At the Department of Sanitation’s Marine Transfer Station on East 91st Street. Photo: Thomas Prior After the meal comes the ritual cleansing. Bones and fat and stray clumps of spinach slide from my plate into the bin beneath the sink, landing on a length of plastic film still clinging to a supermarket foam tray. These new arrivals cover a fistful of worn-out pens, a tube of dried-up glue, a glob of ancient salad dressing, and a layer of coffee grounds.
Because I live in Manhattan, my bag will likely meet a fiery, comparatively harmless, and useful though unpopular end, producing a glimmer of electricity. New York apartment superintendents once burned waste in their buildings’ basement incinerators, smudging the skyline daily, but the city outlawed that practice in 1989, and the air has been less gritty ever since.
Emptying the truck at the transfer station. Photo: Thomas Prior The transfer station is one node in the ceaseless machine that is DSNY. New York’s 8.8 million residents produce 12,000 tons of trash every day, and businesses produce roughly the same quantity of waste that’s handled by a gaggle of private companies. The 7,200 sanitation workers and 2,100 trucks that crisscross the five boroughs every day handle plastics, paper, metal, and furniture, each of which has its own destination.
Trash at Covanta’s plant in Newark shortly before it goes down to the furnace. Photo: Thomas Prior Then the garbage gets carried slowly down into a pit that burns at 1,800 degrees. Bernardino leads me down several floors to a window that looks onto the angled conveyor belt, and I stand there mesmerized by the sight of a ceaseless river of chicken bones, ketchup bottles, expired pharmaceuticals, eggplant peel, and broken toys being vaporized into ash and gas.
Landfill operators are required to cover fresh arrivals with six inches of soil at the end of each day, but that’s not exactly a scientific process. “A landfill is a construction project — you’re always building, you’re always changing the slope,” says Morton Barlaz, an environmental engineer and professor at North Carolina State.
High Acres, outside Rochester. Photo: WM/YouTube New York has a plan to address these issues. Or, rather, it has a plan to come up with a plan — by 2026. So far, it has only a dream. In 2015, the de Blasio administration announced that the city would zero out landfill waste by 2030. Seven years later, the numbers have barely budged. “We’re simply not on a path toward zero waste by 2030 on our current trajectory,” the department’s new commissioner, Jessica Tisch, told the City Council in June.
JDavidsonNYC Short answer: New Jersey
JDavidsonNYC Most 'trash' is recyclable. I struggle to even fill a small garbage bin on trash day. I have curbside recycling and that bin is always overly full
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