Speaker 1: Oh, Hi, it's the French fry under your seat. You
Speaker 1: won't find for another four months. Ali ward, and here
Speaker 1: we are. The trashiest episode of ologies ever made. This
Speaker 1: is another one of those years in the making interviews.
Speaker 1: You're going to talk about it forever. So I came
Speaker 1: across this person's name in relation to garbage, and I thought,
Speaker 1: I must meet this garbage person. They seem great. They
Speaker 1: are a clinical professor at New York University's Liberal Studies Department.
Speaker 1: They teach on the topic of garbage. They have worked
Speaker 1: intimately with garbage. They did a TED talk about garbage.
Speaker 1: They have three anthropology degrees from Columbia University and an
Speaker 1: undergrad and anthropology from New York University, and even authored
Speaker 1: the book Picking Up on the Streets and Behind the
Speaker 1: Trucks with the sanitation workers of New York City the
Speaker 1: perfect fit. Rubbish research is their life's work. So on
Speaker 1: a crisp fall day in Manhattan, I navigated the cobblestones
Speaker 1: to accompany room on the NYU City campus, and I
Speaker 1: routinely test for COVID for shoots and stuff. I had
Speaker 1: tested negative the day before, but I had been in
Speaker 1: an indoor gallery event that week, so I wanted to
Speaker 1: keep my mask on for our interview just in case,
Speaker 1: because COVID is awful. But masks are easy.
Speaker 2: Oh.
Speaker 1: One other easy thing to do, if you don't mind,
Speaker 1: is maybe tell a friend about this podcast ologies, or
Speaker 1: you can support by becoming a patron for a dollar
Speaker 1: a month at patreon dot com slash ologies. Also, rating, subscribing,
Speaker 1: and leaving reviews helps the show so much, and I
Speaker 1: read every single one, such as this very recent one
Speaker 1: left by SJC mud Hut, who said Ali is my
Speaker 1: new best friend, and I really can't help believing she
Speaker 1: makes this podcast for me and me alone. SJC mud Hut,
Speaker 1: It is all for you. Don't tell everyone else, Okay.
Speaker 1: On the episode, your brain is about to become a
Speaker 1: dumpster of facts about what people throw away, where garbage goes,
Speaker 1: who takes it. They're finding treasure in landfills, when an
Speaker 1: item becomes garbage, what plastic you can actually recycle, burning trash,
Speaker 1: building on trash, cherishing trash, and more with professor, scholar, author, garbologist,
Speaker 1: discard anthropologist, one of the two. Doctor Robin Nakel.
Speaker 2: My name is Robin Nagel, and my pronouns are any
Speaker 2: all her.
Speaker 1: Most commonly used are she her, So we'll go with
Speaker 1: that the title of this episode, that's more ambiguous. But
Speaker 1: garbageology not your favorite word, which I'm like, let's hear it,
Speaker 1: because it is one of those words that it it
Speaker 1: sounds like a company that makes garbage cans.
Speaker 2: Okay, I'll accept that. But as a description of what
Speaker 2: we could call a field of concern, of study of crisis,
Speaker 2: of environmental profound environmental relevance, it's too narrow because garbage
Speaker 2: is only one way of thinking about waste.
Speaker 1: But is there a particular way that you describe your
Speaker 1: niche in anthropology.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so it's kind of under the umbrella of what
Speaker 2: we called applied anthropology. My goal in working with New
Speaker 2: York City Department of Sanitation is twofold. One is to
Speaker 2: help the public understand what it is to be a
Speaker 2: sanitation worker in the city for the city and why
Speaker 2: should you care to know that? And the other is
Speaker 2: to help the workforce recognize ways in which they are
Speaker 2: valuable on this meta level that sometimes they don't even
Speaker 2: necessarily acknowledge. I have said many times the Sanitation Department
Speaker 2: is the most important workforce in the City of New York,
Speaker 2: and I get pushed back, even from people on the job.
Speaker 2: And I like it when I get pushed back from them,
Speaker 2: in particular because then I launch into my whole rap
Speaker 2: about public health and the diseases that would make COVID
Speaker 2: look like a sneeze if garbage were not managed more
Speaker 2: or less very well. And I'm not saying it's perfect.
Speaker 2: We certainly had huge problems during the pandemic because of
Speaker 2: budget cutbacks and how the operational side of the job
Speaker 2: was thrown into not chaos, but how do you prevent
Speaker 2: it from being thrown into chaos? Right, So those realities
Speaker 2: are always out there. But if sanitation isn't on the
Speaker 2: street every day, this is not the New York, is
Speaker 2: not the glittering global capital we imagine it to be.
Speaker 1: And you know, I was thinking about it on the
Speaker 1: way over here too, the difference between focusing on the garbage,
Speaker 1: which is dirty, which is something we all fear, versus
Speaker 1: the sanitation, which is the solution. So do you find
Speaker 1: that the way that we talk about garbage versus sanitation
Speaker 1: really depends on if we're focusing on like the good
Speaker 1: or the bad.
Speaker 2: I didn't. I never thought of it that way. I
Speaker 2: like that distinction, and I think you've pinpointed a key
Speaker 2: element here, which is garbage equates with fear for fascinating reasons. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but sanitation. One of the challenges with the word is
Speaker 2: that we could use sanitation to only be talking about.
Speaker 1: Things like sewage.
Speaker 2: Right, So when we say sanitation, do we mean garbage,
Speaker 2: do we mean other forms of waste? Do we mean
Speaker 2: the kinds of protocols that are in place in medical
Speaker 2: facilities and healthcare? All of that has a sanitation connotation
Speaker 2: or context. So same with the word garbage, though, like
Speaker 2: what exactly do we mean by that word? Because it's
Speaker 2: a multifaceted category of material, and depending on how it's defined,
Speaker 2: that dictates I'll say, what happens next, and where it goes,
Speaker 2: and what workforce is responsible for it? And what harms
Speaker 2: does it cause or do we prevent it from causing?
Speaker 1: All by the definition, So, to say something is discarded
Speaker 1: implies that it's useless to the person discarding it, but
Speaker 1: not inherently valueless. But garbage can mean food, waste or
Speaker 1: useless stuff. But does even waste have an inherent value?
Speaker 1: We shall discuss.
Speaker 2: It also allows for thinking about forms of land categories
Speaker 2: of people ways of using time. Do we waste time?
Speaker 2: Do we save time? Are we discarding time? Like? It's
Speaker 2: just far more It's a far broader and thus perhaps
Speaker 2: more exciting way to think about both the problem, the analysis,
Speaker 2: and then some of the potential.
Speaker 1: How long have you been in this field and why,
Speaker 1: of all the fields of anthropology, did you be lying
Speaker 1: for this one or did you ping pong around a bit?
Speaker 2: Well, my earlier work in anthropology was about religion, but
Speaker 2: I've always been intrigued by the problem of garbage in
Speaker 2: particular and waste in general, And when I had a
Speaker 2: chance to teach about it, I came up with a
Speaker 2: syllabus that became a class called Garbage in Gotham, the
Speaker 2: Anthropology of Trash That's amazing. And one of the speakers
Speaker 2: was a sanitation worker I had met just on the
Speaker 2: street who took great care when recycling rolled out in
Speaker 2: New York City to customize the chrome on his truck
Speaker 2: and make it look like such a clean vehicle that
Speaker 2: you could not imagine putting garbage in the back, because
Speaker 2: people were still throwing garbage in the back of his
Speaker 2: truck when it was supposed to be just recyclables. And
Speaker 2: it really pissed him off. So he decided to address
Speaker 2: this himself, and it got him a lot of really
Speaker 2: good media. He was a guest speaker in my class,
Speaker 2: which was wonderful. But the more I learned about the job,
Speaker 2: the more I realized, especially as an anthropologist, you can't
Speaker 2: just hear stories and then draw conclusions about what is
Speaker 2: essentially a subculture, right it is its own world. So
Speaker 2: then I realized I had to do field work in
Speaker 2: person participant observation, the classic anthropology methodology. And then I realized,
Speaker 2: no matter how detailed that work was, I was not
Speaker 2: responsible for or even legally allowed to drive a truck.
Speaker 2: I wasn't on the job. If I said I'd be
Speaker 2: at a given garage on a given morning, and I
Speaker 2: woke up that morning, I'm like, yeah, I don't feel
Speaker 2: like it, which I will admit once in a while
Speaker 2: that happens. My bad. But once in a while happened, well,
Speaker 2: no consequence to me except that I now have a
Speaker 2: reputation as being flaky. But there's no no hammer falls.
Speaker 2: But if I'm on the job, I have a legal
Speaker 2: obligation to be in that girl for roll call. The
Speaker 2: city has a legal obligation to make sure I am
Speaker 2: qualified to drive the truck, to operate the broom, those
Speaker 2: kinds of far more detailed trainings and relationships. That's what
Speaker 2: I needed to do. So I went through the whole process.
Speaker 2: I took the test, I got hired. It took about
Speaker 2: a year from taking the test to actually getting hired,
Speaker 2: because it's a very long, slow, tedious process, in part
Speaker 2: because the City of New York must make sure, by
Speaker 2: its own metrics, that you, the individual, are qualified and
Speaker 2: capable to do the job they're hiring you to do.
Speaker 1: As we recorded this in Manhattan's Greta Trillage, trucks of
Speaker 1: all kinds, garbage and delivery rumbled outside. So just enjoy
Speaker 1: the New York ambiance.
Speaker 2: It's been a puzzle and a kind of an obsession
Speaker 2: of mine for as long as I can remember.
Speaker 1: Have you, before you got the job to do the research,
Speaker 1: have you ever driven anything bigger than like a U
Speaker 1: haul before?
Speaker 2: My high school sweetheart, his dad owned a moving company,
Speaker 2: and so he taught me how to drive a double
Speaker 2: clutch mac. Oh my god. Now, but this was only
Speaker 2: the cab. I never had a trailer behind, but it
Speaker 2: was it was a blast. And he also taught me
Speaker 2: how to the beginnings of how to operate a bulldozer,
Speaker 2: which is not the same as an FBL a front
Speaker 2: end loader. Like each of these pieces of equipment requires
Speaker 2: specific skill and time and forms of knowledge that don't
Speaker 2: we don't acknowledge the expertise that is required to do
Speaker 2: those particular kinds of jobs really well. Like you can
Speaker 2: use a bulldozer to gouge them out of a landscape
Speaker 2: when you meant to have a nice smooth surface, right,
Speaker 2: And it's same with driving a Mac truck, which is
Speaker 2: why I'm glad we didn't have a trailer. When he's
Speaker 2: teaching me how to do the double clutch thing. So
Speaker 2: cool that Mac truck. So that was And then most
Speaker 2: of the cabs for sanitation trucks are also Mac, but
Speaker 2: they're all automatic transmission. Now there are no more standard
Speaker 2: transit mission trucks, which probably just as well, but not
Speaker 2: great for fuel efficiency. But that's a whole other thing.
Speaker 1: But before you are able to drive a garbage truck,
Speaker 1: do they let you do donuts in like a church
Speaker 1: parking lot? Like when you're sixteen and you gotta figure
Speaker 1: out how to book and drive a car, So.
Speaker 2: No short answer, longer answer. When I took the test
Speaker 2: for the permit for my commercial Driver's license, I already
Speaker 2: had a regular driver's license because I didn't grow up
Speaker 2: in New York City, so we actually did donuts on
Speaker 2: frozen parking lots in high school in the wee hours
Speaker 2: of the morning with no grown ups around, being a
Speaker 2: little bad, misbehaving children. So when I took the CDL
Speaker 2: and went through the training that sanitation offers, which is
Speaker 2: very thorough and meticulous, and then the road test and
Speaker 2: all of that, I was very nervous. But when I
Speaker 2: arrived for that first day of class, I'm sitting next
Speaker 2: to a young man half my age, and he never
Speaker 2: drove anything before he got a CDL because he was
Speaker 2: born and raised in New York City, where you don't
Speaker 2: really need a car the way a suburban high school
Speaker 2: or a teenager may need a car. In fact, I
Speaker 2: don't know if this is true, but I have read
Speaker 2: that the rates of teenage mortality are lowest in New
Speaker 2: York City around the country because they're not driving cars.
Speaker 1: Yeah right. I checked into this, and the state with
Speaker 1: the highest teen death rate not New York. The top
Speaker 1: three were Louisiana, Alaska, and Arkansas. So be careful on
Speaker 1: those roads, kiddo, you gotta slow down, pay attention, you
Speaker 1: know what. Just so a tip for me, designate a driver.
Speaker 1: My sister was the victim of a drunk driving accident
Speaker 1: when she was sixteen, and she was airlifted to a hospital.
Speaker 1: The windshield was shattered by her face, and luckily for us,
Speaker 1: she made it out and she is fine, but she
Speaker 1: was picking glass out of her forehead. Years later, the
Speaker 1: guy driving broke a bunch of his legs. So designate
Speaker 1: a driver or volunteer to be for one of your
Speaker 1: friends who will love you all the more knowing that
Speaker 1: they have a safe ride home during which they will
Speaker 1: not get killed or arrested, just saying and buckle up,
Speaker 1: thank you.
Speaker 2: So I knew how to do donuts in a parking lot, right,
Speaker 2: But that doesn't mean you know how to do it
Speaker 2: with a garbage truck. With a collection truck. That's its
Speaker 2: own that I will say you do on the road
Speaker 2: in a collection truck because nobody wants to be near you.
Speaker 2: They don't know if you're empty or full. They just
Speaker 2: don't want to be anywhere near you. So you kind
Speaker 2: of were the King. Yeah, what a majesty, which was fun.
Speaker 1: Robin's twenty thirteen TED talk is titled What I Discovered
Speaker 1: in New York City Trash, and she explains that a
Speaker 1: childhood camping trip left a really deep impression, and by
Speaker 1: that I think I mean it scarred her, but thankfully
Speaker 1: so for us.
Speaker 2: We got to our campsite. It was a lean to
Speaker 2: on a bluff looking over a crystal beautiful lake when
Speaker 2: I discovered a horror. Behind the lean to was a
Speaker 2: dump maybe forty feet square, with rotting apple cores and
Speaker 2: balled up aluminum foil and a dead sneaker. And I
Speaker 2: was astonished. I was very angry, and I was deeply
Speaker 2: confused the campers who were too lazy to take out
Speaker 2: what they had brought in. Who did they think would
Speaker 2: clean up after them? That question stayed with me and
Speaker 2: it simplified a little who cleans up after us?
Speaker 1: Now, you mentioned that this was an early obsession for you,
Speaker 1: But talking about the history of garbage, if we could
Speaker 1: go back, when does garbage start in humanity? I mean
Speaker 1: we have probably piles of charred bone and things from
Speaker 1: dating back to the beginning of humans gathering. There have
Speaker 1: been garbage piles.
Speaker 2: Right, depends again on your definition of garbage. So one
Speaker 2: of the fun challenges is to decide when is it
Speaker 2: garbage quotes around the word, and when is it evidence,
Speaker 2: archaeological treasure, some kind of tidbit of a story of
Speaker 2: our own past. I did a lot of work before,
Speaker 2: just as part of the bigger project with what's called
Speaker 2: the Human relations area of files ATREFS. So the human
Speaker 2: relations area of files are a compendium of ethnographic data
Speaker 2: cross referenced around. You name the category kinship, child rearing, economic,
Speaker 2: and you know, to say economy, that's a huge subject.
Speaker 2: So underneath that inheritance rules ways of organizing what we
Speaker 2: might call religious belief and ceremony and ritual. And so
Speaker 2: I spent quite a while looking at how cultures have
Speaker 2: dealt with waste, how do they define it and what
Speaker 2: do they do about it? And one of the intriguing
Speaker 2: findings I think is that we've kind of never come
Speaker 2: up with a particularly great way of dealing with it.
Speaker 2: Some small scale cultures, when it just got to be
Speaker 2: too much, they just up and moved to a different location.
Speaker 2: Others have buried it over time to the point where
Speaker 2: they raise their elevation. In fact, some of the older
Speaker 2: cities of the world, this is true in Rome and
Speaker 2: some of the other great cities in Europe and parts
Speaker 2: of Asia, some have specific scavenger species they rely on
Speaker 2: to take care of what we would call waste. Putting
Speaker 2: it in a nearby waterway has been very fashionable for
Speaker 2: millennia and not a problem until, of course, we well,
Speaker 2: until many things came to pass, But when we were
Speaker 2: all smaller scale, it didn't decimate that waterway. We've burned it,
Speaker 2: we've used it for fuel, we've ignored it, we have
Speaker 2: mapped it onto different classes, so that if you are
Speaker 2: closer to a given form of waste, through no fault
Speaker 2: of your own, you are considered sort of there's a
Speaker 2: contagion kind of belief that goes with that, and then
Speaker 2: your status within that culture is diminished. In other words,
Speaker 2: we kind of only to ever burn berry or dump
Speaker 2: in the water or give to scavengers. Recycling. We call
Speaker 2: it recycling, but before that word, it was just reusing
Speaker 2: something until it fell apart, right, which we used to
Speaker 2: do more commonly. And now it's coming back almost through
Speaker 2: this and I don't mean this in a derogatory way,
Speaker 2: But this almost BOUTIQUI diy like, Look, I unraveled this
Speaker 2: old sweater and now I'm re knitting with that yarn't
Speaker 2: which I think is really really cool. It doesn't scale
Speaker 2: up necessarily, and that's a problem if we want to
Speaker 2: solve the challenge, the problem that is solid waste broadly
Speaker 2: defined sweater unraveling by itself. Let's put it this. It's
Speaker 2: a good first step. You're doing great.
Speaker 1: And was there a really big difference in terms of
Speaker 1: how sanitation was handled pre and post plastic era?
Speaker 2: Plastics have changed the whole game. We would like to
Speaker 2: believe that plastics are recyclable, but that's not really true.
Speaker 2: They degrade each time they go through a recycling process,
Speaker 2: so after a few times through, you really only have
Speaker 2: a slurry that you can't build or do anything with
Speaker 2: and it ends up in an incinerator or landfill anyway.
Speaker 2: Plastics also off gas always, so there's always some kind
Speaker 2: of chemical component that's inside the water of the plastic
Speaker 2: water bottle, inside the food, in the plastic packaging, inside
Speaker 2: the baby's mouth when they're suckling on some plastic, you know.
Speaker 2: So that's another waste product that is invisible to us.
Speaker 2: But that is that we now carry in our bodies,
Speaker 2: especially fat cells. There is almost no species of being
Speaker 2: on the planet that does not have some of these
Speaker 2: so called forever chemicals inside of ourselves. All like name
Speaker 2: the animal, name the insect, those chemicals are present.
Speaker 1: These chemicals I looked into it are called PERR and
Speaker 1: polyfluorinated alkyl substances, or pfos, and there are close to
Speaker 1: five thousand different types of pfos. But one thing they
Speaker 1: have in common is that they don't occur in nature,
Speaker 1: and bacteria can't break them down, and neither can fire
Speaker 1: or water. Fun Why don't you want such a hardy,
Speaker 1: toxic compound in your system?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 1: Just things like changes in liver enzymes, increased risk of
Speaker 1: high blood pressure or preaclamsia in pregnant people, small decreases
Speaker 1: in infant birth weights, increased risk of kidney or testicular cancer,
Speaker 1: increased cholesterol levels, and decreased vaccine response in children, according
Speaker 1: to the CDC's a Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. Boy,
Speaker 1: maybe we have a solution here. In August of twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: a study was published called low temperature mineralization of perfluorocarboxylic
Speaker 1: acids by some environmental chemist at Northwestern University who found
Speaker 1: that a few types of pfas can indeed decompose using
Speaker 1: some inexpensive and easy to obtain reagents sodium hydroxide and
Speaker 1: dimethyl sulfoxide in case you're taking notes, at about two
Speaker 1: hundred and forty eight degrees fahrenheit, which is a relatively
Speaker 1: low temperature that won't even bake a cookie. But the
Speaker 1: end product is non toxic and benign. This is amazing.
Speaker 1: This just came out a few months ago. Did we
Speaker 1: fix forever chemicals? Not at all, Not at all. This
Speaker 1: only works on certain types of p fas, and environmental
Speaker 1: scientists still say to stop making and dumping them. Like
Speaker 1: we learned in the Oceanology episode, the first task in
Speaker 1: cleaning up the ocean is to stop letting so much
Speaker 1: trash into the ocean in the first place. Otherwise you're
Speaker 1: just chasing your toxic tail. Oh, speaking of plastics.
Speaker 2: Plastics also connects to a kind of industrial process and
Speaker 2: complex of planned obsolescence and trying to convince a larger
Speaker 2: public that each of us, as an individual is responsible
Speaker 2: for making sure that plastic object goes into the right
Speaker 2: bin to be recycled, even though the recyclability of it
Speaker 2: is mostly a myth. But there was a deliberate campaign
Speaker 2: that started in the nineteen fifties to teach us that
Speaker 2: we are the individuals responsible, and by extension, municipalities are responsible.
Speaker 1: The responsibility for sanitary refuse disposal falls upon every citizen.
Speaker 2: Not the manufacturers of those products. That changes everything. And
Speaker 2: the other problem with plastics, of course, among many others,
Speaker 2: is their longevity. They don't biodegrade, or if they do,
Speaker 2: it's very very very slow. And meanwhile they are contributing
Speaker 2: their chemical composition to these larger environments and animals. I
Speaker 2: just want to say one word to you, just one word.
Speaker 1: Yes, sir listening?
Speaker 2: Yes?
Speaker 1: Are you plastics? So?
Speaker 2: Yeah, plastics. Plastics has changed everything.
Speaker 1: Does it change the way that you live your life
Speaker 1: or what you use? I think we're all so anxious
Speaker 1: about it. We don't know what to do. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Now that's a real problem, and especially this complete contradiction.
Speaker 2: I have been taught that I, as an individual, am
Speaker 2: responsible for saving the planet by making sure to recycle
Speaker 2: my plastics and glass and paper and metal. But I
Speaker 2: know partly because I study it, and then other people
Speaker 2: know this sort of in their gut like, yeah, this
Speaker 2: doesn't I'm not sure. We've had recycling for a while now.
Speaker 2: I don't see the earth getting better, so what's going on?
Speaker 2: So it creates this cognitive dissonance. It erodes trust in
Speaker 2: the systems that are telling us to please recycle. I
Speaker 2: think that learning the practice of recycling being religious about it,
Speaker 2: no pun intendent. I think that's important because it can
Speaker 2: create a push from the ground up from those of
Speaker 2: us as individuals together to press for are there plastic
Speaker 2: polymers that could actually be recycled? Are there compostable plastics
Speaker 2: that could work in municipal compost systems? Because if something
Speaker 2: says it's compostable, okay, that's great, but compostable in what
Speaker 2: context through what specific mechanisms of heat and time, and
Speaker 2: those are built very carefully to account for whatever is
Speaker 2: the primary material you know you're going to be dealing with,
Speaker 2: like yard waste and food scraps. But if you add
Speaker 2: compostable plastic, that doesn't necessarily come out the other side
Speaker 2: as compost, but as still breaking down pieces of plastic
Speaker 2: that need a different system. So if enough of us
Speaker 2: are frustrated enough, But we also practice this, We do recycle.
Speaker 2: That's a great raw material for what could become an
Speaker 2: effective political agitation to make plastic recycling real if that's
Speaker 2: chemically possible.
Speaker 1: So it's time to get mad as hell if you're
Speaker 1: not already about a lot of stuff. And there are
Speaker 1: so many triangles with a number in the middle.
Speaker 2: Those don't mean anything. Well, let me back up. They
Speaker 2: mean they tell you the primary polymer component of that
Speaker 2: kind of plastic, but it does not mean it's recycle ubble.
Speaker 2: And in fact, the only ones that can go through
Speaker 2: the system a few times are numbers one and two,
Speaker 2: the PET and HDPE high density polyethyling And I forget
Speaker 2: what PET stands for polyethylene thallate something.
Speaker 1: PET side note stands for polyethylene tear THALATEE. And it's
Speaker 1: the most common thermoplastic polymer resin of the polyester family.
Speaker 1: If it does say so itself, it's very common. PET
Speaker 1: isn't so much. It's in your clothes, it's in fiberglass,
Speaker 1: it's in a bunch of manufacturing items. But where you
Speaker 1: know it best is probably food containers while squinting at
Speaker 1: the bottom of them.
Speaker 2: So the chasing eras symbol was a college student won
Speaker 2: an award when there was a design competition in the
Speaker 2: seventies to come up with some way of indicating recycling matters.
Speaker 2: But then it got co opted and most people believe
Speaker 2: like if the Chasing Era symbol is on the bottom
Speaker 2: of a plastic container while it's recyclable, yeah, nuh huh.
Speaker 1: Wow, I've been lied to.
Speaker 2: Yes you have, Oh you have. We all have. That's
Speaker 2: what I talk about propaganda, That's what I mean. And
Speaker 2: it is a deliberate strategy of a conglomeration of corporations
Speaker 2: who go under the umbrella of Keep America Beautiful.
Speaker 1: M hm ah. My internal monologue here was like what
Speaker 1: and yes, I looked it up. Keep America Beautiful is
Speaker 1: a nonprofit. It was founded in nineteen fifty three by
Speaker 1: the beverage and packaging industry and Philip Morris and other
Speaker 1: tobacco giants. So by campaigning to have volunteers picking up
Speaker 1: cigarette butts on their weekends, they could sway legislation away
Speaker 1: from smoking bands on beaches and in parks, so Pepsi, Coke, Nesley, McDonald's,
Speaker 1: Dow Chemical, and other places with deep pockets and high
Speaker 1: stakes fund Keep America Beautiful, to make sure that the
Speaker 1: focus stays on litter and recycling and your personal responsibility
Speaker 1: instead of the responsibility of the manufacturers and the distributors
Speaker 1: of plastics in the first place. And there's this one
Speaker 1: infamous nineteen seventy keep America Beautiful ad and in an
Speaker 1: Indigenous man wearing a fringed buckskin pantsuit rose his birch
Speaker 1: bark canoe down a river that's thick with trash in
Speaker 1: the shadow of these billowing factories so ominous, and he
Speaker 1: hauls his canoe onto a littered beach, and in a
Speaker 1: close up we see a single tear streaming down his
Speaker 1: face with a message, people start pollution, people.
Speaker 2: Can stop it.
Speaker 1: That Native actor Iron Eyes Cody side Note, was actually
Speaker 1: not at all Indigenous. He was Italian. His birth name
Speaker 1: was Espera Oscar de Courti. He lied his whole life
Speaker 1: about it. But the message people start pollution, people can
Speaker 1: stop it? Does that include companies? The PSA seems to
Speaker 1: skirt over the American notion of corporate personhood. But if
Speaker 1: you don't own a multi billion dollar company that sells
Speaker 1: sugar water in plastic bottles, how much responsibility can a
Speaker 1: person bear, we can make a difference. And so when
Speaker 1: you see three different trash cans, one says recyclables, one
Speaker 1: says composting, and one says landfill, which is like a
Speaker 1: good way to make you think, like, am I going
Speaker 1: to be lazy and put it all on the landfill thing?
Speaker 1: You're like, no, that makes me a shitty person. I'm
Speaker 1: going to sit here and figure out which of these
Speaker 1: napkins is compostable. Do those things really make it to
Speaker 1: those destinations?
Speaker 2: It depends where are we talking about. We mean New
Speaker 2: York City. They're called PSR Public Space Recycling receptacles. They
Speaker 2: are collected by different trucks with different destinations. Oh okay,
Speaker 2: the problem becomes as you touch on are those different
Speaker 2: bins contaminated? So for compost, does someone throw out the
Speaker 2: plastic water bottles or the plastic bag? Well, if it's
Speaker 2: contaminated beyond a certain point, you cannot take it to
Speaker 2: the recycling facility or the compost yard because it really
Speaker 2: now is just garbage. Same with recyclables. If you put
Speaker 2: too much food waste in the recycle bin, you gum
Speaker 2: up the works at the recycling facility. So yes, it's
Speaker 2: going to go to the right place if we put
Speaker 2: it in the right bin. But then it's often very confusing.
Speaker 2: If you have a single use coffee cup from you
Speaker 2: name the major barista source of coffee, it's a paper exterior,
Speaker 2: it's often a plastic lined interior, and then you have
Speaker 2: the plastic of a different polymer that.
Speaker 1: Is the lid.
Speaker 2: Where does that go?
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 2: It depends on the system that a given collection process
Speaker 2: is using. Does the municipality take that plastic lined paper
Speaker 2: and they do it through paper recycling or does that
Speaker 2: go through plastic recycling? So there is no national standard.
Speaker 2: Should there be? Maybe if there isn't, That partly means
Speaker 2: that manufacturers can keep making it up as they go along,
Speaker 2: And then you have this plethora of materials that have
Speaker 2: no clear next step and also are complex to break
Speaker 2: down into components that can be recycled.
Speaker 1: So you can check with your local regulations. But I
Speaker 1: just checked them in California, and plastics with a one
Speaker 1: or two on them it's called an SPI code for
Speaker 1: Society of the Plastics Industry, which sounds very fake. But
Speaker 1: the SPI codes one or two chuck in the recycling bin,
Speaker 1: and I guess plastic bottles with codes three through seven
Speaker 1: can be returned to recycling centers and you may get
Speaker 1: a deposit back for them. But recycling cans and clean
Speaker 1: aluminum foil is definitely possible. Electronic waste should never go
Speaker 1: into landfills, but recycling centers will take it. Batteries, same thing,
Speaker 1: And of course recycling organic waste by composting is a
Speaker 1: great idea. Apparently twenty percent of the US food supply
Speaker 1: is tossed away. It's about ninety six billion pounds of
Speaker 1: food waste a year. That plus yard waste is a
Speaker 1: third of what gets thrown into landfills. And I was like, well,
Speaker 1: at least that's biodegradable, right, not as much as you think.
Speaker 1: When it gets tossed in a landfill, it makes way
Speaker 1: more methane gas, which is twenty three times more potent
Speaker 1: than carbon dioxide in terms of greenhouse gases and global warming.
Speaker 1: But when you're composting it, it's broken down aerobically because
Speaker 1: it's interfacing with oxygen more, and it produces way less
Speaker 1: methane than when it gets tossed in a landfill. And
Speaker 1: you got a lawn to mow. Suburban dwellers leave those
Speaker 1: lawn clippings right on the lawn. You don't have to
Speaker 1: rake them up, you don't have to go put them
Speaker 1: in a bin. Apparently it'll act as fertilizer. Your lawn's
Speaker 1: gonna love it. So now you don't have to get
Speaker 1: a bunch of cut grass up your nose throwing it
Speaker 1: in the green bin. So you're walks. But back to Manhattan.
Speaker 1: Now getting back to you just going over cobblestone driving
Speaker 1: a garbage truck. Is it called the garbage truck or
Speaker 1: a collection truck?
Speaker 2: A collection truck and which let me just add, Yeah,
Speaker 2: I find that the coolest euphemistic. It's quite real and
Speaker 2: a euphemism. I'm on collection. What do you collect old clocks,
Speaker 2: you know, like Barbie dolls, cabbage patchel. Yeah, I'm on
Speaker 2: collection today. I do collection, but I'm collecting. I am
Speaker 2: collecting garbage. So a collection truck. It's very accurate, accurate,
Speaker 2: but it's also it could mean so much else, right,
Speaker 2: I love the I love that it's called that.
Speaker 1: And when you are collecting, how were you collecting just
Speaker 1: the garbage bags on the side of the sidewalk, which,
Speaker 1: by the way, as a Californian, as a West Coaster.
Speaker 1: I'm like, oh, you just put the hefty bag on
Speaker 1: the sidewalk. It just goes on the sidewalk. There's no
Speaker 1: like cans to drag in necessarily depends on the neighborhood. Okay, oh, okay,
Speaker 1: I didn't know that. Do those get flung on the
Speaker 1: truck and sorted later or where does that go? So
Speaker 1: when you say sorted, what do you mean, Like, let's
Speaker 1: say that you've got a black plastic bag full of garbage.
Speaker 1: Does that get opened and cans go one way? Robin
Speaker 1: was shaking her head. No, like I had just landed
Speaker 1: from a distant utopian galaxy. No, that just goes landfill
Speaker 1: or incinerator.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, waste to energy facility.
Speaker 1: Waste to energy facility? Is that? So? Yeah, walk me
Speaker 1: through a little bit what happens when you're a plastic
Speaker 1: bag on the sidewalk and where does it go? When
Speaker 1: someone like you says I'm here to make the city cleaner, it.
Speaker 2: Goes to the back of the truck, and then depending
Speaker 2: on what part of the city that truck is in,
Speaker 2: it will go to a transfer facility, Meaning I'm now
Speaker 2: emptying the truck into a different point of its journey,
Speaker 2: and then in some cases that next step is the
Speaker 2: last step. So in several different Manhattan districts, all of
Speaker 2: the household garbage goes to that waste to energy facility
Speaker 2: in Essex, New Jersey. It's a fascinating plant. I was
Speaker 2: lucky enough to have a tour last spring. And incineration
Speaker 2: is always the big bad guy in the room. However,
Speaker 2: and I'm gonna get killed for saying this, but in
Speaker 2: terms of what gets off gassed and the kinds of
Speaker 2: pollutants that are released and the kinds of hazards that
Speaker 2: are created, incineration, by some arguments, is a far better
Speaker 2: choice than a landfill. So if someone says to you,
Speaker 2: all right, we have to put a land you're going
Speaker 2: to live down stream, down wind from a landfill or
Speaker 2: an incinerator, pick one. I would pick the incinerator.
Speaker 1: Wow, okay.
Speaker 2: And it's partly just what I've learned doing research on
Speaker 2: this for years, but then also seeing the kinds of
Speaker 2: standards that those facilities are held to and the oversight
Speaker 2: that is imposed on them to make sure those standards
Speaker 2: are met. It's not perfect, of course, I'm not saying that,
Speaker 2: but there is no perfect solution. Yet and yeah, I
Speaker 2: would choose Oh man, I'm going to get absolutely.
Speaker 1: But that's also that's an informed opinion though you know
Speaker 1: it's informs an opinion, but.
Speaker 2: You write an opinion. Quite so it's my opinion. But
Speaker 2: so all right, So from some districts it goes straight
Speaker 2: to that facility. Other districts it goes to a transfer
Speaker 2: station where it goes out by barge or by rail,
Speaker 2: and then it ends up in upstate New York or Virginia.
Speaker 2: There is no longer a location within New York City
Speaker 2: where we dispose of our own garbage. The last landfill
Speaker 2: closed in two thousand and one. It's fresh kills on
Speaker 2: the west central coast of Staten Island. Yeah, so we
Speaker 2: have we send it far away. Last I knew the recyclables.
Speaker 2: Once they are sorted at facilities in Brooklyn and Queens
Speaker 2: and New Jersey, they go to nine different states for
Speaker 2: the next step of their processing.
Speaker 1: And with plastics, I understand that we sell our recycling
Speaker 1: over sees.
Speaker 2: Sometimes we sent a lot of our plastics to China,
Speaker 2: and China said to us, Okay, look, we have an
Speaker 2: agreement about rates of contamination. That can only be a
Speaker 2: very very small percentage and you all are blowing that
Speaker 2: percentage over and over and over, and our side of
Speaker 2: the Pacific were like, yeah, okay, sorry, my bad, and
Speaker 2: we kept doing it. So China in twenty eighteen finally
Speaker 2: said enough, no more, we don't take it. Wow, And
Speaker 2: so it created a ripple across the world of recycling
Speaker 2: that is still it's those ripples are still being felt
Speaker 2: because they were our primary buyer of plastics, plastic waste recyclables,
Speaker 2: and so now where do they go? It could have
Speaker 2: sent that ripple back up the manufacturing process to be like, ah,
Speaker 2: maybe this is a good time to take a look
Speaker 2: at why we create so much plastic waste and figure
Speaker 2: out how to stop doing that hasn't yet had that impact.
Speaker 1: Was this from people who don't fully rinse the mayonnaise
Speaker 1: jar before tossing it in the I think.
Speaker 2: It was more than that. I think it was actually
Speaker 2: mixing plastics with like really gross, shitty trash in big
Speaker 2: enough quantities that when you break up in the bail
Speaker 2: of what's supposed to just be plastic and now you
Speaker 2: find stuff that not only can you not reprocess that,
Speaker 2: you're now putting those workers in harm's way and like it.
Speaker 2: Just from what I understand, it was more than just
Speaker 2: missus McGillicutty did not rinse her yogurt container.
Speaker 1: Okay, because every time I've got a peanut butter container
Speaker 1: on those are the worst, right I know. I'm like,
Speaker 1: I gotta get some hot water in this, you know.
Speaker 2: And then how much energy are you using to clean
Speaker 2: it versus how much energy is going to be used
Speaker 2: to recycle it? But really not, You're going to downside.
Speaker 2: So I feel.
Speaker 1: You you were not the only person to wonder how
Speaker 1: clean is clean? And according to the employee owned San
Speaker 1: Francisco waste management company Recology, well done. They say, please
Speaker 1: empty all food residue and liquids from your food containers,
Speaker 1: from your cans, bottles, jars before tossing them in the
Speaker 1: recycling container. And they say, for example, if there's a
Speaker 1: small amount of ketchup remaining in the bottle, give it
Speaker 1: a quick rinse to ensure you don't contaminate other recycled
Speaker 1: paper plastic products. And they suggest to conserve water. You
Speaker 1: can rinse the containers with sink water after you wash dishes,
Speaker 1: just kind of like splogy spoogee in there. So if
Speaker 1: you have ever thrown away a squeeze bottle with two
Speaker 1: fingers of stubborn mustard at the bottom, and then created
Speaker 1: a narrative that they probably like, boil off the mustard.
Speaker 1: We have something in common. We were both wrong. Now,
Speaker 1: what about recycling in a less melt it down and
Speaker 1: reform it kind of way. What about you on the
Speaker 1: collection route did you ever see like an antique hutch
Speaker 1: that you were like, well, holy shit, I'm gonna come
Speaker 1: back here with a truck later and get that myself.
Speaker 2: All the time. Really, Oh yeah, And so that's a
Speaker 2: category of garbage called mango, and mango is either the
Speaker 2: thing itself or the act of deciding to retrieve that thing.
Speaker 2: My best ever was after a big snowstorm when the
Speaker 2: whole workforce of the Department of Sanitation was put on
Speaker 2: snow removal, meaning they're not picking up the garbage, but
Speaker 2: we're still making the garbage. We never stop making the garbage,
Speaker 2: and it piles up and piles up and piles up,
Speaker 2: so finally the streets are clear enough to put people
Speaker 2: back on it. Then it's called chasing garbage. And I'm
Speaker 2: on a block behind the Dakota, the fancy apartment building
Speaker 2: on the upper west side, and it's the garbage is
Speaker 2: as the pile is as high as my shoulder, and
Speaker 2: it's from one end of this long block to the other.
Speaker 2: And it's raining and it's cold, and it's late in
Speaker 2: the day and the truck is so full it's almost bulging,
Speaker 2: and we're done. We just we can't fit anymore in
Speaker 2: the truck. And one of my partners there's one bag.
Speaker 2: He just tosses one last bag. But he has a
Speaker 2: sense of like where there might be something cool inside
Speaker 2: of a given bag, So he opens it up, which
Speaker 2: you're not supposed to do, but he opens it up,
Speaker 2: and inside, folded as if on someone's closet shelf, are
Speaker 2: a set of really beautiful clothing, not fancy, but like
Speaker 2: high end brands of jeans and shirts. And they all
Speaker 2: happen to be my size. And so he says, do
Speaker 2: you want this? I'm like, hell, yes, So I take
Speaker 2: those home. I did take them to the cleaners, you know.
Speaker 2: But then for years I had this really great wardrobe
Speaker 2: adendum that all came from somewhere in the I mean
Speaker 2: the famous people live in the Dakota. I don't know.
Speaker 2: Maybe it was somebody's famous lucky brand jeans.
Speaker 1: Don't know anyway, that's a good find.
Speaker 2: It was a great find. I've found some great stuff.
Speaker 2: But then there are people who There's a fellow named
Speaker 2: Nelson Molina who was on the job for almost thirty
Speaker 2: five years and he worked for the vast majority of
Speaker 2: those years in East Harlem and the Upper East Side.
Speaker 2: So his route that district splits some of the wealthiest
Speaker 2: zip codes on the planet with housing projects and people
Speaker 2: who are not wealthy. And he has a very finely
Speaker 2: tuned sense of when there's something being thrown out that
Speaker 2: really does not deserve to be thrown out. And over
Speaker 2: his years on the job, he assembled this astonishing collection
Speaker 2: of tens of thousands of objects that he has on display.
Speaker 2: It's not open to the public yet. We hope to
Speaker 2: fold it into what will eventually be the Museum for Sanitation.
Speaker 2: But between his genius for recognizing when there's something special
Speaker 2: in the trash and then his curatorial genius of how
Speaker 2: it's ranged, it's dazzling.
Speaker 1: It's my senses of a law look in the bag
Speaker 1: and boom, there it is. That was a clip from
Speaker 1: the twenty fifteen film One Man's Trash, which was directed
Speaker 1: and produced by Kelly Adams, and I'll include a Vimeo
Speaker 1: link on my website. But it's delightful and charming and
Speaker 1: dare I say inspiring.
Speaker 2: So that's like Mongo madness, Mongo majesty, mango beauty and
Speaker 2: the stuff that people throughout baptismal certificates and wedding photos
Speaker 2: and really beautifully framed diplomas from high like Columbia Law
Speaker 2: and Harvard, you know, like things you think, whoa these
Speaker 2: are for life. In fact, one of the diplomas, some
Speaker 2: journalists were through and they contacted the woman whose name
Speaker 2: was on one of these fancy diplomas, who's now living
Speaker 2: somewhere in Europe, and they're like, you want it back?
Speaker 2: She just like, hell no, I don't want it.
Speaker 1: I don't want it.
Speaker 2: So yeah. Nelson's collection is cool for many reasons, but
Speaker 2: one of them is it really asks you to think
Speaker 2: about how these things that our treasure were defined as
Speaker 2: trash by somebody, and why is it so easy to
Speaker 2: do that? And shouldn't there be other ways of ridding
Speaker 2: yourself of something you don't want anymore besides putting it
Speaker 2: on the curve for a garbage truck. And then what
Speaker 2: might those systems be The challenge is time. If Aunt
Speaker 2: Gladys dies and I'm her last living relative and I've
Speaker 2: got to clear out her apartment and it's fifty years
Speaker 2: of whatever were her treasures, but I don't want them.
Speaker 2: Am I going to spend the weeks and weeks and
Speaker 2: weeks of finding those new homes? Or I'm just going
Speaker 2: to put it on the curb, right, Yeah, I'm going
Speaker 2: to put it on the curb. So I mean I
Speaker 2: generically speaking, So it just points to the need for
Speaker 2: different systems, the question about our relationship to time in general,
Speaker 2: and then gratitude for Nelson's stubbornness in deciding this treadle
Speaker 2: singer sewing machine with all its parts, should not be
Speaker 2: in the trash or this film projector that can only
Speaker 2: show really really really old films. And look, there are
Speaker 2: the really really old silent movies right right and like.
Speaker 2: And he has a whole wall of just ferbies, and
Speaker 2: a whole o the wall just a pez dispenser. So
Speaker 2: some of it is, you know, sort of lovely silly things.
Speaker 2: But he has a whole thing of photographs. You can
Speaker 2: spend a long time looking at the table of photographs.
Speaker 2: Who are they and why were those thrown out? And
Speaker 2: who let go of them? And are any of them
Speaker 2: still alive? And most of them have no identifying information.
Speaker 2: They're just pictures.
Speaker 1: If you want to feel sad and scared and oddly invigorated,
Speaker 1: look up Swedish death cleaning, which is like maricondoing your life.
Speaker 1: But while asking the question do I want my bereaved
Speaker 1: loved ones sobbing into this casserole dish I never used,
Speaker 1: I'm sure if they should give it a good will
Speaker 1: So clean out your stuff so that other people don't
Speaker 1: have to make decisions for you after you die. It's
Speaker 1: pretty simple, and the steaks seem very high, which is
Speaker 1: what I need to get motivated to clean out a cabinet.
Speaker 1: On that note, a dear friend of mine recently went
Speaker 1: to an estate sale in la and left with a
Speaker 1: box of items that they were going to throw in
Speaker 1: the trash. They were like, go ahead and take it.
Speaker 1: Seemed like it had some cool stuff in it. Turns
Speaker 1: out the house belonged to a local archaeology professor and
Speaker 1: inside the box were some colorful pottery shards, And she
Speaker 1: asked me if I could find out anything about these
Speaker 1: pottery shards, and via social media, you all connected me
Speaker 1: to an expert in this type of ceramics. And the
Speaker 1: box that my friend acquired from the late professor contained
Speaker 1: irreplaceable artifacts from a nineteen eighty six Central American archaeological dig.
Speaker 1: And as my friend looked deeper in the box, she
Speaker 1: texted me in horror that there was a ziplock of
Speaker 1: human bones from a burial ground in Guatemala. So this
Speaker 1: friend tried to save some pottery from a landfill, and
Speaker 1: now we're literally working with the State Department and the
Speaker 1: Consulate to repatriate human remains to Central America that should
Speaker 1: have never been in a box in a closet. So
Speaker 1: spring cleaning once a year, let's go through all of
Speaker 1: our shit as if we were about to die. Return
Speaker 1: your desecrated human remains back to their country of origin
Speaker 1: before a stranger accidentally buys them at your estate sale.
Speaker 1: Sell some sweaters on eBay, put a lamp on Mercari Marketplace, Craigslist,
Speaker 1: I don't care. Use the buy nothing groups on Facebook
Speaker 1: in your area. Do not accidentally hoard archaeological artifacts. Ever,
Speaker 1: Has anyone ever teamed up with an economist to try
Speaker 1: to figure out how much wealth and resource is in
Speaker 1: the trash. What's the value of the trash?
Speaker 2: So value defined by whom in what context? If I
Speaker 2: am running a private waste company, that trash is worth
Speaker 2: a lot of money to me, and if I am
Speaker 2: doing separation of its own its and I can find
Speaker 2: ways to monetize what is otherwise just this clump of
Speaker 2: something smelly that we call garbage. There's a lot of
Speaker 2: wealth in that. The disconnect is the individual person is
Speaker 2: letting go of that wealth, and then somewhere in its
Speaker 2: next step somebody else is deciding no, no, there's gold
Speaker 2: in them in our bags.
Speaker 1: But what is the value? And who owns it once
Speaker 1: it's discarded?
Speaker 2: Right? And who says who decides what that value is
Speaker 2: in terms of who owns it? And we're talking a
Speaker 2: lot about New York because it's the situation I know best.
Speaker 2: But once it's on the curb, if it's municipal waste,
Speaker 2: it belongs to the City of New York. You don't
Speaker 2: own it anymore. New York City owns it, and there
Speaker 2: have been legal tug of wars about that very issue.
Speaker 2: New York also has two other primary categories of waste, though,
Speaker 2: which is commercial business waste, which is collected only by
Speaker 2: private companies private waste companies, and then construction and Demolition
Speaker 2: debris or CND, which is a third category. The bureaucracy
Speaker 2: behind these different categories is pretty thick, which is partly
Speaker 2: about preventing corruption and partly about health and safety.
Speaker 1: And what about parts of cities that are built on garbage.
Speaker 2: Well, I do a talk, in fact, almost every talk
Speaker 2: I do about garbage starts with a map of Lower Manhattan,
Speaker 2: the original shoreline with this web on top, which is
Speaker 2: the contemporary street grid. And I have a pin on
Speaker 2: the five places where Peter Stuyvesant told New Amsterdam colonists
Speaker 2: in sixteen fifty seven, here's where you are allowed to
Speaker 2: throw out your trash. And it's all on the water's edge.
Speaker 2: And if you look at that, the last pin I
Speaker 2: show is at a place called Kente's Slip and Pearl Street,
Speaker 2: and then I show a slide of that exact place
Speaker 2: with the same pin, and it's three blocks in from
Speaker 2: the water's edge. And all of that is various forms
Speaker 2: of fill, much of which is garbage. While Robert Moses
Speaker 2: was sort of the informal dictator of New York City,
Speaker 2: and New York State. He determined where every ton of
Speaker 2: garbage was deposited so that he would make land.
Speaker 1: Robert Moses, what a character.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: So he deposited garbage in areas where poor people lived,
Speaker 1: and even designed low underpasses so that people without cars
Speaker 1: meaning folks who ride the bus, couldn't access public beaches.
Speaker 1: It was like no car, no beach. And one place
Speaker 1: where the land was built up is on a place
Speaker 1: called Barren Island, part of Brooklyn. Exact beach is called
Speaker 1: dead Horse Bay, which I can't be called dead Horse
Speaker 1: Bay because the dead horse is in it, right, that's
Speaker 1: got to be metaphorical. Nope. There was a glue factory
Speaker 1: where all the pre automobile dead horses were sent to,
Speaker 1: and the waters of dead Horse Bay were littered with
Speaker 1: chopped up dead horse bones. Dead Horse Bay also smelled
Speaker 1: a lot like dead horses. But the land was filled
Speaker 1: up with the city's trash and covered with just a
Speaker 1: dusting of topsoil that washed away. And to this day
Speaker 1: you can walk along Glass Bottle Beach kind of like
Speaker 1: a watery time capsule of trash deposited in early nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty three, there are rusted cash registers, tires, warped crusty
Speaker 1: leather shoes, soda bottles of all kinds, and yes, the
Speaker 1: occasional horsebone. And I should say you can't actually walk
Speaker 1: along the shore as it was closed two years ago
Speaker 1: after radioactive waste was found in thirty one different spots.
Speaker 1: So they're working on it, but you can google pictures
Speaker 1: so many bottles. People say it sounds like gently clinking
Speaker 1: champagne flutes or shimmering windshimes as the bay laps at
Speaker 1: the glass.
Speaker 2: And so we are literally walking on our own history,
Speaker 2: our own archaeology, all the time. But that's not unique
Speaker 2: to New York at all. Cities all over the world
Speaker 2: have done this since time immemorial.
Speaker 1: How does the garbage not just float out to see?
Speaker 2: Well? Sometimes it does, oops, sometimes it does. It depends
Speaker 2: on how well built the landfill is, how what kind
Speaker 2: of what innovative construction was put in place for it.
Speaker 2: There are parts of the city where it is just
Speaker 2: eroding back out into the city. Not many, but there's some.
Speaker 1: I have so many questions from listeners, can I ask you?
Speaker 1: Of course, oh my gosh, But as always before your questions,
Speaker 1: we have some money to discard toward a worthy cause
Speaker 1: chosen by theologist, and Robin pointed us toward the Sanitation Foundation,
Speaker 1: which is the official nonprofit partner of the New York
Speaker 1: City Department of Sanitation, and their mission is to keep
Speaker 1: the city clean while celebrating and supporting the essential sanitation
Speaker 1: workforce and advancing the city's ambitious zero waste agenda. They're
Speaker 1: also making the first ever New York City Sanitation museum
Speaker 1: featuring the Treasures in the Trash, collected and curated by
Speaker 1: Nelson Molina, who we talked about earlier. So find out
Speaker 1: more or donate yourself at Sanitationanfoundation dot org. And that
Speaker 1: donation was made possible by sponsors of the show. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's dig through your inquiries. They have so much value,
Speaker 1: so many good questions. I'm just going to start straight
Speaker 1: out with Kyla Kelly's question, who asked, how fucked are
Speaker 1: we Alliemeyer says, okay, seriously, how much garbage is there?
Speaker 1: Kelly Shaver wants to know how much trash is on earth?
Speaker 1: Just how how fucked?
Speaker 2: Uh So, I think because of plastics, we're seriously fucked.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's my thought.
Speaker 2: Yeah, in terms of a metric of like how precisely
Speaker 2: fucked are we? I'm not I wouldn't have a I
Speaker 2: don't know. I have a child, and I am often
Speaker 2: lying awake at night seriously worried about the future, that
Speaker 2: that child, that child is twenty three, that child is
Speaker 2: no longer, but that child is young enough. Maybe they
Speaker 2: will have a child of their own someday. What what
Speaker 2: crisis are we guaranteed to leave them? And I can't
Speaker 2: answer it, but the possibilities are numberless. So yeah, very fucked. Yeah,
Speaker 2: thank you for that question.
Speaker 1: Yeah, think, I mean that's a That was the answer.
Speaker 1: I thought good to hear from an expert.
Speaker 2: That's my expert.
Speaker 1: Yes. Robin later emailed me to say that though she
Speaker 1: came off as rather emphatic about it, she wanted to
Speaker 1: add that being fucked is not the same as being hopeless,
Speaker 1: and where we're at if things don't change, is really bad,
Speaker 1: but that hoping and striving for change and improvement is
Speaker 1: still the right move as always, So don't throw your
Speaker 1: good intentions in the garbage. Besides, is there even room
Speaker 1: for them? Christina? We wants to know, is there a
Speaker 1: real possibility of running out of places to put our garbage?
Speaker 1: And the movie Wally comes to mind when they think
Speaker 1: of this, they say, have you seen Wally?
Speaker 2: Five times? I love Wally Wally. It's one of my
Speaker 2: favorite movies. No, we are not running out of places,
Speaker 2: in part because more current landfill technology uses a cellular system,
Speaker 2: whereby you are encouraging the decomposition of what's in there,
Speaker 2: so it happens faster than if you just bury it
Speaker 2: and walk away and then each so there's like a
Speaker 2: quadrangle of cells, and when the last cell is as
Speaker 2: decomposed as it can be, it's much less quantity, and
Speaker 2: so you can reuse it. Also, there are vast stretches
Speaker 2: of I mean, if we wanted to, we could fill
Speaker 2: all those lovely planes of the Midwest and the rural
Speaker 2: area like we can. If we want to keep land filling,
Speaker 2: we will not run out of space for a very
Speaker 2: very very long time. It's going to cost arms and
Speaker 2: legs and heads and toes to get it where we
Speaker 2: want it to go, right by whatever transportation we choose.
Speaker 2: But if we want to do that, we're not going
Speaker 2: to run out of space anytime soon.
Speaker 1: Is it more about not producing so much.
Speaker 2: Municipal solid waste in the United States and that's the
Speaker 2: technical term for what most people think of when they
Speaker 2: hear the word garbage, like what's in your kitchen waste
Speaker 2: basket or on the curb, in the litter basket. That
Speaker 2: accounts for at the very very most three percent of
Speaker 2: the nation's waste stream. So I talked earlier about propaganda.
Speaker 2: There is a lot of attention to what's at the
Speaker 2: curb and where it goes and the harms it causes,
Speaker 2: all of which are real, But off stage, with far
Speaker 2: less public attention, are the far more harmful, much larger
Speaker 2: quantities of waste from a host of industrial and agricultural
Speaker 2: and mining and medical systems, among other big categories. So yes,
Speaker 2: we should make less, but it's again this question of scale.
Speaker 2: It has to scale up beyond us as people, individuals
Speaker 2: and individual cities. Again, I'm not therefore saying we shouldn't recycle,
Speaker 2: we shouldn't generate less waste in our own lives, because
Speaker 2: that is the start. We don't smoke in almost any
Speaker 2: public venue anymore. That happened because of a confluence of
Speaker 2: influence from scientists, health experts, and just plain old people
Speaker 2: who were tired of getting their air polluted everywhere they went.
Speaker 2: As well as the devastating health consequences of smoking cigarettes. Right,
Speaker 2: So it wasn't because the government woke up one day
Speaker 2: and said, oh my, we should stop people from smoking
Speaker 2: because it would be good for them. That's not what happened.
Speaker 2: It happened from the ground up. One of my dreams
Speaker 2: is that plastic water bottles will be similarly scarce in
Speaker 2: the world from a similar kind of push, because if
Speaker 2: we really believe that, then the change is within our power,
Speaker 2: together with each other. It has to be a coalition.
Speaker 2: It can't just be me, myself and.
Speaker 1: I And for anyone wondering when plastic water bottles started
Speaker 1: choking the planet, you can look no further than the
Speaker 1: marketing success of Perrier water in the nineteen seventies because
Speaker 1: reports linking diet sodas to health risks started rising, and
Speaker 1: so this French mineral water became very popular through marketing
Speaker 1: to the yuppie community, and then Nesli bought Perier in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety two. Pepsi entered the arena, launching Aquafina in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety five, and then Coke hopped in the bottled
Speaker 1: water waters in nineteen ninety nine when they launched disani.
Speaker 1: Did you know that aquafina and disanni or pepsincoke? Did
Speaker 1: you know that? Did you also know the huge secret?
Speaker 1: Most of that water, even if it purports to be
Speaker 1: from like Yosemite springs or whatnot, it's act just tap water.
Speaker 1: It's just municipal water, filtered, bottled, and it costs more
Speaker 1: than gasoline per gallon. We've been had, but patrons Susie
Speaker 1: Shipman and Elik Race both asked if we'll ever go
Speaker 1: back to a less wasteful and maybe plastic free existence.
Speaker 2: There's a brilliant book called Waste and Want by a
Speaker 2: historian named Susan Strasser, and she delves deep into how
Speaker 2: disposability became our preferred choice over reuse. For example, you're
Speaker 2: on a train, you go to the restroom. It used
Speaker 2: to be a towel that rolled, which I remember those
Speaker 2: two right now. I think people might be horrified to
Speaker 2: go into the Amtrak restroom and not have a paper
Speaker 2: towel to use. Same with There used to be public
Speaker 2: drinking options around the city with cups on chains attached
Speaker 2: to the fountain, so you could just dip the cup
Speaker 2: and drink from the cup. I don't think we would
Speaker 2: do that anymore, and there are good reasons why we
Speaker 2: would hesitate to do it. But the alternative of a
Speaker 2: discardable single use that creates a host of nightmares that
Speaker 2: are you know, sort of on the other side of it.
Speaker 2: So the other thing about the rise of single use plastics,
Speaker 2: you're selling more right plastics they they're manufactured and sold.
Speaker 2: And the more single use utensils we use with our
Speaker 2: takeout food, or the more wrap we have around our
Speaker 2: throwaway Dixie cup, whatever it is, somebody's making money on that. Yeah,
Speaker 2: So partly it's followed the dollar.
Speaker 1: That's a really interesting morn.
Speaker 2: There are still city water fountains all over the place,
Speaker 2: and I drink from them without any hesitation. And New
Speaker 2: York City water is famously wonderful and healthy and pure,
Speaker 2: et cetera.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I at least love seeing more places in
Speaker 1: airports where you could refill a water bottle, especially since
Speaker 1: you know in an airport the consumers in there comes
Speaker 1: with a nine dollars price tag to get a glass
Speaker 1: of waters. You're like, well, Kelly Brockinson and Ella had
Speaker 1: great questions. Ella wants to know what's the difference between
Speaker 1: garbage and rubbish and Kelly ass garbage versus trash versus litter.
Speaker 1: Please define are there are there different definitions?
Speaker 2: Not really anymore, I would say, but there used to be.
Speaker 2: There used to be distinctions. I think now they're just
Speaker 2: the thesaurus would give you rubbish or garbage or trash
Speaker 2: as synonymous. Litter is different. Litter is sort of waste
Speaker 2: out of place, Like you know, it's not supposed to
Speaker 2: be at the curb or on the street. It's supposed
Speaker 2: to be in a litter basket or a garbage bag
Speaker 2: or a truck or a landfill. It's not supposed to
Speaker 2: be loose. There's a fantastic novel by one of my
Speaker 2: all time favorite authors, China Mieville, and the authors called Unlundone,
Speaker 2: and one of the key characters is feral trash. And
Speaker 2: I think of litter as feral trash.
Speaker 1: It is funny because once you put it in a
Speaker 1: litter basket, it's no longer litter.
Speaker 2: Correct, but it trash in general, and litter in particular
Speaker 2: has a way of escaping its confinements.
Speaker 1: And Robin says that in the eighteen nineties, New York
Speaker 1: had more clear distinctions between garbage, which usually denoted food waste,
Speaker 1: rubbish or trash which was other items, and excelsior, which
Speaker 1: sounds like a model of suv like the Lincoln Excelsior,
Speaker 1: but it really just means wood shavings and sawdust. And
Speaker 1: of course American English favors garbage or trash. Brits call
Speaker 1: it rubbish and their garbage cans or dust bins after
Speaker 1: the coal ashes that they collected. But anyway, yes, nice names,
Speaker 1: gross stuff. Rubbish sounds cuter.
Speaker 2: Rubbish sounds more sophisticate.
Speaker 1: It does. It sounds less smelly than garbage.
Speaker 2: It certainly does. Yeah, garbage sounds gross, but rubbish.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a lot of folks I'll list them in an aside,
Speaker 1: Joe Mueller, Brie Brie Steward, Maria Dnae de journee Justin Cacito,
Speaker 1: and Pauline de Pierre. I want to know about people.
Speaker 1: Are people going to the dump? Is that a disposition method?
Speaker 1: How often do people turn up in dumps?
Speaker 2: What people and what dumps? And what do you mean
Speaker 2: by dumps?
Speaker 1: Like how often are their dead bodies or body parts?
Speaker 2: Oh you mean, oh that I thought you meant how
Speaker 2: often people just go into the dump because you know
Speaker 2: it's Friday night, you got nothing to do, Let's go
Speaker 2: to the dump. Oh yeah, which effect people do? We
Speaker 2: have fun? I took you in a dump.
Speaker 1: I let you shoot my gun in some rats. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Because some smaller towns, some smaller dumps, they put aside
Speaker 2: things that might be useful and you can do. Like
Speaker 2: there's a fantastic one I go to sometimes in Vermont
Speaker 2: that has a whole little building full of stuff that
Speaker 2: people don't want anymore, but somebody else might want it,
Speaker 2: and it's it's always fun to rummage the round through
Speaker 2: that non rubbish. In terms of bodies going to dumps,
Speaker 2: of course, I mean that happens. It's There have been
Speaker 2: sort of myth level stories about human bodies who have
Speaker 2: been buried at fresh Kills landfill in New York City.
Speaker 2: Of course, there are cartoonish stories about mobsters getting rid
Speaker 2: of their enemies in the landfills of the meadowlands and
Speaker 2: other parts and landfills in this part of the world.
Speaker 2: Almost certainly there are, but I don't have firm stories
Speaker 2: about it.
Speaker 1: But that's not why fresh kills is called fresh kills.
Speaker 2: No fresh kills. The name comes from the roots are
Speaker 2: in Dutch kills like catskill peak skill. It means near
Speaker 2: a creek or stream, so it has nothing to do
Speaker 2: with death.
Speaker 1: Okay, but I mean, you've never seen like a hand
Speaker 1: sticking out of something happening?
Speaker 2: I have not, But Sarah, sanitation workers I've worked with
Speaker 2: who have what's the protocol? All kinds of city agencies, police,
Speaker 2: county corps, the Medical Examiner's office, Department of Health. There's
Speaker 2: a whole I don't know what the protocols are, but
Speaker 2: there's this. It activates a whole lot of response.
Speaker 1: Yeah, are rugs? Do rugs get a bad rep for
Speaker 1: a reason?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Sometimes?
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 2: Also, there was a story from a few years ago
Speaker 2: that crew was working a block and someone had discarded
Speaker 2: a couch and as they put it into the back
Speaker 2: of the truck, thousands of dollars worth of cocaine fell
Speaker 2: out of it. Oh yeah, big oopsie.
Speaker 1: Is there a protocol for that or is it just
Speaker 1: like put that on eBay see what you can get. Yeah.
Speaker 2: No, they would have been fired and jailed if.
Speaker 1: They had done that. That's a good point, I guess,
Speaker 1: not worth that. Did you hear the story about the
Speaker 1: guy who threw away a disdrive full of bitcoin?
Speaker 2: I did, hear that.
Speaker 1: Has he reached out to you to be like, can
Speaker 1: you help me out here?
Speaker 2: Was he even in New York?
Speaker 1: No, I think he was in the Essex or something.
Speaker 1: I think he was British. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So.
Speaker 1: James Howells, a Welsh computer engineer, accidentally tossed some bitcoin
Speaker 1: into a landfill in twenty thirteen and has spent nearly
Speaker 1: a decade and potentially millions of dollars developing AI trash
Speaker 1: scanning schemes and robot dogs to help him locate this
Speaker 1: disk drive with his bitcoins. How many bitcoins eight thousand,
Speaker 1: which are worth about one hundred and forty five million dollars,
Speaker 1: even with bitcoin dropping to less than a third of
Speaker 1: its top price this year. Has he got a chance? No,
Speaker 1: it's gone, isn't it? Well?
Speaker 2: Probably, I mean it exists in the world. If it's
Speaker 2: in a landfill, it exists in the world. If he
Speaker 2: could convince somebody to go back, and if the records
Speaker 2: were kept well enough to go back and have a
Speaker 2: pretty good guess of exactly where it was buried, and
Speaker 2: he was willing to probably pay a hefty amount of
Speaker 2: money to get them to excavate. Here's the other thing, though,
Speaker 2: how far down is it and what infrastructure has been
Speaker 2: put in place on top of it, because if it's
Speaker 2: a landfill built today, there are leechate and methane and
Speaker 2: other volatile organic compound retrieval and treatment methods, so it's
Speaker 2: not just a hump of earth with garbage inside. It's
Speaker 2: a very complex, very carefully engineered geography. And if his
Speaker 2: bitcoin thing is down many layers and they would have
Speaker 2: to disrupt the system that then is part of the
Speaker 2: entire complex. I don't know that there's enough money in
Speaker 2: the world to convince anybody to do that, right.
Speaker 1: The sad thing is I think it was like half
Speaker 1: a billion dollars on a disk drive a bitcoin. But
Speaker 1: the sad thing is it's just bitcoin's tanked in the
Speaker 1: last six months, so it's like every day he's not
Speaker 1: getting it. Is just I just I want him to
Speaker 1: do that eternal sunshine and just be able to take
Speaker 1: that part of his brain that knows he threw away
Speaker 1: bitcoin and just take it out of his brain and
Speaker 1: just let him live, you know what I mean. But
Speaker 1: that brings up a good question though. Bradley Ladwig, first
Speaker 1: time question asker, longtime listener, says that I've heard that
Speaker 1: new landfills are using enzymes to speed up decomposition and
Speaker 1: using methane capture to generate electricity. Are those methods being
Speaker 1: widely utilized yet.
Speaker 2: In a contemporary landfill.
Speaker 1: Yes, oh, okay, that's great. Yeah the methane capture does
Speaker 1: that go go right back into the natural gas pipeline.
Speaker 2: So I don't know the physics or the chemistry of this,
Speaker 2: but it's part of gases that are at least in
Speaker 2: this part of the world sold back to the national
Speaker 2: grid and then are used to help heat homes in
Speaker 2: the area.
Speaker 1: Okay, just a side note on this, So natural gas
Speaker 1: and landfill gas or LFG aren't the same thing, just
Speaker 1: because when microbes are chomping and burping and doing their thing,
Speaker 1: they're also making CO two. So LFG or landfill gas
Speaker 1: straight out of the pipe raw might be fifty to
Speaker 1: fifty methane and CO two with some other volatile compounds
Speaker 1: mixed in, give or take. So vertical and horizontal pipes
Speaker 1: are buried in the landfill and they collect the gas
Speaker 1: and then it gets cooled and processed before being sold
Speaker 1: for other purposes as natural gas. But landfills are farting
Speaker 1: and we capture it, we cherish it, and then we
Speaker 1: burn it for money. Speaking of gross, Shelby reared and
Speaker 1: asked how dirty is trash and Evily Sanchez requested info
Speaker 1: on the worst thing Robin has ever found in the garbage.
Speaker 1: She wasn't the only one. Amy Ramatsu wants to know,
Speaker 1: what's the nastiest thing you've ever scene?
Speaker 2: I find a large conglomeration of maggots at the bottom,
Speaker 2: let's say, of a plastic or metal garbage can to
Speaker 2: be really really like, it absolutely wigs me out, and
Speaker 2: that's not fair to the maggots, and it's like they're
Speaker 2: just they're just little beings in the world. Then we
Speaker 2: create the conditions for them to exist. And in fact,
Speaker 2: if you have this really gross, but if you have
Speaker 2: a wound, like a deep flesh wound and it's not healing,
Speaker 2: but you drop a maggot in there, that mago will
Speaker 2: eat all the dead infected flesh and you will have
Speaker 2: a very very healthy wound that then will heal. So
Speaker 2: maggots actually could have a role in healthcare and have
Speaker 2: had in the past. But yeah, so I I maggots are.
Speaker 1: They're just babies, They're just little beings.
Speaker 2: Trying to exist in the world. I very few. I
Speaker 2: feel that very strong, Like.
Speaker 1: It's just infants, they're just flying.
Speaker 2: Even if they were grown up flies, I'm less wigged
Speaker 2: up by them. But don't they have a right to live?
Speaker 2: And how we made the conditions that make them prosper?
Speaker 2: The party we did, we throw the party, We're like
Speaker 2: perfect for you. Maggots come on over, same with rats
Speaker 2: New York City among other cities. But because we use
Speaker 2: plastic garbage bags, we have created what a colleague of
Speaker 2: mine calls rat topia. Okay, why how Because we have
Speaker 2: food waste in those bags all over the city, especially
Speaker 2: at night, because rats tend to be nocturnal. And then
Speaker 2: so we put the from restaurants, especially put food waste
Speaker 2: from houses as well. We put them out the bags bags.
Speaker 2: I don't care how minty the flavoring of the bag is.
Speaker 2: It just means the rat will have breath that smelt
Speaker 2: like you just brushed his teeth. It will not dissuade
Speaker 2: them from eating into and getting food from those bags.
Speaker 2: So as long as we are reliant on plastic bags
Speaker 2: at the curb at night, we are feeding rats.
Speaker 1: Oh well, two things about that. Number one there's an
Speaker 1: episode I did with doctor Bobby Core again.
Speaker 2: He's my man.
Speaker 1: I love him.
Speaker 2: Bobby is the best. He's the one who has the
Speaker 2: term rat toopia. I didn't know you did one with Bobby.
Speaker 1: I missed that.
Speaker 2: Oh fantastic.
Speaker 1: It's urban rodentology. Yeah, yeah, oh I Lobby's the best.
Speaker 1: I love him, Bobby.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: No, Bobby's the best, absolute best in the world at
Speaker 1: what he does. And there are a ton of people.
Speaker 1: Grace robis Show Seed of the K, Alison Babel, Ali Brown,
Speaker 1: Super Sarah, Nico Peruzzi and Diana m All had questions
Speaker 1: about trash bags, and Grace wants to know. Are there
Speaker 1: biodegradable garbage bags? Sea to the K wants to know,
Speaker 1: are you team scented bags? Sea to the K says,
Speaker 1: I am not into tropical garbage. Are there better ways
Speaker 1: to collect our trash?
Speaker 2: Collect or leave on the curb?
Speaker 1: I guess either. Okay, let's get into it. Those are
Speaker 1: two big questions.
Speaker 2: Okay, So in terms of better ways to collect it, certainly,
Speaker 2: if we are reliant on individual trucks, which at maximum
Speaker 2: capacity in New York the standard truck is specked for
Speaker 2: about twelve point five tons. You in certain conditions, you
Speaker 2: can squeeze as much as fourteen fifteen tons on that truck.
Speaker 2: But if you think about that, we generate about ten
Speaker 2: thousand tons a day. So but then then how do
Speaker 2: we like you don't want eight point eight million people
Speaker 2: driving somewhere with their garbage to drop off their little
Speaker 2: household waste. You know that the infrastructure and air quality
Speaker 2: stress from that would be absurd. There are a couple
Speaker 2: of pilot programs right now that are containerizing garbage in
Speaker 2: the middle of a block, like they do in many
Speaker 2: cities in Europe, where I, a householder can carry my bag,
Speaker 2: put it in the right container, it locks behind me,
Speaker 2: rats can't get it, and then the truck comes. I
Speaker 2: don't know at what intervals to get that material. You're
Speaker 2: still dealing with the truck. We have designed the system
Speaker 2: sort of by default. But because we designed it, we
Speaker 2: can redesign it, like we could decide to do it
Speaker 2: differently in terms of better ways to leave it for collection,
Speaker 2: if we want to use that collection system still and
Speaker 2: instead of leaving it on the curve. First of all,
Speaker 2: plastic bags are a disaster.
Speaker 1: I thought, so if we.
Speaker 2: Did compost more rigorously if we separated our food waste
Speaker 2: and put them into what New York used as what
Speaker 2: they call the brown bin system. Those brown bins are
Speaker 2: almost completely impermeable to pests. I think a rat, really,
Speaker 2: really really stubborn rat that came back to the same
Speaker 2: one for night after night after night might be able
Speaker 2: to get through. But they were designed to be super sturdy.
Speaker 2: So if you take your people say, oh, I don't
Speaker 2: want to compost because I'll get rats because of my
Speaker 2: food waste in one place. No, you're putting your food
Speaker 2: waste in a far more secure container and leaving the
Speaker 2: rest of your garbage that the threats don't want. You
Speaker 2: will have fewer pests if you compost. The public has
Speaker 2: yet to understand that on a broad scale. Plastic bags
Speaker 2: were introduced for good reasons between nineteen sixty nine and
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy one in New York, and they do. They're
Speaker 2: easier in many ways for the householder. I want to
Speaker 2: say they cause fewer injuries for the worker, but that's
Speaker 2: not necessarily true. It's a different type of injury than
Speaker 2: what metal cans created. But the convenience of it, you
Speaker 2: don't have to store the bags when they're empty. There's
Speaker 2: all kinds of ways that they're convenient, but they create
Speaker 2: a host of problems like rats.
Speaker 1: What did people use before plastic.
Speaker 2: Bags, metal garbage cans? That was it?
Speaker 1: Like, I'll just awster the grouse straight up. Yeah right, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess I remember my dad dragging that
Speaker 1: to the curb and those were everywhere in the work
Speaker 1: before then.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and if the lid was off a little bit
Speaker 2: and it rained filled with rain water. And this was
Speaker 2: also when a lot of buildings heated with coal, so
Speaker 2: you often had coal ash in these bin in the
Speaker 2: in the cans. The cans get rusted, the cans get dented,
Speaker 2: the cans create like that those rusty edges then cut
Speaker 2: workers and then they get gangreen from the tetanus no
Speaker 2: lockjaw and tetana. Yeah. So the cans were not great either.
Speaker 2: They're also heavy as hell, you know, as the plastic
Speaker 2: cans we call them plastic containers can be receptacles, and
Speaker 2: then you have the weight issue of how do you
Speaker 2: lift it. The cans were not great, but bags are
Speaker 2: not great either.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Okay, but patrons kJ first time question asker Stephanie
Speaker 1: trout Berman, Christina Kassakis, Connie E. Karringer, Nicole Kleinman, Samuel Harvey,
Speaker 1: Barb chang Ira Gray, and Marin Prophet wanted to know
Speaker 1: about hazardous items and the days lurking on curbs. How
Speaker 1: often do those cuts or sticks with sharp things.
Speaker 2: Like so needles. I don't know how often needlesticks happen,
Speaker 2: but they happen. Sanitation and refuse work, according to the
Speaker 2: Bureau of Labor Statistics, is far, far, far more dangerous
Speaker 2: than being a cop or a firefighter, and it's always
Speaker 2: in the top ten most Dangerous Jobs list, which comes
Speaker 2: out every two years. That category sanitation refuse work is
Speaker 2: always somewhere in the top ten. It moves maybe from
Speaker 2: four to seven or from seven to five, but it's
Speaker 2: always there. The three sources of harm are the trash itself,
Speaker 2: because especially with plastic bags, it punctures the bags, It
Speaker 2: punctures the workers, the truck, the mechanics of the truck.
Speaker 2: When you put a bag in the back of the truck,
Speaker 2: there's a it's called the blade. The hopper comes down
Speaker 2: and scoops it up to compress it into the body
Speaker 2: of the truck. But that exerts immense pressure and off
Speaker 2: and what is caught by the blade of the hopper
Speaker 2: catapults back out at you. So you never want to
Speaker 2: be behind a truck when the hopper is cycling. So
Speaker 2: that's another source of harm the truck. Also, mechanics of
Speaker 2: the truck fail sometimes and hurt people, and then traffic
Speaker 2: motorists are impatient to get around a truck, understandably but
Speaker 2: often without remembering there are human beings who are working
Speaker 2: with that vehicle and they're somewhere nearby, and if you
Speaker 2: go around them, take care that you're not gonna hurt them,
Speaker 2: hit them, kill them. So those are the sources of
Speaker 2: the harm, and it's ubiquitous. You will not get through
Speaker 2: a twenty two year career without injury.
Speaker 1: You just won't.
Speaker 2: Even if it's something seemingly mundane like your discs erupt
Speaker 2: or your rotator cuffs and your shoult like and I
Speaker 2: say seemingly mundane, those are crippling. Yeah, So even if
Speaker 2: it's that you wear the work on your body for
Speaker 2: the rest of your life.
Speaker 1: And I'm going to guess that sanaisian or don't get
Speaker 1: free Starbucks like cops and firefighters.
Speaker 2: There's all kinds of like there's sporting good stores that
Speaker 2: if you're a copper firefighter you automatically get ten percent off.
Speaker 2: There are yes, free donuts, the famous donuts for cotton.
Speaker 2: You don't get that as a sanitation it's yeah, it's
Speaker 2: definitely the step child agency of those three.
Speaker 1: Is there something that you feel like sanitation workers should
Speaker 1: get at the holidays? Like should you be baking cookies
Speaker 1: and leaving them stuff where this is not carbag this
Speaker 1: is for you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, go to your local garage with holiday cookies, have
Speaker 2: enough for everybody and understand there's more than one shift,
Speaker 2: but yeah, Or talk to the garage superintendent and find
Speaker 2: out what deli the guys like most and order a
Speaker 2: big old one of those you know, six foot long sandwiches.
Speaker 2: They you can't give them beer because of rule changes,
Speaker 2: but you know, sodas and anything, especially if you do
Speaker 2: it through the garage. If a sanitation worker is on
Speaker 2: the route and you offer him even a cup of coffee,
Speaker 2: technically it's illegal, and technically they could get in really
Speaker 2: big trouble for it, even if it's something humble like that.
Speaker 2: So if they don't know you and you offer them
Speaker 2: a cup of coffee, they're probably going to say no.
Speaker 2: But if you go through the garage and you're like
Speaker 2: my second grade class wants to adopt your garage or
Speaker 2: my community organization or my family. We just want to
Speaker 2: acknowledge you somehow.
Speaker 1: Yeah, heck yeah, m hm oh that's so good to know.
Speaker 1: So cookies sandwiches do it now? Some patrons Isabelle Sleigh Maker,
Speaker 1: Margot Rosenbaum, Kylie m Smith, Eric Johnson, and Susie Kroger
Speaker 1: wanted to know's house smelly? A lot of people final
Speaker 1: question from listeners want to know, like Deli Dames wants
Speaker 1: to know do people who work directly with garbage sanitation
Speaker 1: does it change their sense of smell? I know that
Speaker 1: you said that when you were working with it, you
Speaker 1: stop noticing it. But is there anything that sanitation workers
Speaker 1: do for themselves to kind of end the day and
Speaker 1: get back to home, or anything that the municipalities are
Speaker 1: doing about about smell. Because it's something that it's a stigma.
Speaker 2: I have never asked them if it has changed their
Speaker 2: sense of smell. It's a lovely question and I don't
Speaker 2: know the answer. I will say many sanitation workers would
Speaker 2: never ever wear their uniform home. They will shower and
Speaker 2: change back into the street clothes, and some garages actually
Speaker 2: pitched in to buy washer dryer for the garage so
Speaker 2: they never take their uniform home. They wash it on site,
Speaker 2: so they're never bringing it into the family laundry system.
Speaker 2: I know some workers that's their choice. I know others
Speaker 2: who are completely nonchalant about like, yeah whatever, yeah I
Speaker 2: washed this last week was the big deal, you know.
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess you know a lot of people
Speaker 1: wear shoes all over the city and then wear the
Speaker 1: shoes inside their house without taking them off.
Speaker 2: So you know who knows that has come to wig
Speaker 2: me out as much as somebody picking their nose and
Speaker 2: eating the boogers. Like just when I see shoes inside,
Speaker 2: I just I'm like, oh, you don't have to do that.
Speaker 1: And take it from someone who literally is the sanitation
Speaker 1: at their politics, like that crosses you out, you know,
Speaker 1: take the shoes off at the door.
Speaker 2: Apparently, Also, if you want to cut your risk of
Speaker 2: getting sick from anything, COVID, the flu, anything, there are
Speaker 2: two things you should do as soon as you walk
Speaker 2: in the door of your home. One is wash your hands.
Speaker 2: The other is take off your shoes. Those two things together,
Speaker 2: apparently are absolutely excellent protections. There's not feel safe, but
Speaker 2: you are far less likely to get sick if you
Speaker 2: do those two things.
Speaker 1: I remember hearing that hemlines got shorter because of tuberculosis
Speaker 1: because people were just dragging long skirts through lookies and
Speaker 1: bringing them back into their house, and so like, I
Speaker 1: just think about that when I think about taking my
Speaker 1: shoes off.
Speaker 2: Just that is a cool fact, twig.
Speaker 1: Now, there's got to be something that sucks about studying
Speaker 1: garbage other than the term garbageology. Is what's the thing
Speaker 1: that is the hardest about the job or just the
Speaker 1: toughest thing about the field in general.
Speaker 2: This is a consistent source of dismay for me. When
Speaker 2: acknowledging essential workers city uniform forces, people whose work is
Speaker 2: fundamental to our daily well being, the people who collect
Speaker 2: our garbage and who sweep our streets are almost never mentioned,
Speaker 2: and it breaks my heart. And I include here not
Speaker 2: just municipal workers, but people working for the private companies
Speaker 2: as well, whose jobs are often far more difficult than
Speaker 2: what the municipal workers have to face, and yet we
Speaker 2: don't acknowledge them. So even just saying thank you when
Speaker 2: you see somebody working the truck, it's a small gesture,
Speaker 2: But what if everybody did it? What if that was
Speaker 2: understood like, oh, there's a sanitation, I'm going to say,
Speaker 2: I thank you. What if that was just expected and
Speaker 2: normal and common, that would be fantastic because that would
Speaker 2: then also trickle up, as it were, to helping when
Speaker 2: there are more formal acknowledgments, making sure that those folks
Speaker 2: get the recognition they deserve. That one recent example, September eleventh,
Speaker 2: just passed the twenty first anniversary. Sanitation was absolutely pivotal
Speaker 2: in the city's response, but rarely gets mentioned when there
Speaker 2: are formal acknowledgments. No one on the job died on
Speaker 2: the job because of that tragedy, But since that tragedy,
Speaker 2: one hundred and twelve people have died of very weird cancers,
Speaker 2: almost all of which are directly attributable to the exposures
Speaker 2: they got through working Ground zero. There's a young woman
Speaker 2: who works for sanitation who's doing it's a background in
Speaker 2: film who's doing a documentary to try and get that
Speaker 2: story more attention, but it's still generally not well known
Speaker 2: at all. So what my source of dismay? And I
Speaker 2: realize I'm kind of going on and on about this
Speaker 2: but they deserve more public awareness and praise and thanks
Speaker 2: and gratitude. They need to be front and center in
Speaker 2: our attention.
Speaker 1: And I'm also going to guess the moniker of garbage man,
Speaker 1: which is not it's what you use anymore sanitation worker. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I imagine that must be a label that they
Speaker 1: hear a lot.
Speaker 2: There was a headline in the Statina and Advance about
Speaker 2: something about a garbage man, and I wrote to them
Speaker 2: immediately and I didn't say I didn't say it in
Speaker 2: language as strong as I felt. You know, you want
Speaker 2: to be polite, but they change the headline.
Speaker 1: Good.
Speaker 2: It's one small thing.
Speaker 1: And I love that you're an advocate for that, and
Speaker 1: that you've been in the actual job and in the
Speaker 1: uniform and in the truck.
Speaker 2: I'm very proud of that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you should be. What is your favorite thing about
Speaker 1: what you do in general? About studying this, about being
Speaker 1: an anthropologist, about working in sanitation, about the friends you've made, anything.
Speaker 2: Sometimes I look around at the university where I work
Speaker 2: and I wonder if my job in NYU matters. Yes,
Speaker 2: I teach, and maybe I have influence on my students.
Speaker 2: And yeah, I write some, although not as much as
Speaker 2: I should, and like that's good. But when I'm working
Speaker 2: with sanitation people, their work absolutely matters to the well
Speaker 2: being of this city every single day, profoundly, so it's
Speaker 2: so important. It's like the oxygen in the air. We
Speaker 2: get to completely overlook it and take it for granted
Speaker 2: and just assume it's going to be there. But if
Speaker 2: it weren't, we would be in deep shit. That connecting
Speaker 2: to people whose jobs are so profoundly essential in the
Speaker 2: deepest possible way, that is deeply satisfying. Also that they've
Speaker 2: let me in, you know, because who the hell am I? Right?
Speaker 2: But over time they have let me in, and that's
Speaker 2: an honor. I also really enjoy watching their friendships. They
Speaker 2: form bonds of camaraderie that often last far longer than
Speaker 2: the job itself, and that I I don't see counterparts
Speaker 2: of that within NYU. And maybe that's because I'm sort
Speaker 2: of an introvert in this world, and maybe that's on me,
Speaker 2: but I really enjoy watching the bonds that they form
Speaker 2: in the trenches in the War on Grime. I still
Speaker 2: have trouble telling that story without choking up. In fact,
Speaker 2: in that moment in the Ted Talk, I had a
Speaker 2: moment of like I can't just I can't cry it
Speaker 2: at time.
Speaker 1: So thank your sanitation workers. Yeah, thank you so much
Speaker 1: for doing.
Speaker 2: This, Thanks for your interest this is and thank all
Speaker 2: your readers for their great questions.
Speaker 1: Oh, such good questions. I literally could talk about garbage forever.
Speaker 2: Indeed does one could.
Speaker 1: So ask smart people garbage questions because we're here to
Speaker 1: find out and look, they love answering them. Go watch
Speaker 1: Robin's Ted talk, Go google composting if you feel inspired,
Speaker 1: clean out a closet, get a reusable water bottle if
Speaker 1: you don't have one, and vote and for more on
Speaker 1: doctor Robin Nakeel. You can see the links in the
Speaker 1: show notes and enjoy her book, Picking Up on the
Speaker 1: Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of
Speaker 1: New York City, which will also link the show notes.
Speaker 1: There will be links to so much that we discussed
Speaker 1: on my website. We are at Ology's on Twitter and Instagram,
Speaker 1: and I'm at Aliward on both smologies. Episodes our kid
Speaker 1: friendly shortened versions of classics and they are scrubbed of filth.
Speaker 1: They're in our feed or all collected at aliward dot
Speaker 1: com slash smologies. I think We've got like seventeen Smologies
Speaker 1: episodes up already. Thank you to Mercedes Maitland and Zigrodrigez
Speaker 1: Thomas for editing those. Thank you to Aaron Talbert for
Speaker 1: admitting the Ologies podcast Facebook group with assists from Bonnie
Speaker 1: Dutch and Shannon feltis Emily White of the Word to
Speaker 1: remakes professional transcripts and Caleb Patten bleeps them. Susan Hale
Speaker 1: handles merch and so much else. Noel Dilworth all our scheduling.
Speaker 1: Kelly R. Dwyer helps with the website and she can
Speaker 1: design yours too. Nick Thorburn wrote the theme music, and
Speaker 1: our lead editor is Treasure Jared Sleeper of mind Jam Media.
Speaker 1: And if you stick around until the very end, you
Speaker 1: know I tell you a secret this week. There's two.
Speaker 1: Number one, if you listen to Vamproology You'll know what
Speaker 1: I'm talking about. But Art Thou a Spirit of health
Speaker 1: or a goblin damned merch is on the way. It's
Speaker 1: dropping this week. I'm very excited about it. And second
Speaker 1: secret is I keep getting this song called Crush by
Speaker 1: Ethel Cain stuck in my head because there's this one
Speaker 1: lyric that just is on a loop and The song
Speaker 1: is about some piece of shit guy, but the lyric
Speaker 1: I get stuck in my head, goes his older brother,
Speaker 1: bagged the valedictorian, his mother steady screaming he should be
Speaker 1: more like him, and just what a rhyme valedictorian? More
Speaker 1: like him? And I enjoy it? Okay, goblins exciting, Bye
Speaker 1: bye
Speaker 2: What I love garbage