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.
00:17:09 · Tracy Alloway, Joshua Goodman, Joshua Goodman, Tracy Alloway
[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. [00:17:13] S5: The idea was more people will participate because it's easier, which is a good motivating principle in general. But on this specific topic, the technology is not there yet, or at least we don't feel the technology is there yet. Your paper, just to get back to where it all goes, it goes to Staten Island, where it is actually one of the fastest processes in the waste stream. cardboard and paper that you recycle today might become a new pizza box tomorrow. Pizza boxes are one of the primary things made at that facility. And then your compost, which is sort of our best and newest and most exciting stream. Your food waste goes to a few places, but primarily to our Staten Island compost facility. It's a 33-acre site where over a period of three or four months, we turn and aerate your material until it's broken down into finished compost, which we give away to parks and gardens to residents directly. We just finished our summer compost give back season. We gave away about 15 million pounds of finished compost. [00:18:07] S1: To New Yorkers. [00:18:08] S3: I didn't know you could get New York City compost.
00:18:08 · Tracy Alloway, Joshua Goodman, Joe Weisenthal, Joshua Goodman, Joe Weisenthal
[00:18:08] S3: I didn't know you could get New York City compost. [00:18:10] S5: NYC.gov slash get compost. You can find events near you to get 40 pound bags. And some of it goes to the Department of Environmental Protection's Newtown Creek Digestor Eggs. If you've been on the BQE right as you go over the Kosciuszko and come between Brooklyn and Queens, you'll see the big eggs. Those are large facilities where your food waste will be mixed with wastewater. So it gets mixed there with everything that you put down the sink or that you flush down the toilet where it's digested into biosolids for fertilizer and usable biogas that heats homes in Brooklyn. So your waste goes to a lot of different places, but the idea is to divert as much of it as possible to beneficial use and hopefully to reduce the total amount over time. [00:19:07] S4: I'm thinking about that guy, and it's a guy, at the cocktail party. It's like the classic, like, I heard two-minute segment on. [00:19:15] S1: The radio once. [00:19:16] S0: I hate that guy. [00:19:17] S4: I think Odd Lots' listeners are better than that. They only say things if they've researched the topic for at least 30 minutes. [00:19:22] S1: They certainly... I'm sure Odd Lots' listeners know that person, at least. [00:19:25] S0: They know. [00:19:26] S1: Oh, my God. They're prepared to take it on. [00:19:27] S4: I can't stand that person. On the other hand, and I don't want to get into this. [00:19:31] S0: It might. [00:19:31] S4: The fact that, like, New York has guaranteed contracts.... [00:19:35] S1: Anyway.