Trash collection in NYC
anderson recycleworlds.net
NYTIMES
In New York City, trash has no dedicated space all its own.
It fits, instead, in plastic bags squeezed into the in-between spaces of the city.
It fills the gaps between buildings, the landings of stairwells, any available turf between two fixed objects.
Say, a parked car and a dining shed.
Even towering piles of trash can be almost invisible to inured New Yorkers.
But step outside the city for a moment — or view it with a visitor’s eyes — and a sense of absurdity may set in: How can one of the world’s greatest cities handle its garbage like this?
The Absurd Problem of New York City Trash
And the Trade-Offs Required to Fix It
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· By
Emily Badger and
Larry Buchanan
Photographs and videos by DeSean McClinton-Holland
Larry Buchanan, Emily Badger and DeSean McClinton-Holland walked miles around New York pondering trash, including tailing a midnight collection shift, and will never look at it the same way again.
March 2, 2024
Consider the ubiquitous New York trash bag. It tears. It leaks. It smells. It multiplies on the sidewalk, attracting carryout clamshells and still-full coffee cups tossed on top until it all melds into a sticky mess. That mess feeds rats, blocks sidewalks and spills into the street. Then it strains the sanitation workers who must move every bag by hand into a trash truck, as testy drivers honk behind them.
Conversely, if the city could just tame all of this garbage, New York might be transformed.
The Sanitation Department has vowed to do this, shifting the bulk of New York’s waste out of sloppy sidewalk piles and into containers in a manner more closely resembling that of other American cities and global capitals. The prospect has prompted much snickering: New York’s big idea to clean up trash is to … put it in trash bins? Like other cities have done … for decades?
(It’s not lost on the Sanitation Department that the city is a punchline: “This was our moon landing,” the agency posted self-deprecatingly on X when video of its newly unveiled trash truck was shared widely last month.)
But the details of how this might be done in New York turn on a number of deeper and more difficult questions about the city itself: Where, exactly, do you carve out space for an essential city service in a place with so little space left? How should the city dole out what has become its most contested public asset, the curb space in the street? Would New Yorkers give up parking to clean up the trash?
These questions are about no less than the dilemma of a truly dense city, where anything that demands its own space means something else must give.
To be a little less philosophical about it, the current state of trash collection in New York City seems almost preposterous: