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?
00:10:46 · Joshua Goodman, Tracy Alloway, Tracy Alloway, Joshua Goodman
[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? [00:10:57] S3: I kind of like the rats. [00:10:58] S2: I get really bored walking down the street and seeing some wildlife, which in New York City is just pigeons and rats. [00:11:04] S3: It's somewhat entertaining. [00:11:06] S1: I get it. Look, I love all animals. I'm a longtime vegan. [00:11:09] S5: But the fact is that There is a Jungian reaction to a rat for most people. You walk down a street in New York and a rat runs across your foot. You remember it every time you're on the block for the rest of your life. And the same goes for public space trash, which I know certain New Yorkers have sort of romanticized. [00:11:25] S1: I think that you can. [00:11:26] S5: Only do that if it's not your reality. You know, that living around trash and rats is not a good thing. And we would like it to, you know. People sometimes assume that anyone at the Department of Sanitation loves the trash. And I always tell them, no, no, no, our job is to get rid of it. [00:11:40] S1: We hate the trash. [00:11:41] S5: The trash is our enemy, as fascinating as it is to study. And so when we thought about putting. [00:11:47] S1: Global best practices into place just the last.
00:11:47 · Joshua Goodman, Joshua Goodman, Tracy Alloway, Tracy Alloway
[00:11:47] S1: Global best practices into place just the last. [00:11:49] S5: Few years, this is actually a very data-driven agency, probably not surprising. But we had about a century of data about the weight of the trash, which had long been our primary metric for efficiencies. And what we needed was data about the volume of the trash. That's what you need for containerization programs. And so we had to do a 70,000 block volumetric analysis. We went block by block and converted those weights into volumes and developed the programs that are coming out now. And there were a lot of different, both left and right, thoughts about what approach we should take, if any. [00:12:26] S2: And. [00:12:27] S5: We've developed a strategy that we think will work for the unique streetscape of New York. When I first got involved in this work, I would often hear from people, well, there's no place as dense as New York that does this. [00:12:38] S1: Not true. [00:12:39] S5: There's no place with as much weather flexibility as New York. [00:12:41] S1: Not true. There's no place that produces as much volume of trash. Not true. [00:12:44] S5: We actually produce per person less trash than most other Western cities. There's no reason that they can have this everywhere else in the world other than a political inertia, right? And that's what's begun to change based on the data that we've produced. [00:12:59] S3: Well, to me, one of the obvious political choices that's been made in New York is also.
00:12:59 · Tracy Alloway, Tracy Alloway, Joshua Goodman, Joshua Goodman
[00:12:59] S3: Well, to me, one of the obvious political choices that's been made in New York is also. [00:13:02] S2: We don't have a pay-as-you-go service, or you're not paying per pound of trash that you produce, right? I can produce a lot of trash, and it's sort of incumbent on the city to collect it versus someone who's trying their best to recycle and compost and things like that. Why don't we talk about logistics for a second just to better understand the current state so that we can figure out where we're trying to get to. I take out a bag of trash from my apartment building and it's a Wednesday in Soho and I place it on the curb. What happens to it from there? [00:13:34] S5: So a collection truck, we don't call them garbage trucks because they also pick up recycling and compost, comes by sometime generally between midnight and 8.30 in the morning. Try to get as much of it done before peak rush hour. The trucks are on routes that are optimized for a few things. They hold about 12 to 13 tons of trash each. You want it to get full on its route, and you want the route to be completed in a single shift. So they're optimized around those factors. And then once the truck is full, or loaded out is the jargon, it's taken to a network of transfer stations. [00:14:12] S1: So prior to 2000, it was.