NY Times’ City Room blog continues its Q&A series with experts on various urban planning issues (the first was with recently-appointed Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan). For the garbage/recycling geeks among us (I include myself here), this is a very interesting read.
And if we are going to think that expansively about how we might use our streetscape, we might go even further, to imagine a few parking spaces per building permanently turned into “eco-spaces,†with islands bulging into the streets to calm traffic, with plantings to absorb rainfall that would otherwise flow into the sewers and to absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen, perhaps with small-scale rat-proofed composting receptacles, or igloos for depositing recyclables, or …. the mind reels.
YES! And this is only Part One!
Answers From the Garbage Expert
Benjamin Miller, an expert on the history of New York City’s trash, is taking questions from readers this week. This is his first set of answers.
ADM: why doesn’t the city recycle glass? this seems inexcusable to me.
Mr. Miller: The city does recycle glass. When we designed the city’s recycling program, we determined that the way to achieve the best balance between the adverse environmental impacts of running additional collection trucks through New York City and the overall economics of collection and processing costs and recycling revenues was to collect glass in the same truck hopper with metal and plastic. In order to minimize truck miles — since trucking produces some of the most significant environmental consequences associated with waste management — these trucks must have compaction blades. This means that a significant portion of the bottles will be broken. But broken glass does not reduce the marketability of the more valuable metal and plastic (as it would the marketability of paper). And although it is difficult to make new glass bottles from the city’s collections, because bottles require color-sorted glass and sorting is easier with whole bottles, the mixed-color cullet (glass shards) that New York’s program produces can be used in a variety of construction applications and to make products such as fiberglass insulation, beads for reflective paint, sandblast medium, concrete blocks, and glass tiles.
ADM: if i leave some large piece of recyclable metal (for example, a steel bed frame) out with the garbage, what are the odds that it will be recycled vs. just being thrown in with the landfill-bound garbage?
Mr. Miller: If you put it out the night before your designated recycling day, it should be recycled.
Tom B: Why doesn’t the City of New York recycle plastic bags? Is there a broader policy decision in the making regarding the proliferation of plastic shopping bags in the City? (i.e., prohibiting their distribution within the City, or offering incentives to use paper…)
Mr. Miller: Film plastic is not as easy to recycle as the #1 and #2 bottles that the city currently collects. Because it is relatively light, awkward to handle on mechanical processing lines, and its mixed resins have a relatively low value, less than 4 percent of film plastics in the country are recycled, compared to 25 percent of plastic bottles. But it is recyclable, into products such as trash can liners, pipes, and plastic wood. Since plastic bags represent about 5 percent of the city’s waste stream, they offer a significant opportunity for diverting more waste from landfills.
In my view, recycling systems in a place as logistically complex as New York is should be thought of in two parts: the front-end, where the city’s residents are responsible for sorting and setting materials out at the curb, and the back-end, where the city or its contractors are responsible for collecting, processing, and marketing the materials. The rules for the front-end should be as simple as possible and should never change. The back-end should be flexibly managed to take advantage of changes in technologies and markets. Materials that are potentially recyclable — such as all clean plastics and textiles — should always be collected for recycling. When technologies and markets allow these materials to be cost-effectively processed and sold, they will be available in the recycling stream. When they cannot be processed and sold, they can be disposed of with other unusable residue; if the collection and processing system has been efficiently engineered, the net cost of disposing of this residue should not be prohibitively more expensive than if it had been collected with the regular garbage in the first place.
Since we can predict that the price of oil, the primary ingredient in film plastic, will continue to rise, it seems very likely that film plastic will have an economic market in the years ahead. As for the more general chicken-and-egg question of which comes first — recycling or markets for recyclables — the answer is that investments in manufacturing infrastructure are more likely to take place after a demonstrated supply of recyclables of known quality is available.
Of course it would be even better to reduce the number of plastic bags used. Rather than prohibiting them — or encouraging greater use of paper bags, which have more significant adverse environmental consequences — I would argue that we should use economic incentives. The best would be an across-the-board one: charging people by the bag for the waste they throw away, rather than including a large hidden charge in every resident’s property taxes. Failing that, there could be a charge or tax for any type of non-reusable shopping bag.
Topic: A number of questioners asked why New Yorkers put garbage on the sidewalks in plastic bags, waiting for “overnight†collection trucks, where they are unsightly, accessible to rats, and a source of objectionable odors.
Mr. Miller: Apart from single-family areas, it clearly is not possible for refuse to be collected from garages or backyards. Nor does New York have alleys running behind buildings where waste could be set out, as in cities such as Washington and Philadelphia. Nor is there room on most streets for permanent dumpsters.
Until the New York City Sanitation Department began encouraging the use of plastic garbage bags in 1969, New Yorkers did use metal garbage cans (or “ash cans†as they were known when most buildings still burned coal and painters such as John Sloan, of “the ash can school,†painted gritty street life scenes). Plastic bags offer many advantages over cans: they create less sleep-shattering noise; they can be slung underhanded into truck hoppers more quickly than cans can be dragged from the curb, lifted, emptied, and returned, while producing far fewer worker injuries; they do not have to be hauled back into basements and hosed out and stored and repaired; they are never stolen.
Unfortunately, rats also love them. And since the only way to eliminate rats is to eliminate their food supply, we have a significant incentive to think more creatively about how we set our waste out on the street.
Though municipal trucks (as opposed to commercial-waste haulers) generally do not collect waste at night (they start at 7 a.m. in the winter, 6 a.m. in the summer), people are allowed to set out their waste the evening before. This is not a good idea. The rules should be changed so that unless the waste is in a rigid, closed container, it cannot be set out more than a few hours before the scheduled pickup time.
The best solution, of course, would prevent rats from having even a few hours for breakfast — while still allowing efficient collection and protecting sanitation workers’ backs. The rigid roll-out containers typically stored in single-family garages can be emptied very efficiently by the robotic arms that many suburban garbage trucks use. (These containers would also offer a convenient way to charge residents on the basis of how much trash they throw away, which would provide a strong incentive to reduce waste, and save New York and its property-tax-payers a great deal of money.) Unfortunately, robotic arms could not reach over the parked cars lining most New York City curbs to reach containers on the sidewalk.
It would take a major rethinking of our parking arrangements — and perhaps of our union agreements for the number of workers per truck — but if the equivalent of one or two parking spaces, per apartment building, were reserved for sanitation collections for a few hours a few times a week, we might be able to dramatically reduce our rat population, our collection costs, and our worker injuries.
And if we are going to think that expansively about how we might use our streetscape, we might go even further, to imagine a few parking spaces per building permanently turned into “eco-spaces,†with islands bulging into the streets to calm traffic, with plantings to absorb rainfall that would otherwise flow into the sewers and to absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen, perhaps with small-scale rat-proofed composting receptacles, or igloos for depositing recyclables, or …. the mind reels.
Michael Miscione: What about incinerators for helping to lighten New York City’s garbage overload? I understand that modern incinerators are relatively harmless. Is that really the case? If so, is this an option that New York City should be considering?
adm: I understand Arlington, Va., has a waste-to-energy plant that incinerates 100 percent of its trash to create about 30 percent of its power needs. Is it feasible to do something like this in NYC, or for parts of NYC? What are the obstacles and downsides?
Mr. Miller: For a nation that relies predominantly on oil, much of it from the Middle East — a nation that is burning an ever-increasing quantity of coal, a major source of atmospheric carbon and mercury; where it appears that a new generation of nuclear power plants may soon be built, despite the fact that issues associated with the long-term management of nuclear wastes have not yet been resolved; and where more than half of all wastes are landfilled, despite the fact that landfills release a significant proportion of all anthropogenic greenhouse gases — the answer, in George Tenet’s immortal phrase, is a slam dunk.
Also, in many cases, it’s cheaper. And if not now, it soon will be, as both landfill prices and energy costs continue to climb.
Whether or not a waste-to-energy incinerator is sited within the city or simply nearby (much of Manhattan’s residential refuse is now burned at a plant just across the Hudson in Newark), the environmental benefits — including those from not having to haul our waste hundreds of miles to landfills in other states — will be significant.
By the way, if most relatively difficult-to-recycle, nonchlorinated plastics, like bags, were burned in waste-to-energy plants, the overall adverse environmental impacts might be less than they would be if they were collected, processed, and transported for recycling.
Red: What is your opinion of the city’s proposed waste management plan which focuses on marine transfer stations (the one currently objected to by West Side state assemblymembers)?
Mr. Miller: Compared to the current situation, which requires white sanitation trucks from all over the city to drive to transfer stations that are located in only a couple of neighborhoods, using dispersed marine transfer stations makes a great deal of sense. Our garbage trucks will drive a million fewer miles each year on city streets.
That is not to say, however, that we could not do even better. Putting garbage in containers on barges is only the first step in a long and costly process: in order to reach a landfill, the containers will have to be lifted out of the barges somewhere else within New York Harbor, and then placed on trains or ocean-going craft. This extra handling is very expensive. So is containerizing the waste in the first place. Since many more landfills are accessible by rail than can be reached by ocean-going barges, it would make a great deal of sense, wherever possible, to put the waste directly onto railcars. And there may be more cost-effective ways to package the waste than in steel containers.
It happens that there is a rail line on the West Side that has the potential to haul waste out of the city. The best way to do that might be through a series of relatively small-scale, linear transfer facilities arranged along and above the rail right-of-way. Having multiple plants would reduce the space requirements for each, while also reducing the number of trucks in any one neighborhood.
Recyclable materials, however — since the City’s new recycling plant on the Brooklyn waterfront is designed to minimize deliveries by truck — will need to go into barges. That leaves the question of which piers would be most suitable for transferring recyclables — a question that should depend primarily on where the truck impacts would be least. Alternatives that have been considered so far are at Gansevoort Street and across from the Javits Center. There are also City transfer stations (one of which is not used at present, but nonetheless offers relatively good truck access) at West 59th Street and West 135th Street. And other locations might also be considered. The optimal answer—because it would reduce the truck miles associated with just one plant — might be more than one.
But the most important question associated with transfer stations is: Where (and how) will the waste (or recyclables, or compostables) be processed or disposed? Until we know the answer to that, it is impossible to plan a rational transfer network, since we don’t know how many plants we will need, of what type, or where to put them. For example, if we had access to another nearby waste-to-energy facility (or compost plant), we might not need even need a transfer station for that waste shed. (Waste from the West Side of Manhattan is not transferred, but driven straight to the Essex County waste-to-energy plant in white garbage trucks.)
Michael Miscione: I understand that you feel strongly that the closing of the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island was a big mistake. Why do you think that?
Mr. Miller: There are New York City firemen who blame Rudy Giuliani for some of the problems that developed on and after 9/11. I suspect that there will be residents of states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia and North Carolina, who will blame Rudy Giuliani for the decision to send to their backyards all of the waste generated in New York City, despite the fact that New York’s landfill had decades of remaining capacity and, because of hundreds of millions of dollars spent in its latter years on environmental improvements, was one of the best-managed landfills in the country.
I would suspect that future generations of New Yorkers, too, will blame him for an inexorable increase in their waste disposal costs, which in recent years has escalated at an annual rate equivalent to the salaries of about 300 full-time city employees. Fortunately, the Bloomberg administration has managed to keep the city in the black. We know, however, that every city faces the prospect of economic downturns. (This may be especially true of one as dependent as ours is on a single “industry.â€) Someday we may regret the irreversible luxury of sending our waste far away, and pine for more police officers and nurses.
Where do nyc’s recycling trucks go to?
not sure precisely, but i’ll try to find out. anyone know?