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.
00:21:52 · Joshua Goodman, Joshua Goodman
[00:21:52] S1: You're wasting that space. [00:21:53] S5: So we planned for one extra day. You mentioned Christmas. And we planned for basically one extra day above their collection. And we went out and measured piles of trash. We eventually were able to come up with conversion formula to use. But it was a lot of on-the-street work measuring both the trash itself and also the streetscape. Because you might know the length of a block, but you know that you can't put the bin in front of a curb cut. You know it can't go in front of a fire hydrant. We had determined that we were going to go with a side-loading model. There are different ways the trucks can be serviced. That meant that we had to think about tree canopy height. The bin can't go up into the tree. There are so many factors in really four dimensions on this to consider. And in Europe in particular, what you see are open shared bins. And this is what had kind of been contemplated in earlier pilots that we had done going back to 2021-2022. okay, just a European style, basically a dumpster on the street that everybody on the block is to use. We always had a lot of issues with that as an at-scale solution because a few reasons. First of all, in New York City, we provide this free unlimited service for residents. Businesses have to pay for trash collection and through a network of private carters. And so there was a concern about, well, if it's a free open bin, why wouldn't a business just steal space in that bin. [00:23:15] S1: With their trash in there?
00:23:15 · Joshua Goodman, Joshua Goodman
[00:23:15] S1: With their trash in there? [00:23:16] S5: So we didn't want to go forward with that model. We also knew that there are many neighborhoods in the city where an on-street container was not going to improve the situation. If you think about a low-density neighborhood, making everybody all of a sudden walk down to the middle of the block, that doesn't help just in the name of saying, well, we've done the whole city. So the model we eventually came up with after we had this volumetric data was a containerization system for low-density buildings, one to nine residential units, so a single-family home up through a small apartment. using a wheeled trash bin and then eventually a specific wheeled trash bin. The largest buildings, 31 or more units, is the point we came up with where they can certainly support at least one of what we call empire bins, the on-street containers. And then the 10 to 30s, the mid-sized buildings, was where we found there's a lot of variety. Might be 11 studios, there's 11 people in the building, versus 29 two-bedrooms. They have to use one or the other, but they choose. [00:24:14] S1: And that program....
00:24:14 · Joshua Goodman, Joshua Goodman, Joe Weisenthal, Joe Weisenthal, Tracy Alloway
[00:24:14] S1: And that program.... [00:24:16] S5: With that model was implemented, the city's divided into 59 community districts. We began in one community district, Manhattan 9, which is West Harlem, Amsterdam to the river, 111 to 155 in June of last year, 2025. And now, fall 2026, this is coming to a second district, Brooklyn Community District 2, which is downtown Brooklyn through Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Brooklyn Heights. That is the point that this really moves beyond a pilot and becomes a real program that New Yorkers can expect to see in their neighborhood. And the mayor has actually committed to funding this program for a full rollout by the end of 2031. [00:24:56] S4: I'm kind of curious, like, I actually don't know which, what I have right now. [00:25:01] S0: So what I have right now. [00:25:02] S2: In my- It's a damning indictment of how often you take out the trash. [00:25:05] S0: No, I take out the trash every day. But like, so the way, like- You take it to a central location, right? No, no, no.