00:32:53 · Joshua Goodman, Joshua Goodman, Tracy Alloway
[00:32:53] S1: Buying them online. [00:32:54] S5: And it comes with an instruction booklet, but they don't necessarily read it because it came from an online pharmacy and whatever. And then they think, this is trash. I put it in the bag and it goes away. And so a big thing that we want people to remember, of course, is a human being handles your garbage. But the move to mechanized collection, the side-loading truck, in high density areas will make a huge difference for the backs and knees of sanitation workers. They go out, they begin their day with a roll call at their garage. I mentioned the city's divided into 59 districts. They start at one of their assigned district. They do a roll call, they get their assignment for the day. [00:33:28] S1: There's a big. [00:33:29] S5: Electronic board where they find out where they're working that day. They go out with their partner and they collect the trash. And then in many, but not all districts, they get to dump it at the transfer station on the same shift. Some districts where the routes are optimized differently, it's another shift comes in and empties the truck so that it's empty when people come back. [00:33:48] S1: In the morning. [00:33:50] S5: These are people who deal with every possible situation you can imagine. And if we can get it so that they are not lifting your garbage as much, it will. [00:33:57] S1: Make a huge difference. [00:33:58] S3: What happens to bulky waste under the new system?
00:33:58 · Tracy Alloway, Tracy Alloway, Joshua Goodman, Joshua Goodman
[00:33:58] S3: What happens to bulky waste under the new system? [00:34:01] S2: Because one of the nice things about New York City right now is, you know, you can put a couch on a curb, and sometimes people will just take it and use it on their own. But if they don't, then the trash collectors will come and they'll throw it away and you don't have to pay extra. [00:34:14] S5: To do that. [00:34:15] S1: Yeah, no change. [00:34:15] S5: If there's an item that doesn't fit in your bin, you know, a couch is a great example, just leave it next to it. A truck will still be coming down. We hope to find efficiencies at full rollout and have to run fewer of the trucks, the rear loader, the sort of traditional collection truck that can get bulky items. But that was actually one of the things we learned from Barcelona. Barcelona is often held up as the gold standard of waste management in urban environment. We talked to them at the beginning of this process and asked them quite a few questions about what worked and also what they would have done differently. And it was interesting because American urbanists will tell you. [00:34:48] S1: That Barcelona is perfect, we should just do Barcelona. [00:34:51] S5: And the Barcelona people were like, we still have a lot of issues. One of which was that they had converted their fleet too heavily to sideloaders. And then learned, well, actually, people still put a loose bag next to it once in a while. They still need the couch. And they had to go back and get a different truck. So we're making sure to keep that as part of the program.
00:34:51 · Joshua Goodman, Joe Weisenthal, Joe Weisenthal, Joshua Goodman
[00:34:51] S5: And the Barcelona people were like, we still have a lot of issues. One of which was that they had converted their fleet too heavily to sideloaders. And then learned, well, actually, people still put a loose bag next to it once in a while. They still need the couch. And they had to go back and get a different truck. So we're making sure to keep that as part of the program. [00:35:09] S4: Just out of curiosity, in this international exploration, did you ever look into Mexico City? Because I've never been to a city that's, A, more clean. And, B, you can't find a trash can for the life of you. And I'm like, where do people put their, like, you buy something from a street food vendor. [00:35:25] S0: You have this wrapper. And I'm like, I don't know where to throw it away. There's no trash cans anywhere. And yet the streets are spotless. I don't get it. You know, public space. [00:35:33] S5: Litter baskets and public space maintenance are different across the world. And we have talked to them. And, you know, we have responsibility here for the property owner to maintain the sidewalk. In Mexico City and in Tokyo, which is the other sort of famously clean streetscape city, there are community groups who are paid or tasked with maintenance. And we have that as well through the business improvement districts system. We did in 2018 conduct a one-district pilot where we tried going with the Tokyo-Mexico City model and removed every litter basket. Because people sometimes say, oh, the litter baskets, they attract the trash. [00:36:10] S1: People littered everywhere.
00:36:10 · Joshua Goodman, Joshua Goodman, Tracy Alloway, Tracy Alloway
[00:36:10] S1: People littered everywhere. [00:36:13] S5: So that said, I don't want to preclude for your future study. It is true that piles of trash attract additional trash. And when you're in a neighborhood that is not containerized and you see a pile of black bags, it is natural to think, I can put my garbage on top of this. So my hope is that after full containerization, we can reevaluate some of that further and say, OK, now that the city broadly doesn't have trash. [00:36:37] S1: Everywhere, what can we do to limit littering and public space cleanliness issues? [00:36:57] S2: This is a slightly random question, but what happened to the anti-littering campaigns of like the 80s and 90s, I guess as far back as the 70s? Because I feel like you just don't see them as much anymore. And it's not like, I don't. [00:37:10] S3: Think you can look at New York and say, mission accomplished. There's no more littering. [00:37:13] S1: I totally agree. [00:37:14] S5: I will say that I do think that there's some confirmation bias and selective memory about these because we... Ran a multi-million dollar one last year, the We Heart NYC anti-littering campaign. We ran one that was well into the six figures recently that had a picture of a finger pointing up into an NYC litter basket and said, if you see someone littering, tell them where to stick it. [00:37:36] S1: We ran a few of these. [00:37:38] S5: And the issue is, I think, probably the same one that you find across the media landscape, right? The monoculture is long over. And we try to do a tremendous amount.
00:37:38 · Joshua Goodman, Joshua Goodman, Tracy Alloway
[00:37:38] S5: And the issue is, I think, probably the same one that you find across the media landscape, right? The monoculture is long over. And we try to do a tremendous amount. [00:37:48] S1: Of littering outreach. [00:37:49] S5: But, you know, this came up a lot in January, February. [00:37:51] S1: This year when there was a sort of persistent dog waste issue. [00:37:55] S5: Oh, yeah. And I would often remind people that as frustrating as it is and as much as we do want to and are planning to do more, there is no one in the city who doesn't clean up after their dog because. [00:38:04] S1: They don't know the rules, right? [00:38:06] S5: Of course, you know, outreach and education is great, but it's not like they go, oh, yeah, you know, I didn't know you had to clean up after your dog and now I saw the ad. [00:38:13] S2: Right. [00:38:15] S1: We do them.
00:38:15 · Joshua Goodman, Joshua Goodman, Tracy Alloway
[00:38:15] S1: We do them. [00:38:16] S5: Every sanitation truck comes with a poster space on the side. We put anti-littering messages on those posters frequently. We've had longstanding relationships with the arts community. You've probably seen the early 90s David Lynch anti-littering ad that he did with the DSNY. It's something that we're interested in, but also I do think that we're at the point where we see the built environment as the bigger issue here. And I'll bring it back to some of the philosophy behind this. One of the thinkers who informed a lot of the work of the trash revolution that really gets at what you're talking about is a 70s urban planner named Oscar Newman, who wrote a book called Defensible Space that was basically what he did in the book was he said that controlling even for income, for age, for all demographics, He found that public housing still had, at that time, a higher rate of crime than market rate housing. [00:39:10] S1: And so what was the cause? [00:39:12] S5: And he proposed that there were elements of the design of the space that caused this issue, specifically that there were significant parts of many urban public housing developments that didn't feel like they belonged to anyone. [00:39:26] S1: They were everyone's. [00:39:27] S3: Oh, yeah. [00:39:28] S1: And so he proposed.... [00:39:30] S5: A design model that would be did. So the most famous example of his design is the Yonkers row houses that were the subject of Lisa Belkin's book, Show Me a Hero, that won her the Pulitzer, I guess. [00:39:44] S1: In the late 90s.