TALKING
TRASH
When
it comes to trash, New Yorkers are creatures of habit, and they
like to bestir themselves as little as possible. To prove this,
one need only leave a small pile of garbage out on some streetcorner.
It will grow exponentially, all of a sudden a designated trash
collection site.
The problem of what to do with what they throw
away has bothered residents of the nation’s largest city
almost since its inception. Now, in an effort to close New York’s
yawning budget gap, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has decided to suspend
part of the city’s recycling program. Citing the lack of
a profitable recycling market, Bloomberg has decreed that the
Sanitation Department will no longer make separate pick-ups of
plastic and glass. Instead, they will again be mixed in with the
bulk of the 928 pounds of garbage each city resident throws away
in a year.
This has come as something of a shock to many
New Yorkers, who had just become accustomed to squeezing as many
as three, four, or even seven separate recycling bins in their
famously undersized apartments. Separating their trash was always
a nuisance, but it was a tangible thing people could do everyday,
to let them feel they were helping their community. It made New
Yorkers—so thoroughly cut off from their natural environment—think
about just how their city is able to function, with all of its
gargantuan needs and output. The end of recycling marks another
chapter in a long tug-of-war in which the city’s physical
and fiscal health have often been balanced against each other.
Right from the beginning, the burghers of old
New Amsterdam were embroiled in battles to keep residents from
simply throwing their garbage and the contents of their chamber
pots in the streets—where they counted on stray dogs, and
especially the city’s many loose pigs, to eat them. By the
1800s, the muck in lower Manhattan was reportedly as much as two
to three feet deep in the wintertime. When, in 1832, the city
finally began a concerted effort to clean its streets, an old
woman reportedly cried out in amazement, “Where in the world
did all those [paving] stones come from?…I never knew that
the streets were covered with stones before.”
Even then, trash collection was sporadic, and
during the Civil War draft riots, striking sanitation workers
smashed the new street-cleaning machines (essentially water barrels
on wheels), yelling “Death to the labor-saving devices!”
Landlords illegally hooked their cesspools and outhouses up to
the city’s vastly inadequate sewers. During the worst of
the summer heat spells, dead horses routinely littered the streets.
Sanitation lagged even as the consequences of
its neglect became increasingly evident. Waves of cholera and
typhus swept regularly through the city, carrying off rich and
poor alike. The Collect, a large, beautiful pond that was a favorite
Manhattan gathering place throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, became so polluted with the refuse from butchers’
and tanners’ shops that by 1813 it had been finally, clumsily,
filled in. From this fetid, slowly sinking soil rose the notorious
Five Points slum. There, the mortality rate for children under
the age of five reached 50 percent.
Forms of recycling did exist throughout much of
the nineteenth century. The laissez-faire city that was routinely
handed over much of its trash to rag- and bonepickers, some of
whom used it to make dolls that were sold at Macy’s, and
other department stores. In 1896, a new sanitation commissioner,
George E. Waring, Jr., reorganized the department and instituted
a more systemized plan. For the first time, New Yorkers were required
to separate their garbage at the curbside. Much of it was sold
to private contractors, who boiled it down for grease and fertilizer,
or used it for landfill and other purposes.
But
by the 1920s, this earlier recycling effort had also been defeated
by a falling market in trash. The city had some 80 open dumps,
including the monumental ash heap in Flushing Meadows that F.
Scott Fitzgerald described so memorably in The Great Gatsby,
“a fantastic farm, where ashes grow like wheat into ridges
and hills and grotesque gardens.”
Garbage lined much of the Manhattan waterfront
along the Lower East Side; from there it was transported to one
New York’s 22 incinerators or—until the practice was
banned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1934—towed out and dumped
unceremoniously into the sea. The sea often threw it back, onto
local beaches, along with the city’s untreated sewage. By
1940, according to a recent study by Columbia Professor Daniel
C. Walsh, New Yorkers were producing an all-time high of 2,068
pounds of garbage per person each year—or more than twice
the weight they toss out now.
Over
the years, better public policy and real estate pressures consolidated
the dumps in Staten Island’s Fresh Kills landfill, and neighborhood
objections put the incinerators out of business. Most of the city’s
refuse is simply shipped out of town now, to landfills in Pennsylvania,
Virginia, and elsewhere. New York has probably never been cleaner
than it is today, due in large part to deindustrialization, and
the demise of leaded gasoline, coal as a heating fuel, and the
end of horse-drawn transportation. (Even in the years just before
the Civil War, when the population of Manhattan was still under
one million, its horses unburdened themselves of over 500,000
pounds of manure and some 45,000 gallons of urine, every day.)
Professor Walsh expects the city’s trash
stream to continue to diminish, especially as digital technologies
continue to replace paper. And at least one expert, former city
Sanitation Department official Benjamin Miller, expects recycling
to return as the rising cost of landfill disposal makes it the
cheaper alternative. Keep those bins handy.
Kevin
Baker is the author of Paradise Alley, a historical novel set
in New York during the Civil War draft riots.
©
Copyright The
New York Times
