00:10:46 · Joshua Goodman, Tracy Alloway, Tracy Alloway, Joshua Goodman
[00:10:46] S5: So Is it someone who spends the bulk of their time in public in a car versus someone who spends the bulk of their time in public walking? Is it someone for whom a rat is a curiosity versus a reality that they have to live with? [00:10:57] S3: I kind of like the rats. [00:10:58] S2: I get really bored walking down the street and seeing some wildlife, which in New York City is just pigeons and rats. [00:11:04] S3: It's somewhat entertaining. [00:11:06] S1: I get it. Look, I love all animals. I'm a longtime vegan. [00:11:09] S5: But the fact is that There is a Jungian reaction to a rat for most people. You walk down a street in New York and a rat runs across your foot. You remember it every time you're on the block for the rest of your life. And the same goes for public space trash, which I know certain New Yorkers have sort of romanticized. [00:11:25] S1: I think that you can. [00:11:26] S5: Only do that if it's not your reality. You know, that living around trash and rats is not a good thing. And we would like it to, you know. People sometimes assume that anyone at the Department of Sanitation loves the trash. And I always tell them, no, no, no, our job is to get rid of it. [00:11:40] S1: We hate the trash. [00:11:41] S5: The trash is our enemy, as fascinating as it is to study. And so when we thought about putting. [00:11:47] S1: Global best practices into place just the last.
00:11:47 · Joshua Goodman, Joshua Goodman, Tracy Alloway, Tracy Alloway
[00:11:47] S1: Global best practices into place just the last. [00:11:49] S5: Few years, this is actually a very data-driven agency, probably not surprising. But we had about a century of data about the weight of the trash, which had long been our primary metric for efficiencies. And what we needed was data about the volume of the trash. That's what you need for containerization programs. And so we had to do a 70,000 block volumetric analysis. We went block by block and converted those weights into volumes and developed the programs that are coming out now. And there were a lot of different, both left and right, thoughts about what approach we should take, if any. [00:12:26] S2: And. [00:12:27] S5: We've developed a strategy that we think will work for the unique streetscape of New York. When I first got involved in this work, I would often hear from people, well, there's no place as dense as New York that does this. [00:12:38] S1: Not true. [00:12:39] S5: There's no place with as much weather flexibility as New York. [00:12:41] S1: Not true. There's no place that produces as much volume of trash. Not true. [00:12:44] S5: We actually produce per person less trash than most other Western cities. There's no reason that they can have this everywhere else in the world other than a political inertia, right? And that's what's begun to change based on the data that we've produced. [00:12:59] S3: Well, to me, one of the obvious political choices that's been made in New York is also.
00:12:59 · Tracy Alloway, Tracy Alloway, Joshua Goodman, Joshua Goodman
[00:12:59] S3: Well, to me, one of the obvious political choices that's been made in New York is also. [00:13:02] S2: We don't have a pay-as-you-go service, or you're not paying per pound of trash that you produce, right? I can produce a lot of trash, and it's sort of incumbent on the city to collect it versus someone who's trying their best to recycle and compost and things like that. Why don't we talk about logistics for a second just to better understand the current state so that we can figure out where we're trying to get to. I take out a bag of trash from my apartment building and it's a Wednesday in Soho and I place it on the curb. What happens to it from there? [00:13:34] S5: So a collection truck, we don't call them garbage trucks because they also pick up recycling and compost, comes by sometime generally between midnight and 8.30 in the morning. Try to get as much of it done before peak rush hour. The trucks are on routes that are optimized for a few things. They hold about 12 to 13 tons of trash each. You want it to get full on its route, and you want the route to be completed in a single shift. So they're optimized around those factors. And then once the truck is full, or loaded out is the jargon, it's taken to a network of transfer stations. [00:14:12] S1: So prior to 2000, it was.
00:14:12 · Joshua Goodman, Joshua Goodman
[00:14:12] S1: So prior to 2000, it was. [00:14:15] S5: All taken to the Staten Island landfill. When the landfill closed, the city moved to a waste export model. It was a multi-billion dollar, 15-year infrastructure project to build five transfer stations around the city. These are places where the truck comes, it dumps out onto the tipping floor, a big floor, where a large front-end loader pushes it down holes in the floor into like a shipping container that's underneath. Robotic arms seal up the shipping container. A giant crane puts it on either a barge or a rail car. and it's taken to its final destination outside the city. This is obviously far more environmentally sustainable than an in-city landfill, and also than the old trucking model, right? Barges and rail cars, much, much better for the environment. When you see these barges with 50 or 75 packed storage containers on them, you think, wow, that would have been 75 trucks driving to a landfill. [00:15:10] S1: That's for your.
00:15:10 · Joshua Goodman, Joshua Goodman, Tracy Alloway
[00:15:10] S1: That's for your. [00:15:10] S5: Regular trash, refuse is the term that appears in our materials. Um, for your metal glass and plastic, they're taken to a facility in sunset park where they're palletized and prepared to be sold on the recycling market. Uh, New York city is a great opportunity for me to mention something really important, which is lots of people in sort of the demographic that listens to odd lots, educated, smart people, the cocktail party set, think that it makes them sound really smart to say, I heard recycling is a scam. Didn't someone once tell me, I have to tell you, I can't speak for other municipalities. New York City's recycling system is protected by long-term contracts that guarantee beneficial reuse of those materials. If you properly sort a can or bottle in New York City, it will become a new can or bottle or other reusable item. [00:15:55] S3: Wait, slight tangent. What about a styrofoam cup? [00:15:58] S5: So styrofoams are banned in the city, right? So you shouldn't see them too often. Styrofoam actually hits on the great issue with this. Styrofoam is often used as the archetypical example of a non-recyclable item. [00:16:10] S1: Can't be recycled, can't be recycled. [00:16:11] S5: On a pure molecular level, of course it can be recycled. [00:16:13] S1: It's just plastic.
00:16:13 · Joshua Goodman, Joshua Goodman, Tracy Alloway, Tracy Alloway
[00:16:13] S1: It's just plastic. [00:16:15] S5: The issue is that it's so light that no plastics manufacturer would ever feel that they had enough in one space to make money off of it. It's a good example of how this is actually a market-based system for recycling specifically, because many more things are recyclable from a chemical standpoint than are actually accepted as recycling. In New York City, you probably know that in 2017, 2018, there were domestic policy changes in China that collapsed a lot of cities. [00:16:42] S1: Recycling markets. [00:16:43] S5: New York was protected from those changes by long-term strategic planning before that. We also had resisted an urge that a lot of cities gave into in a few years before that to combine their paper and their metal, glass, and plastic. [00:16:55] S1: Oh, it's easier for residents. [00:16:57] S5: It turned out to be a huge money loser for cities that did it and also for the environment when this market change happened in 17, 18. [00:17:07] S3: What was the argument for doing that? [00:17:09] S2: Because when I think about it in my head, it's like, well, of course it's going to cost more to sort it out.