00:02:11 · Tracy Alloway, Tracy Alloway, Joe Weisenthal, Joe Weisenthal, Joshua Goodman, Joshua Goodman
[00:02:11] S3: And wait for collection. [00:02:12] S2: And we are in a giant process of trying to change that. So there's a lot to discuss here. [00:02:16] S0: There's a lot to discuss. [00:02:17] S4: By the way, that quote, according to Google Gemini, there's no Republican or Democratic way to pick up the garbage. Former Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia was the one who said that. And so Who is out running as a Republican on a fusion nonpartisan? [00:02:31] S0: Anyway, that's not the point. But it is, you know, it's just a thing. Either you do it well or you don't. [00:02:35] S4: And people get really upset if you don't. New York is tricky for multiple reasons. But, you know, you think in a suburb, right, you put the trash out. But there aren't cars in the way between the trash bins and the garbage truck, etc. Because they're in the driveway or the garage or something like that. [00:02:52] S0: New York has all kinds of things in between the road and the bins. I know there's, you know, there's. [00:02:57] S4: This big effort to do containerization, I think, at one point or headlines about some, you know, outside study from like McKinsey, etc. There's a lot of interesting logistical questions about trash collection. And so it's a core topic. Even though we haven't done it, it sits firmly. [00:03:14] S1: In our wheelhouse. [00:03:15] S5: Absolutely. [00:03:16] S1: All right.
00:03:16 · Joshua Goodman, Tracy Alloway, Tracy Alloway, Joshua Goodman
[00:03:16] S1: All right. [00:03:16] S2: So without further ado, we have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with Joshua Goodman. He is, of course, Deputy Commissioner at New York City's Department of Sanitation. So Josh, thanks so much for. [00:03:25] S3: Coming on Odd Lots. [00:03:25] S1: Thank you both for having me. [00:03:27] S3: Is trash collection apolitical? [00:03:29] S5: So obviously we all admire and respect Mayor LaGuardia. It's a famous quote. [00:03:33] S1: You hear it all the time. You hear paraphrases of it all the time. It's patently untrue, right? [00:03:37] S5: The moment you start to dissect it, you realize that, of course, an enormous public space logistical initiative is going to be colored by ideology. Partisanship, maybe not, but the sort of implication behind the quote that it's a binary, yes, it's picked up, no, it's not picked up, really undersells substantially the amount of planning that needs to go into this, both in the short term and in the long term. In New York City, we at the Department of Sanitation pick up, process, and export 24 million pounds of trash recycling and compostable material every single day. One of the things I like to tell people is that there's a word that you'll hear a lot, Sisyphean, right? [00:04:16] S1: And you hear it used imprecisely, in my opinion. [00:04:19] S5: It's often used as just a synonym for hard. Oh, I, you know, school was a Sisyphean task or this home improvement project, whatever. [00:04:26] S3: But it ended.
00:04:26 · Tracy Alloway, Joshua Goodman, Joshua Goodman, Joe Weisenthal, Joe Weisenthal
[00:04:26] S3: But it ended. [00:04:27] S5: Right. And we have the definitional Sisyphean task. Just as Sisyphus faced the boulder again each day, we pick up 24 million pounds today. We pick up 24 million pounds tomorrow. We pick up 24 million pounds the next day. There will never be a time when DSNY says, great news, everyone. [00:04:44] S1: We got it all. Exactly. [00:04:45] S5: And this is, as Tracy mentioned, we think of it as the last free unlimited service. [00:04:52] S1: There's no signup. There's no opt-in. [00:04:54] S5: There's no means test. You put it out, we come and get it. It's basically us in the public library at this point. And that means, and that's specific to New York, of course, but it means that as we think about changes in global best practices, We need to keep that commitment to full universal service. [00:05:13] S0: I don't want to. [00:05:15] S4: Get too bogged down in this question of Sisyphean and the philosophy of what the Greeks were trying to teach with the lesson of Sisyphus and the philosophers like Camus and so forth who studied Sisyphus. [00:05:27] S0: Over the years.
00:05:27 · Joe Weisenthal, Joe Weisenthal, Joshua Goodman, Joshua Goodman
[00:05:27] S0: Over the years. [00:05:28] S4: But one element of that lesson is the boulder, yes, it was endless and it never ended, much like trash collection. but there was no purpose to it. There was no internal satisfaction that one could perceive from the outside, whereas helping the public, that could in theory be satisfactory. So had Sisyphus pushed up the boulder every day and then something great happened to the land, oh, it was clean, maybe that would have been satisfying internally. And what's tortuous about the Sisyphean metaphor is that there does not seem to be any reward for it. [00:06:02] S5: Well, it is true that most New Yorkers think of cleanliness as the natural state, right? It's not, wow, you did a great job. [00:06:08] S0: Are you sure about that? [00:06:09] S1: Well, that's the goal, right? [00:06:10] S5: The idea is that a street is supposed to be clean. [00:06:12] S1: And you mentioned Camus. [00:06:13] S5: Our guy at sanitation has actually started because many people notice black bags of trash. They notice piles of trash. They rarely, if ever, notice the absence of piles of trash. And so there is a philosophical element to this, but obviously- I know we're going to spend a lot more time on. [00:06:30] S1: The details today. [00:06:30] S0: We could just talk about Camus and Sartre. [00:06:32] S1: The whole time.
00:06:32 · Joshua Goodman, Joshua Goodman, Tracy Alloway
[00:06:32] S1: The whole time. [00:06:33] S5: What it really came down to was about four or five years ago, we had spent decades of people coming to New York from Barcelona, from Buenos Aires, from Paris, from London, even from Chicago and LA and saying, why do you live like this? And for many decades, our answer had basically been like, well, have you tried a bagel? We have better pizza than you do. We had not gotten serious about addressing these challenges in a meaningful, long-term way. And that's what's begun to change over the last few years through a process that we call the trash revolution, which is a complete reimagining of the relationship that 8.5 million New Yorkers have with 24 million pounds of trash a day, what they expect from us, what we expect from them. And it's required an enormous amount of data analysis, of streetscape redesign, of work across agencies, of breaking down silos. And fortunately, it's getting results. There's a lot we can talk about that really shows that this is working. [00:07:26] S2: Before we get into all the ins and outs of the trash revolution, which I love as a designation, how did black bags of garbage become a thing in New York in the first place? Because I remember this was one of the big culture shocks when I first moved to New York. college and then I dropped out. So I was only here for two or three weeks. Maybe all the trash bags had something to do with it. But walking down the street, coming from places like London and Tokyo and seeing these bags of trash laid out, it was kind of weird. Yeah.
00:07:26 · Tracy Alloway, Joshua Goodman, Joshua Goodman
[00:07:26] S2: Before we get into all the ins and outs of the trash revolution, which I love as a designation, how did black bags of garbage become a thing in New York in the first place? Because I remember this was one of the big culture shocks when I first moved to New York. college and then I dropped out. So I was only here for two or three weeks. Maybe all the trash bags had something to do with it. But walking down the street, coming from places like London and Tokyo and seeing these bags of trash laid out, it was kind of weird. Yeah. [00:07:56] S5: There were really two key events that led to New York's unique status here. One is the 1811 street grid. In New York City, the only non-renewable resource is public space. There is a finite amount of room. And so when the streets were laid out in the 1811 master plan, The city was built without alleyways. You go to Chicago, which has similar density, there are alleys behind almost all buildings to store the trash. So if you're watching a movie and it's set in New York and someone jumps out of a dark alley, it's almost certainly shot in Chicago or an LA soundstage because we don't. [00:08:27] S1: Really have them. [00:08:28] S5: So that meant there was no storage space behind the buildings, which other cities have. [00:08:32] S1: And then throughout.