyone has these rolling carts about one and a half cubic yards. You roll them out, they come to the truck. That's one big idea.
The problem is Department of Sanitation don't pick up those containers at the moment, they lift everything by hand into the back of the truck, so the rolled carts have to be less than 55 gallons.
Brian Lehrer: Right. I gather from the article it would take a different kind of garbage truck than we generally use here now that has special arms that can lift those metal containers. Could you describe the containers more? The article describes them as below-grade containers with pneumatic tubes and street-level sorting bins to keep their streets clean and the trash pickup efficient in those other cities and countries that you mentioned France, South Korea, Argentina, the Netherlands. Does below-grade mean they're underground?
Clare Miflin: Those are three different things you mentioned right there. There's shared containers in the street, that's common in the Hague or the Netherlands where imagine the East Village, at the moment, people bring their trash down to those containers on the sidewalk often. It's individuals, they bring it down, and then the super deals with it and puts the bags out. Instead, you could have a shared container on the parking lane of the street. They could be above ground, or better, they could be submerged.
That's normally done below the sidewalk. In those cases, you just see a little bit above the sidewalk, you put the waste in, or the recycling, and when the truck comes that place it up. There's I think it's up to eight cubic yards of it below grade that is lifted up and put into the truck. Those ones do require special trucks to lift it up. The ones I was saying, the wheeled bins, they could just retrofit their trucks right now with a little hoist that's like $10,000 a truck to pick up those. That's not a big change in trucks. You have the shared ones on the street that residents can bring waste to, you have the ones I was suggesting is for London Terrace.
They have a lot of building staff that already bring in the waste stuff in containers in the service elevator, those could be taken directly to the truck. The SMI also pick up roll-off containers which are huge. The ones you see a lot in NYCHA developments, the 30 cubic yard ones, or that are shared in Battery Park City, those are rolled onto a truck. Pneumatic tubes is another one again, which is like in Roosevelt Island, where they have the underground pneumatic tubes which go to a roll-off container in one location.
Brian Lehrer: There are some models of these kinds of things right here in New York City, Battery Park City, Roosevelt Island, as the article on Streetsblog points out. Listeners, help us report this story and give us your opinion too, if you like, or ask a question, what's the trash situation on your block? How would you like to try a container system of one kind or another, or to make everyone pay for trash pickup based on the amount you generate, an idea we're going to get to in just a second? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer. I just want to finish the thread, Clare, on what other cities do with containers.
You're quoted in the article talking about Paris which has a similar density to Manhattan and its much larger container experiment over there than we have here. What's happening in Paris?
Clare Miflin: Okay, so in Paris, they're doing a lot of things to make it better on the streets. They collect trash daily from all over the city and they call them the wheelie bins so they're about 96 gallons or double size and you roll them out every day and it goes directly to the truck. They're even experimenting with the truck SMS messaging building so you know when that truck is coming. We have that on our trucks here. I mean, you can track your Snowplow, it could be done here that you would know when the truck is coming.
In Paris, they're used to going to bottle banks there, so they're used to taking their recycling to a shared location. They piloted these drop-off containers in the street for all the recycling streams, and they pick up trash and food waste door to door. Food waste isn't in every neighborhood yet. You drop off your plastics, metals, glass, textiles in a local on-street drop-off, and your smelly waste is picked up door to door.
Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call. Alexis in the East Village is going to go right at it I think. Alexis, you're on WNYC. Hi.
Alexis: Hello. We are feeding our rats every day in the East Village. We need to increase our composting and make it mandatory like other cities like Seattle, San Francisco. Ireland, you pay for your garbage to be picked up, but you do not pay for composting. We need a robust composting system to deal with our trash. I agree if we put out our trash in metal containers that are contained and know when the truck is coming and get rid of these plastic bags that are just being ripped open every night by our rats. Our rats on Avenue B eat clams and mussels every day and so their population has just blossomed. There's billions of rats on Avenue B right now eating mussels and clams.
Brian Lehrer: Alexis, thank you very much. We're going to go to Nicole in Bushwick next, a report from that neighborhood after we heard from the East Village. Hi, Nicole, you're on WNYC.
Nicole: Hi, can you hear me? [chuckles]
Brian Lehrer: Yes, we got you.
Nicole: I've called in before, I run the Clean Bushwick Initiative. I've been doing that for six years. We're a community organization that basically goes out and cleans up the streets. Now, from my perspective, this issue in lower-income neighborhoods has been an issue just way before the pandemic but I think this issue has come so into the forefront because so many other neighborhoods now have become littered because of budget cuts. 1/3 of what's in the trash is food and the fact that the mayor wants to cut funding to the sanitation budget by close to $50 million and cut that program from expanding we're just going to see a worsening situation.
At the end of the day, we're all just creating too much trash and there needs to be extended producer responsibility. Definitely the garbage bags with food waste in them, it's just not going to get better without some serious innovative changes.
Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Nicole. We did a segment last week on two different models for producer responsibility, at least for plastic packaging waste. Two different models that are before the New York State legislature right now, one that environmentalists back more than others. Chris, Nicole mentioned the cut, not increase, but a cut to the sanitation department budget despite us being so far from the goals that the government set a few weeks ago for how little we're supposed to send to landfills by the end of this decade, Mayor Adams proposing a cut in the sanitation department budget as you report in the article. How much of a cut and what's their rationale?
Christopher Robbins: It's around $50 million total. Some of that is actually cuts to corner basket pickup. Also, it's around $28 million to suspend the organics pickup program. Just to give you some perspective, at the height of its popularity, New York City had 3 million organics collection participants, and it currently has less than 65,000. There's seven community boards that can participate in the program right now. In those seven community boards, just 5% or 6% of residents use it. Of those people, just 50% of them put their bin out every week for collection.
While the mayor has called it a symbolic program, that's a self-fulfilling prophecy because the more you cut the program, of course, the less people will participate. That also means the cost of transporting that waste out of town, that 30% of all residential waste being organics, valuable organics that we can reuse, is going to a landfill or an incinerator. It's almost like the MTA when we talk about cutting service because fewer riders are there. Well, if you cut service, then the service will get worse, and then fewer people will ride, and it's kind of a death spiral.
There has to be major political will behind this idea that we're not going to treat this as some ancillary, extra credit program, this is baked into a sensible and necessary solid waste strategy going forward in New York City.
Brian Lehrer: This is WNYC FM HD and AM New York, WNJT FM 88.1. Trenton, WNJP 88.5 Sussex, WNJY 89.3 Netcong, and WNJO 90.3 Toms River. We are a New York and New Jersey Public Radio and streaming live @wnyc.org a few more minutes talking about trash on the streets of New York City and some different kinds of ideas from different cities around the country and around the world as to what to do with it and we haven't even gotten to the articles biggest bombshell proposal yet. [chuckles] Both of the last two callers said they were gonna bring it up and then they didn't.
The idea is that maybe, just maybe like New Yorkers pay water bills based on the amount they use, people should pay for the trash to be picked up based on how much trash they put out. Some people call it pay-as-you-throw. Currently, residential pickup is free in New York. Chris, do other cities pay for trash pickup?
Christopher Robbins: Yes, lots of other cities pay for trash pickup. Los Angeles pays for trash pickup. I mean, I think it's this idea that taxes in New York City especially are already so high that people just see it as a God-given right to be able to throw whatever they want out on the curb and we see what the system creates, right? It sort of creates a free for all on the streets of your block multiple times a week when there's just no incentive really to stem that tide. Yes, like water landfill space is a finite resource, and other places across the world have recognized that people should pay for the privilege of taking that space up.
Brian Lehrer: Clare, does your group advocate for this?
Clare Miflin: Yes, definitely. Pay-as-you-throw or save-as-you-throw, as it's called here, is an important part of making sure people throw away less waste. I think on average, it reduces the amount of refuse by 17% after it's introduced but it's just one of the many things, and both Alexis and Nicole, I agreed with their points, we have to compost more. We actually have an advocacy campaign Put Waste To Work, you can go to the website, which kind of lists all the strategies, how can we make sure we circulate stuff so we reuse things more, how can we put waste in containers, and how can we make sure we compost organic waste to regenerate green spaces so they can act as sponges?
I mean, the benefits are so many to New York City.
Brian Lehrer: It's interesting that they call it different things in different places. I guess it depends on whether you want to go with the carrot or the stick, right? Pay as you throw, that's the stick, save as you throw is the carrot because you could save money, but Clare, is there an environmental justice risk here if people start getting charged for a sanitation pickup, this is going to fall proportionately harder on lower-income people than on upper-income people, or do you disagree?
Clare Miflin: There are many ways to do it, and in San Francisco, they have if you're lower-income, you pay less. The whole point of it being save-as-you-throw is it's revenue-neutral. Say it was done on a building level, you would have a property tax rebate every building, about the average amount that people pay for waste disposal, which I think is about 100 bucks a unit or household, so the building would get the rebate, and then they would pay per the amount of bags or containers they set out. That's how it's done in Toronto, for example, and for cities that have a lot of trash chutes, it makes more sense to do it on a building scale.
Brian Lehrer: Chris, were you trying to get in there?
Christopher Robbins: Yes, I was just going to point out that the city's independent budget office has studied this and a pay-as-you-throw program would save New Yorkers $400 million every year, which is, if you'll notice, pretty close to what we're spending trucking the trash out of town. It has been studied and it's doable, and it would save taxpayers money.
Brian Lehrer: One more call and we'll hit one more borough. Judd on Staten Island. You're on WNYC. Hi, Judd.
Judd: Great. Thanks for taking my call. I think just ironically, pay-as-you-throw I think it would be really challenging to implement that all throughout New York City because there'd be just much incentive to dump illegally, and already we have a problem with people throwing their house trash bags in streets, and, I mean, the amount of litter on the street. Staten Island seems like a place where it could work because you've got a lot of single-family homes and lower density buildings where it's easier to track but other than that, I can't imagine in Brooklyn or Manhattan. I mean, everyone could just put it down the street. Part of the next apartment's building if you're still doing street collections.
I don't see how it'd work logistically. The Department of Sanitation originally started out as the Department of Streets. Their main goal was actually just to keep the city clean. I think that needs to still be the focus just to keep things practical and avoid getting distracted. I am a huge environmentalist, I'd love to see more composting and less waste, but the number one thing we got to deal with politically is just the local environment problem, someone else put it with the rats, but the smell, the unsightliness. We need to get the street trash, the bags off the block. We need to containerize that waste.
It needs to be done in a shared system like you see everywhere around the world, in Paris, and in Rome, and in Buenos Aires, and let's not get too fancy with pneumatic tubes and such, it's not practical. We just need to get those bins on each block, and in the lower density neighborhoods, single-family brownstones, containers that you just have that you can roll out from the sidewalk to the street like you see in most suburban areas that can be picked up automatically. Exactly the ones that we had for composting, those would work just fine. Let's get on it.
Brian Lehrer: Judd, thank you very much, and to one of the things that he said, a listener writes on this illegal dumping, "People do it now in Brooklyn, garbage is dumped illegally in my park every day." Clare, a last word reacting to Judd on Staten Island, and then we're out of time.
Clare Miflin: Yes, illegal dumping initially can be a problem but if you have enforcement, it can go away typically within six months to a year, and it's less likely if you have a building-based system. In Toronto, or San Francisco, or Seattle, you just pay more for having a larger garbage can. You want a large can, you pay more, and that could work over all of the one to six family neighborhoods. You just pay for the size of your garbage can. That doesn't really encourage you to dump trash elsewhere, and the same if it's a building scale,
it's not on the individual. In Toronto, you saw buildings that changed their trash chute to an organics chute.
They made it a little smaller, so it only took the bio bags, and they diverted 85%, and that was at a building scale, and there was no real incentive for a resident in that building to take their trash and throw it on the street. They could still throw it in their trash bin but they set up the system to make it easier for them to divert their food waste than not. I think I agree with Judd that we have to contain stuff but I think all these systems work really well together to contain it, to do the composting, to do the pay as you throw.
Brian Lehrer: Well, the article with lessons and ideas from around the country and around the world is called "Trash town: Why is the world's richest city so filthy and what can be done about it?" on Streetsblog. We thank Streetsblog contributor Christopher Robbins who wrote the article, and Clare Miflin, an architect and founder of the Center for Zero Waste Design, who was one of the sources. Thanks, both of you, for coming on. Really interesting.
Christopher Robbins: Thanks so much for having us.
Clare Miflin: Thank you so much.
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