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.
00:08:32 · Joshua Goodman, Joshua Goodman, Joe Weisenthal
[00:08:32] S1: And then throughout. [00:08:33] S5: Much of the 19th and 20th century, the city used sort of the old Oscar the Grouch metal garbage cans. Following the 1968 sanitation strike, the last major New York City sanitation labor action, there was an overflowing amount more than those metal cans can handle. And when the strike was resolved, Mayor Lindsay put together a group to study a number of after effects of the issues the city had faced during that time, one of which was a task force called the Committee on the Black Bag. It studied plastic trash bags, which were basically new at that time, and the plastics industry pushed them as rodent resistant, which obviously we know they're not. And you can easily find New York Times coverage from that time of people proudly stating that the transition from metal garbage cans to black bags will reduce rats while freeing up public space. Obviously, it became clear almost immediately that that was not the case, but it took another five decades or so to get serious about promoting a new solution. [00:09:31] S4: So I understand, and we're going to get into this, that there are different approaches, etc., to picking up the trash, etc., But why is the LaGuardia quote wrong? I understand different views, but that still doesn't necessarily mean, to me, it still seems like it could be right in the sense that different views don't necessarily map to politics.
00:09:31 · Joe Weisenthal, Joshua Goodman, Joshua Goodman
[00:09:31] S4: So I understand, and we're going to get into this, that there are different approaches, etc., to picking up the trash, etc., But why is the LaGuardia quote wrong? I understand different views, but that still doesn't necessarily mean, to me, it still seems like it could be right in the sense that different views don't necessarily map to politics. [00:09:51] S5: It is true that it's not a neat left-right split necessarily, but it's not true that who you put into office has no bearing on what happens to the trash. I think his point was that it transcends ideology, and it doesn't, or else this would have been done a long time ago. [00:10:06] S4: Okay, then what are the different ideological frameworks from which we can view the question of optimal trash collection? [00:10:13] S5: One of the things to think about is that cleanliness is not just a an abstract concept. It has a tremendous impact on a person's quality of life. Every morning, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers get up, they go out, they go to work, they go to school. If they walk down a dirty street, the first thing they think is no one cares about me. And I can't necessarily blame people for feeling that way. Often, thoughts about cleanliness in public space are.... [00:10:44] S1: You have to think about who you're prioritizing, right? [00:10:46] S5: So Is it someone who spends the bulk of their time in public in a car versus someone who spends the bulk of their time in public walking? Is it someone for whom a rat is a curiosity versus a reality that they have to live with?