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.
00:19:35 · Joshua Goodman, Joe Weisenthal, Joe Weisenthal, Joshua Goodman, Tracy Alloway
[00:19:35] S1: Anyway. [00:19:36] S4: Does not necessarily... vindicate recycling. I might vindicate it from the New York City perspective, but let's move on. [00:19:43] S0: All right. That's an rough overview of, let's say, the old regime. [00:19:47] S4: Why don't you give us the equivalent sort of like rough So the big changes in what I just described were that were conducted between 2000 and 2015 to move from a landfill model to a waste export model. [00:20:03] S5: Those were huge back of house changes on our operations. And what we're doing now is making sort of front of house changes for how New Yorkers interact with the trash. [00:20:11] S1: It's actually, I don't. [00:20:13] S5: Mean to use it as an excuse, but it's one of the reasons why as other cities moved to on-street containerization, New York didn't. [00:20:19] S1: We had this big project going on of building the transfer stations. Obviously, we should be able to do both. [00:20:24] S5: But so now what we're doing is after we completed this 70,000 block volumetric analysis, Can. [00:20:30] S2: You say a little bit more about the analysis? Because I don't even know how you would start such a project. Because if you look at an apartment building, it's like, OK, maybe they produce like X pounds of waste on a certain day. But then the day after Christmas, that suddenly explodes and becomes five times as much. [00:20:46] S1: Yeah, absolutely.
00:20:46 · Joshua Goodman, Joshua Goodman, Tracy Alloway
[00:20:46] S1: Yeah, absolutely. [00:20:47] S5: So when you look at one thing that I think is important to remember as we talk about this is that even though New York has a reputation for being behind the curve, there's actually no city in North America that does on-street containerization. [00:20:59] S2: Right? [00:20:59] S5: It's a purely European, South American, and Asian thing. And when this program is implemented, New York will have gone, I would never say worse, but have gone from the back of the pack to first. And that means that we had to develop a system that would work for us specifically, right? As we first started to confront this, I heard a lot from sort of two groups, urbanists who would say, this is a solved problem, copy-paste Barcelona, copy-paste Amsterdam, and also community leaders in the city who said this would never work here, right? And when we did this study, what we really found was that both of those groups were wrong. It is, of course, achievable and it is. [00:21:33] S1: Of course, difficult. So when we had all this. [00:21:36] S5: Data about the weight of the trash, what we wanted to do was, again, as I mentioned, that there's a finite amount of street space. You want to establish a containerization model that can hold all the waste, but that is not oversized because then. [00:21:52] S1: You're wasting that space.