NYC Trash: A study in persistence
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Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too, and it's just the three of us, Oscar the Grouch in it, here on Stuff You Should Know. Yeah, I think there may be one more in this sort of semi-suite that we've been tackling over the years, which is to say the operations of New York City. It's fascinating stuff.

I love it because every time I'm there, I'm like, how do they deal with all this trash and deliver all that mail? So if mail is interesting enough, well, I'm going to do a little research and see if New York City mail is worth its own deal. Okay. We did one on the USPS before. Oh, sure. That was a class. And we've done stuff on landfills and all kinds of things. But New York City is very specific to its own self. Yeah.

As they say, living it up between the moon and New York City. I can't remember the rest. Living it up? Yeah. Isn't that what he says?

No. Living it up between them. Yeah. I like that better. It's if you get caught, but I like living it up. Yeah, I like living it up better too. Oh, goodness. All right. So we're talking New York City trash, Chuck. I didn't ever really give much thought to it. I've been to New York plenty of times. I've been like, wow, there's a lot of trash everywhere all the time. Some of it in bags, some of it on the street.

Some of it in overflowing trash containers. But it turns out that it is an enormous issue and has been an ongoing and very longstanding issue in New York. And they now have a mayor and a sanitation commissioner who's like, enough, it's done. We're cleaning the city up once and for all. And what's, yeah, Eric Adams, he's got a whole like, his whole campaign is called Get Stuff Done.

And the trash branch of that is get stuff clean. And Jessica Tisch, the new garbage commissioner, is from one of the wealthiest families in America, possibly the world. Oh, wow. But who's decided to dedicate her career to civil service, specifically in New York. So she's worked in a few agencies, and now she's the head of the sanitation department, the DSNY. Wow.

And is basically just like steamrolling through with new changes and just being like, oh, I don't care. That's the way you used to do it. Apparently it's wrong because it didn't get it done. We're doing it this way now. So they're actually making huge, enormous changes by leaps and bounds that seem like they actually possibly could clean New York up in the next couple of years. Do you know what how the Tisch family, what their deal is? What their deal is, like how they communicate Thanksgiving? Yeah.

Well, no, you said one of the wealthiest families in the world. I was kind of curious. Oh, I get what you mean. So what from or whatever? Her father is the CEO of like the Lowe's theaters, the Lowe's hotels. Apparently they own a distilling brand like the parent companies, the CEO of the parent company.

But I have a feeling like her family is like legacy wealthy. That's my impression. Yeah. New York, NYU has the Tisch School of Arts. I'm sure it's the same family. Yes, it is. As a matter of fact, there's a really interesting profile on her and the New York Sanitation Department and the New Yorker of all places.

And they rattled off like three different things that are named after her family. So, yes, they've been around for a while. But apparently that's pretty cool. She's like, I'm incredibly wealthy, but I'm going to go, you know, work my way up in New York bureaucracy, you know. It's really pretty incredible. So should we go back in time? Yeah, let's.

Yeah, we've talked before about what old New York was like. And when you see movies about old New York, they, you know, they might grunge it up a little bit. Like Scorsese's Gangs of New York probably did one of the closest, truest depictions of early New York and just kind of how disgusting it could be. And we've talked about the amounts of manure from horses on the sides of the street.

But it was really, really gross. New York was a disgusting place back in the day. They did have a law. And this show's kind of got it is kind of got it all. It's got like amazing facts of the episode. Right off the bat, we have a great album title, which was this law from the 1650s that banned tubs of odor and nastiness.

If that's not like a Stooges album title or something, I don't know what is. That's good. But it was it was gross. I think the first fact of the podcast for me is that about 20 percent.

of Manhattan, or really the whole metro area, is built on land that didn't used to be there. It's literally land that came from garbage fill, from construction debris, dirt from the subway project. Like lower Manhattan in particular just kept growing and expanding in size. And here's another fun fact on that. Ellis Island is

It's 28 acres now. It started out as three acres. Oh, wow. It was literally built from, I guess, just waste. Yeah. Because, I mean, if you think about it, if you just go dump one load off of an island, you've just littered. But if you keep doing it, you're developing the land. It becomes art. Yeah. You just got to stick with it, and eventually it becomes an okay thing, right? Yeah.

Yeah, it's really pretty incredible to think about that. There are overlays that show how lower Manhattan grew just from dumping stuff. Oh, yeah. Oh, but there's pretty cool maps like that. I love that kind of stuff, too. I love walking around and being like, what was this building originally? What used to be here? I ask that out loud sometimes. The building never answers, does it? No.

So this is not the first time under Eric Adams and Jessica Tisch that a New York administrator has tried to clean the city up. Plenty have tried, but the last truly successful one was in the century before last. A Civil War, I think, colonel, a Union colonel named George Waring.

who became the head of the Department of Street Cleaning, which is what the Sanitation Department was called back then. And he cleaned up the city starting around 1895, but he was not the first head of the Department of Street Cleaning. That department was almost 20 years old by the time he came along, but it had just basically been a place where Tammany Hall and the political machine developed.

They gave jobs to to supporters, political supporters. And it was like, you don't need to show up to work. You're still going to get a paycheck kind of thing. Yeah. I mean, they either did that or they outright just stole money that was allocated for those cleaning up projects to begin with.

I saw a name back then in the 1800s that the sludge of just manure and garbage and cess. Is cess a thing, I guess? Cess is the best. I know it says pool is a thing, but is cess the thing in the pool? I would think so.

All right. Anyway, they called the sludge that lined the streets corporate pudding. So gross. Because I guess it was just, you know, it wasn't getting cleaned up because all that money, like I said, was either stolen or reallocated to cronies. There's someone named Robin Nagel, who's an NYU professor, who is an unpaid position, but has basically worked as the unsanctioned, unsalaried anthropologist professor.

from for the Sanitation Department of New York and just has an incredible amount of knowledge about this stuff. Yeah, we've talked about Robin Nagel before and George Waring and the changes he made. So supposedly you can look at Harper's Magazine between 1893 and 1895. And it's like it's like George Waring came along and waved a magic wand. Like the difference is so distinct. Like he created kind of like a military type thing.

um, institution hierarchy. He, uh, outfitted his people with, um, uh, white outfits designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier. Yeah.

and pith helmets. And they went around and they cleaned up New York. And apparently they throw parades for him once in a while because they were just so successful and loved and revered because they did such a good job. But you can see the difference between these photos in Harper's Weekly that Robin Nagel has. And I think we talked about all this in the Typhoid Mary episode. I think it was in the beginning of that one. That makes sense. I'm pretty sure that's where it was.

Yeah. I imagine George Warren came in on day one and was like, for starters, how about you get that dead hog off the side of the road? Somebody's like, genius! He was famous, by the way, for designing the Memphis sewage system after the Civil War, before New York. They're like, hey, you did such a good job, you know, working out the sewage, I guess, in Memphis. Come on to New York because we have sewage in the streets. Nice. He worked his way up.

If you can make it in New York sanitation, you can make it anywhere with sanitation. Believe me.

So as things were going, they had landfills that came along, obviously. But a lot of the trash was handled by incinerators. Still is just great controversy, as we'll get to later. But a lot of these smaller apartment buildings had their own incinerators. They would just burn their trash. The city was like, this is an air quality nightmare. I can't imagine. So let's let's ban these things. Yeah.

And I thought it said 1889, but they were banned finally in 1989. Yeah. That tracks. I mean, it wasn't until the 90s that New York really started to kind of turn around some.

It's true. So one of the other things they did, aside from banning individual buildings having incinerators, which just seems like madness in retrospect, you know what I mean? It kind of does, yeah. They also started slowly shutting down the landfills that were within the city limits. Yeah.

And finally, the last one, Fresh Kills on Staten Island, was famously shut down in 2001. And one of the reasons it became famous is it was the landfill that accepted a lot of the waste from the Twin Towers after the World Trade Center attacks. And that was it. It's kind of like fitting, you know what I mean, in a really weird, bittersweet, poetic way. Yeah, like a turning of the page. I guess so, yeah.

But that was it. So the thing is, is New York still has tons of trash that they accumulate every day. I mean, just as we'll see a mind boggling amount of trash is generated by New York every day. Um, and they have trouble getting it off the street, but then also they're starting to, to find like, we are having problems identifying where to send this trash. Yeah, for sure. Um, so getting back to wearing, uh, back then he was like, all right, we gotta, we gotta figure out a way to, um,

get this trash. Like people just threw it in the street and wearing was like, that that's not a good system. I don't know if anyone's noticed, but just throwing your trash out of your, literally out of your window. Sometimes if your apartment isn't the way to go about things, if we want to live a healthy life as a city, um,

And so why don't we get trash cans? You mentioned Oscar the Grouch. They were just sort of the standard metal Oscar the Grouch cans for a long, long time until 1968 when there was a sanitation strike that was only nine days long. But it doesn't take long for a sanitation strike to really, I guess, get a little steam. Not in New York. A little steam going because there were 100,000 tons of garbage there.

on the city streets by the end of that nine days, and it was just a mess. So they said, all right, how about this? These trash cans were working for a long time, but you're just dumping your trash right in these cans. Why don't you put it in trash bags inside the can? And very sweetly, they thought that might help the rat situation, like contain the smell enough where rats wouldn't get to it, which is kind of kooky to think about. Of course, rats will get to trash anywhere. For sure.

Uh, and it was better than, um, you know, lifting up these big, heavy trash cans because they could just pick the bags out of the trash cans and throw them in. And then finally, just a few years later in 71, they said, let's just get rid of these cans and just put it in bags and put it out on the side. Yeah. Let's one of the greatest, most important cities in the world. Just leave our trash laying around in bags. Yeah.

For hours on end, multiple times a week, every week. Let's do that instead because you can stick them anywhere. They'll fit anywhere. And that's one of the challenges that New York has is it lacks a lot of the alleys and a lot of the little side, well, alleys I think is good enough to where people in other cities store trash cans and trash bins.

Like sane people. So instead, they have to use these trash bags and basically tuck them wherever they can, kind of out of the way. And very frequently, not out of the way. You have to walk around them on the sidewalk pretty often, too. So that's the state of New York trash collection now. People leave their trash out in bags on the sidewalk. The sanitation department workers come along and pick up the bags and throw them in the trash bin.

manually, throw them in the garbage trucks manually. And this is staggeringly behind the times. Like garbage technology has advanced by leaps and bounds since then. And New York, just because of some of its unique characteristics and traits, has had a really hard time implementing them like other cities have. Yeah, absolutely.

But like you said, there's good news on the horizon. You want to take a break now? Yeah. All right. We'll take a break. Good little setup. We'll come back and talk about just how much trash there is right after this. We'll be right back.

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All right. So we promised talk of just how much trash New Yorkers produce.

I don't think like per person, they're creating an exceptional amount of trash, not picking on New Yorkers. Sure. There's just a lot of people there. Eight hundred thousand, more than eight hundred thousand residential apartment buildings. And they produce about four and a half million tons of just residential trash every year. So twenty four million pounds a day or about twelve thousand tons per day of just residential people.

people trash from apartments. Yeah.

So every day they generate an equivalent weight of trash to 50,526,316 Big Macs. I knew something like that was coming. That's a lot of Big Macs. Imagine all of that being produced every day. Is that net weight after cooking? Sorry. Yes, that's the completed weight. That's what you get when they put it on the tray. Okay, gotcha. And what's interesting is eating either one has about the same impact on your health.

Uh, that's good. Thank you. It's morning for us, which is unusual, so I'm a little slower. Yeah. And a little less giving with my laugh count. As long as I'm getting a little bit of it. A little bit goes a long way. You've had plenty? You got me right off the bat there with the, what was that first joke that really got me? The Oscar the Grouch one? No, that was okay, though. Oh, the mistaken living it up in New York City. Yeah, yeah. That got me going right off the bat.

So you would not be surprised to learn, dear listener, that the DSNY, which is the New York City's sanitation department, is the largest in the country. One reason is obviously because there are so many people and so much trash. But also, New York is a little bit unique among large cities, obviously.

And that they are responsible for more trash than other large cities are. Yeah. Right. Yeah. A lot of other cities, they they'll handle some like maybe houses or something on the outskirts of town or in neighborhoods. Yeah.

But, you know, the apartment buildings and commercial stuff, all that's handled by private companies. And then in other cities, it's all private companies these days in some cases, too, especially suburbs. But, yeah, with New York, they're like, nope, we're going to handle it. If you're a resident, we're going to take care of your trash. That's right. And as we'll see, they on the private side, they handle the commercial trash themselves.

That's coming up shortly. But as far as the residential stuff goes, they collect from each residential building two or three times a week. There are 59 different districts that cover New York, each having its own garage that house more than 2000 collection trucks over those 59 districts. Yeah. And that's just the collection trucks. They have other kinds of trucks, too. Yeah. I saw that. Yeah.

I was trying to find out about maintenance of these things, but collectively, just the garbage trucks of New York drive about four and a half million miles a year. That's crazy. Yeah, it's a lot of miles. So, yeah, they have all sorts of different trucks. This is where the part of me who was once a little boy who loved looking at picture books of like Caterpillar Earthmovers and those giant Volvo dump trucks really kind of came back to the surface. But they've got some dual bin models. Yeah.

And if you look at them, they basically do what it says on the tin. There's half divided into half for trash and the other half for recycling. So you can pick up both on the same day at the same time. They have top loaders that go up to like a dumpster and just pick it up and shake it like an enemy you might on the street who weighed much less than you.

And then they also have just the regular kind that are called the white elephants. And those are just so incredibly...

Each of the New York City regular single bin garbage trucks can hold 12 tons of waste. That's incredible. A full size American standard school bus weighs 14 tons. So they fit almost a school bus weight of trash in just one single truck at a time. How many big bags is that? I didn't do that one. Okay. Okay.

This is the other fact of the podcast for me is that every garbage truck in New York has two sets of steering wheels and pedals on both sides. So either person can drive.

And no matter who's driving, each brake pedal is live. So if someone doesn't see somebody and the person that's not driving see someone, you know, dart in front of the garbage truck, they can hit the brakes as well. Yep. Yeah, it's a good idea. They also have street sweepers, a.k.a. mechanical brooms. And I should say, I've seen those are starting to be rolled out in electric versions, but apparently they're trying to slowly electrify their entire fleet.

Seems like street sweepers were one of the first to be electrified. Salt spreaders, snow plows, front end loaders, basically everything you could possibly need to clean up and clear trash, the New York City Department of Sanitation has it. Yeah, for sure. And if you're like, well, why do they have snow plows and

all that kind of stuff is because besides trash and recycling and composting, which there is sort of a newer program, and it came about because it's a big problem. I think about 20% of New York City's garbage is food waste. Man, it's a lot. And they can really, really cut down on that with a good composting system in the city. But they're working on that. We'll get to that later. But they have to clean vacant lots. They're the ones who remove the snow.

Uh, here's another fun fact. If there's a car on the street that has the license plates torn off of it and someone has just dumped it and it's worth under $1,250, uh, the, the police say that's a garbage car. It's not our responsibility. So it's, uh, the DSNY has to take care of it. Yeah. So, um, I looked up a little bit on that and I couldn't find how they make that assessment of how much the thing is worth. Yeah.

No. Kelly Blue Book? I guess. I would think just by virtue of having the license plate removed and it being abandoned on the street would indicate that it was worth less than $1,250, you know? Usually. The $50 is what kills me. That's true. Like, that's where they landed instead of just $1,200 or $1,300. Yeah. But, hey, I guess it was a formula. Similarly, they also clean up abandoned bikes that are, like, chained to public property. Yeah.

If the bike can just no longer be ridden because it's so bent or it's missing some essential parts, they will take care of it. They'll clip that chain and throw the whole thing away. But if you have a bike that you want to get rid of, you don't have to abandon it. In New York City, you can take the wheels off, put them in with your trash, and then you can put the bike itself out with your recycling. Oh, very nice. Yeah, I thought so too.

And as if that wasn't enough, last year in 2023, Eric Adams, the mayor, said, all right, you also now have to regulate and enforce street vendors. You've got to clean up the highways and take care of the graffiti in New York. And I'm sure they were like, great. It's not like we didn't have enough to do already. Well, what's interesting is that's creating a lot of grumbling because there's a lot of jobs from other agencies that are just being taken.

Oh, I'm sure. And the justification is like, hey, you're doing other stuff. You have other stuff to focus on. So this part has become kind of low priority. So it makes sense the Department of Sanitation would clean up graffiti. We're cleaning up the whole city. And apparently there was a backlog of 1,000 requests for graffiti removal. They cleared 800 of them in one month. So they're doing some amazing work there.

That's awesome. I mean, I like good graffiti, like graffiti art. Yes. So if you're a resident of New York, you put in a request for graffiti removal. You can also request that graffiti be left alone.

And there's like this whole procedure and process, but they give you like a certain amount of time between the time you say, I want this graffiti removed. And then the time they come out, I guess, to give you a chance to really think about whether you want it removed or not. And then they'll remove it. Yeah. Like, do you want the vulgar tag just spray painted across the front of a business removed or is it art? Exactly. Depends on who did it. I guess so.

8,000 sanitation workers total, 2,000 other employees left.

um well eight yeah so i guess that's ten thousand total but eight thousand actual you know sort of you know bag slingers and cleaner uppers uh they're known as new york's strongest uh they are 90 male right now so uh props to that 90 but and really props to that 10 of these ladies that are getting in there and getting their hands dirty because it is tough tough dangerous work

Yes. So one of the things, one of the reasons that it's particularly dangerous for sanitation workers in New York is, again, because they use bags. They're not in cans. If you've not been to New York, just imagine bags of trash just piled everywhere. The problem is when they're grabbing them and throwing them in the truck, they're

they're probably trying to avoid garbage juice, which is a very distracting thing. It's very gross. It's rarely harmful, but you don't want it on you, but it can distract you from things that can harm you. So like some rusty, sharp thing poking out of the bag that you put your hand on. There's a lot of hazards. Sometimes the stuff that's in there could pose a hazard to you in other ways, like garbage juice would.

There's an article I found from 1996 where a sanitation worker named Michael Hanley died because some jerk threw hydrofluoric acid away in with the regular garbage. And when it was compressed in the hopper, it exploded and Hanley inhaled it and died basically on the spot. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing that happens when that...

hopper, you know, squishes all that stuff down. There's going to be stuff that sprays out. They, you know, try to get out of the way, but sometimes they can't. And Olivia found this another fun little factoid here that apparently enough of that garbage juice is coffee related that whatever season it is, if it's like pumpkin spice season or whatever, the sanitation workers just like it's like, oh, God, here comes the pumpkin this, you know, this fall. Yeah.

I can imagine that just gets really old really fast. Can you imagine? Yeah, because it's the worst version of that coffee. It's not hot and fresh and in the cup. It's cold and runny and mixed with other stuff and leaking out of a garbage bag. Yeah, like hydrofluoric acid.

Right. So there's also, it's also just hard. Like a lot of this stuff is very heavy. You can fit a lot of stuff into a trash bag. And apparently residential places with compactors use what are called sausage bags where you can fit multiple compacted rounds of trash into one single bag. You need two people to toss those in. And then the cans, they're also in charge of the cans, right? Like I think those little...

Very famous kind of mesh wire New York City trash cans that open like a door, I think, at the base. Am I making sense here? Sort of. Just street corner trash cans. Let's just call them that.

Those weigh 30 pounds empty. So I've never seen a New York City trash can that wasn't absolutely overflowing. So that's a lot more weight. And they're doing that by hand. Some of these routes can have as many as 400 of these. So that's so crazy. That's just really, really, really hard, strenuous labor.

You also, so you said that there's never a New York City corner trash can that is empty. So I found a study from 1987 that estimated that a 60-pound can, so a trash can with about 30 pounds of waste, you can imagine this probably pretty average.

Um, to lift it, the 40 inches into the hopper and dump it requires three and a half horsepower, um, from the sanitation worker. And then, like you said, there might be 400 of those on a route. I just can't imagine how just tired you would be at the end of this. Well, and all the stuff you're breathing in too, uh, especially if you're a street sweeper, uh, all kinds of, you know, sort of respiratory issues can pop up, um, before, uh,

COVID, you know, before people are like, hey, maybe we should wear masks and sanitize things. Thousands of New York City workers got sick during the early COVID days. Nine of them died. About 100 sanitation workers died from illnesses cleaning up ground zero. So it is, you know, not only is it a strenuous job and can be dangerous because of, you know, sharp and rusty things, but it's just it's just hard on your body, period. Right. Right.

Fortunately, they have a really good union. They're members of Teamsters Local 831, the Uniform Sanitation Men's Association. And thanks to the union, when you are an entry-level sanitation worker, you start out making $43,305 a year. Not great. Which is, no, especially in New York. It's hard to live on that. But if you stick with it for five and a half years, it more than doubles the

to $88,979. That's pretty great. Yeah. And once you reach that point, there are plenty of New York City sanitation workers that are making $100,000 or over from all of the extra pay that can come from bonus work.

Like they get triple overtime for snow removal and stuff like that. So you can make a pretty good middle class income for New York City as a sanitation worker just from sticking with it for a few years. Plus, also, you can retire in just over 20 years, too, with full benefits. Yeah, I mean, that's a big deal. You get about 18 days of vacation. But if you start in your early 20s, you put in your 22 years, they don't have like an age limit.

thing where like you have to work to a certain age. So if you start in your early 20s, you could potentially retire with your full pension in your early to mid 40s. And, you know, you can do a lot worse than that.

For sure. Yeah. Because, I mean, you just be like, well, I want to keep working, but I'll go over here and take this other job, but I'll still get paid for my old job because I retired. Exactly. You do have to pass a civil service exam. You have to get your CDL, your commercial driver's license. There's about a month of training.

And then you have to, you know, once you get that license, they have a little practice area where they practice like a little obstacle course, basically. Yeah. Practice driving that garbage truck because, you know, driving through New York is...

I find it enjoyable and kind of fun and exciting. But driving a garbage truck, I imagine, is tough. There's stuff all over the place and you can't just Mad Max it through there, you know? No, you can't because people get killed like that because there's a lot of people walking and running and riding bikes around New York that you have to look out for. Increasingly distracted people, we should add. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

So we said that they shut down all of the landfills within New York's borders, but that means that they have to ship this trash one way or another outside of New York. Some of it gets diverted to incinerators. They're like, we don't want incinerators in New York because it contributes to poor air quality, but we'll pay you to burn it for us elsewhere.

Fortunately, they've now converted some of those incinerators to waste-to-energy plants. So you're actually getting something out of burning the trash. As far as these waste-to-energy plants go, if you're thinking like, what do you mean they...

Burn trash and get something out of it. It's it basically works just like coal would like any kind of energy creation like that is Just burning something to create steam to spin that you know to boil water to create steam to spin that turbine Mm-hmm, and in this case they just burn trash instead of coal right which you think is like oh, that's great You know we may maybe this should be a whole episode at one point, but they're there are

A lot of people say like these are an environmental nightmare. You are creating energy, but you're also creating a landfill in the sky by what you're putting into the air. So we might want to look into that as a full one at some point. Remember, we did our plasma waste generator episode and that thing was flawless in its design and execution. But I don't think that's what they're using for these waste energy plants. I don't think so.

So some of the garbage is being diverted and incinerated. But from what I understand, the vast majority is sent outside of New York to landfills in places like Virginia or South Carolina or Ohio. And the way that they get there predominantly is by rail and by barge.

And so New York set up five what are called marine transfer stations that are amazing. Did you look into them at all? Because they're crazy awesome. I did.

And they are crazy awesome. Yeah, those Marine stations, I think they built those over about a 20-year period starting in the early 2000s. There's five of them. The neighborhoods where these were going to be near were obviously not too excited about them when they were first proposed. But apparently they've done a pretty good job.

As far as the smell goes, they aren't too stinky. I think it's noise more than anything because you're you constantly just have trucks going in and out of there. Right. But they've done a great job with deodorizing and and venting this stuff.

even have hawk calls being played on loudspeakers to keep seagulls away because that would be a nightmare. Oh, yeah. But apparently they're not as bad as everyone thought they were going to be. No, plus also the neighborhoods that they're in are like already kind of ports and there's other industry nearby anyway. And they set up essentially access roads so that when the trucks start backing up,

They're not on the street. They're off of the street. And then the whole thing is enclosed, right? So garbage truck goes into the building, sealed shipping container comes out the other side. And inside the building, like you said, they've taken all these measures to keep the smell down and just keep it from being gross. But what happens is a garbage truck comes in, backs up to the tipping station, tips its contents all the way down to the next story down,

Next story down is just basically like that trash compactor in Star Wars, the first one. It's essentially like that. But rather than having like that pneumatic arm crush everything, they have front loaders that basically push all the stuff into shipping containers. And a shipping container can hold just over about two full trucks worth of waste. I think 25 tons. They top that thing off.

seal it and say, here you go, waste management, take over from here. Yeah. And, you know, you mentioned some of this goes to different states. I saw that almost all of Manhattan's trash goes to New Jersey. Oh, nice. Sorry, New Jersey. Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio is where most of the rest of it goes as far as landfills go. And then weirdly, Staten Island trash goes to South Carolina.

That is a little weird. I don't know why, but I guess they just, you know, worked out an exchange program or something. Yeah. And I guess it's totally up to private companies. Like I said, waste management's a good example of taking possession of those shipping containers, stacking them up on barges. I think you can fit like 48 full on a barge and...

taking it on a slow boat to South Carolina or taking it up river to Niagara Falls. I think that's where one of the incinerators is, Niagara, New York. And then also if it's somewhere like Ohio, it's very tough to sail a barge to Ohio. So you just take it to a rail station and the shipping containers get shipped by rail to Ohio where it gets dumped.

All right. Maybe or actually right before we take a break, let's cover this one more thing, I think, which is if you've lost something and you want to get it back in the trash, it's it's probably not going to happen. But it really depends on how good of a looker you are, because what you'll do is you'll call up.

You'll say, I lost a wedding ring in the garbage. I'm pretty upset about this. And they say, oh, great. We have a program called the Lost Valuable Search. Just come on down to the Marine Transfer Station. We'll work with you to determine which truck is yours. And then there's a huge pile of trash and you have 90 minutes to

to go through and find it by yourself or, I guess, with whatever friends you are able to talk into coming with you. And people have. They've found all sorts of stuff. Sure. It happens. Yeah, it does happen. Apparently, also, there's people who are like, oh, that's what I have to do? Just forget about it. I'm good. Thanks anyway. Yeah, I'll get a new wedding ring. So let's take a break and we'll come back and talk about some of the shady business that goes on in the private industry. All right. Cool. ♪ music playing ♪

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Okay, Chuck. So we said that the city picks up residential trash, but for the most part, commercial trash like stores, office buildings, industry, that's handled by private companies. And that's not actually new. That goes all the way back to, I think, the mid to late 50s, 1957, I think.

When the city was like, hey, we could use some help collecting trash. How about private companies get involved? And the mafia sat up and said, yes, let's do that. And apparently the Gambino and Genovese crime families were really big into what's called carting. It's private trash collection. For decades, it was extraordinarily corrupt.

And finally in the 90s, New York did something about it, got the crime families out of the carding business, but the companies are like no less shady than they were before.

And they're just shady in different ways. Whereas before they were screwing over the customers, now they're screwing over the workers. Because back then, at least they were mob run, but they were in really good unions. And as these private companies came along, they don't have very good unions. So I saw somewhere that a worker at a private company today makes less as a driver for a truck than a helper made in 1985. Wow.

$16 an hour. They make less than that. 1985 to 2016. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. That's what happens when you have a union that's good that goes away in favor of a union that's bad and that's in cahoots with the ownership. Or if there is no union at all, which is the case sometimes. True that. Wasn't Tony Soprano in sanitation? Or didn't he say he was? Yes, he was in carding. Yeah, yeah. I remember that. I also remember when I lived in New Jersey, the

Italian. I'm not saying it was a mafia truck because that would be wrong to assume. But whoever picked up our trash had a big Italian name on the side of the truck. And it was during that time of the Sopranos where I was kind of like, what's going on here?

Oh, you know what's going on there. But supposedly that was after they cleaned things up. Although that was Jersey, huh? So, yeah, they probably didn't. That was probably mafia run. Well, and it was also mid-90s. So I think they were like, that's when they were cleaning it up. Gotcha. So there are about 250 private handlers that are now overseen by the Business Integrity Commission, which may as well be called the Don't Let the Mafia Get Involved Commission.

And sometimes. Yeah, exactly. So you mentioned, you know, just bad conditions and some of these private companies like very long work hours, maybe safety training, maybe not, maybe safety gear, maybe not there. If you hear of a story about a pedestrian that's killed in New York by a garbage truck.

Chances are it's a private company, not always, but there are much, much higher incidents of, I didn't say incidences. Somebody called us out on that. You remember that? Yeah. Yeah. Nice work. We're really progressing here in year 16. And we're trying to. But many more incidents from the private companies, you know, running over somebody than the DSNY and largely because of training, but also because.

They're working too long, they're too tired, and they have too much to do in general. Yeah, an investigative journalist named Kira Feldman wrote an article for ProPublica called Trashed. And I don't remember what came after the colon, but it's really eye-opening. I mean, even if you don't care about trash collection or New York City, just...

The fact that people are being treated this way is just nuts, man. So it's definitely worth a read if this episode piqued your interest at all. Yeah, there's an African immigrant named Mukhtar Diallo. And I don't think we mentioned that some of these private companies will just like

you know pick up the the dude in the parking lot that's looking for day work so they're not covered at all or insured or anything like that they'll just like we'll pay you under the table to like run out in front of the truck and uh get bags out you know to where they can be collected easier right and Mukhtar was one of these guys and he was crushed under a truck and when it came time to

Talk about this that company said this kid. We don't know this guy he just he's a homeless guy that ran out in front of the truck and Of course it later came out what really happened so in 2019 a New York passed a law that said alright We're dividing this into zones now there can be no more than three companies picking up in each zone Just trying to sort of rein in the chaos a little bit right and you have to if you want to do this you have to sign a contract and

That meet certain standards of safety and working conditions. And it's, you know, it's kind of being implemented now. So it is still currently changing for the better. Yeah. And you mentioned all the miles that the DSNY travels just on their routes every year. These commercial haulers might be driving from, you know, one one spot.

to many, many blocks over to the next spot and just wasting so much time and burning so much gas. Whereas if it's like, there's only three companies in this one quadrant, they're going to be driving a lot around, a lot less. And they're also going to be burning a lot more, a lot fewer fossil fuels and releasing fewer emissions too. So it's altogether a pretty good plan. Of course, the companies are like,

Can't do that. Like, what about competition? But New York's not really listening, apparently, and that's what's happening right now. And that's just part of another, again, this larger push for reforming the whole place under Eric Adams and Jessica Tisch. And one of the big ones is getting rid of the black bags in favor of

Like the same plastic bins that you see in basically every other city in the world in one way, shape or form or another. New York's finally being like, we're going to get in on that. Are they black bags?

I think they were blue. There's blue, too. Yeah, they have all different colors, but there's definitely blue as well. Yes. Okay. I wasn't sure. It's been a while, but I just have a visual in my head of like mountains of blue bags on trash day. And if you've never been to New York at all or you haven't been many times, you would probably be shocked to come out on trash day on a hot summer day.

rainy trash day because it's quite a sight and quite a smell. But like you said, they're moving toward Benz.

just a few months ago in February of this year, they said, all right, here's our new plan. If you've got a smaller apartment building, you're going to have those little wheelie bins like almost every other city in the United States. If you are in a really big apartment building, it's basically a dumpster, but it's plastic, but it's like a large container. You mentioned the fact that there aren't a lot of alleys in New York. It's kind of a movie trope,

when you've seen alley scene set in New York city, probably not being filmed in New York because most of the buildings on a block are just, you know, crammed, you know, right next to each other. Right. So these dumpsters have to go somewhere. And they said, all right, uh,

We'll make them small enough to fit in a parking spot. We'll lose 150,000 parking spots all over the city. But we have to do it. And it'll also help us reclaim some of this sidewalk space that we're losing. Yeah. And apparently parking spots is one of the most politically charged issues in all of New York politics. I'm sure. So that's really gutsy to be like 150,000 parking spots are going away so we can put these bins there.

And it's not even across the board. There's some blocks I read that are losing a quarter of their parking spots. Oh, I'm sure. So it's definitely going to take an adjustment for sure. But there won't be bags of trash everywhere. They'll just be like different colored bins that are on the street just off the sidewalk that a truck comes along and picks up that it doesn't require human hands to throw bag after bag into the truck anymore. Yeah.

Boy, New York City, the residents really have to get on board with this to make that work. Well, they did a pilot study of it in Harlem.

And this is back in September of 2023. And apparently it was extremely successful. Rat sightings were down 68%. Where did they go? I don't know. I think they just kind of, they disappear. They go poof into nothingness after they don't eat for two days. Boy, that means they're organizing. This could get really scary. But supposedly they, the people of Harlem were like, this is, this is cool. We can, we can definitely deal with this. So they're rolling it out to the rest of New York. Yeah.

Yeah, I think they will see the benefit to where people get on board because what would really screw up that system is that truck is going using the mechanics to dump those cans. But then there's four or five bags that wouldn't fit in the can just sitting there. Right. So you're still going to have to have some people down there slinging bags. Definitely. For sure. But it should speed up the whole thing and.

Clean it up if everyone chips in. Yeah. And isn't that what living in New York is all about? Everybody chipping in. A little bit, for sure. You got anything else?

Uh, no, uh, just, uh, another mention of composting there. They're getting that going. I mentioned earlier, uh, still pretty new program, uh, since 20% of that total waste is food waste. Uh, if they really got a pretty efficient composting system going, then it would do a lot to reduce trash and, uh, do better things for mother earth. So you did have something else.

I did. Well, if you want to know more about New York trash collection, go to New York and just walk around and you'll find out everything you need to know about it. And while you're booking your flight, how about it's time for listener mail?

I'm going to call this, what is this? Oh, arson investigation. Okay. Hey guys, in 2019, I moved to St. Paul with some friends from college. It's really fun. I made many new friends. In fact, two of my roommates I had never met. One was a local rapper. The other was a firefighter EMT. St. Paul is the arson capital of the country. Is it really? It wouldn't surprise me. After listening to this story, this guy said it was a glorious era of

my life filled with healing, fun, and young adulting. Within a few months I got a job at a discount movie theater and I was working one day when the theater got a call from our boss and said, "Hey, your house is on fire. You should come by." So the firefighters walked me through the burning home. I saw no flames, but it was S-M-O-K-E-Y.

I went up to my room, nothing was burnt there, which is great, but it did smell like a bonfire for about a year after that. Man. Everyone was gone at the time, so nobody was hurt. About a month later, my landlord slash boss, same person, which is why that sounded weird earlier, mentioned that there was a big break in the fire investigation.

but made me do a little work to figure out who it was. It turns out the firefighter EMT that I live with decided he didn't want to live with us anymore, so a week before, he moved a couch to the basement and set it on fire and walked away. Oh my God. What a twist. I know. I only found out because he admitted it to me. My life went haywire for a while after that, but I'm happy to report that I'm settled in full-on adulting

With love, that is Tegan Torres. Fantastic. What a great, great story. Thanks a lot, Tegan. Who saw that coming? Not me. That was a twist that you'd find at a discount movie theater. Right. Well, if you want to be like Tegan and send us an amazing story about something we talked about, we love that kind of thing. You can send it via email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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