From the Archives: Brilliant Minds of Trash and Sewage

Hey, it's Alec Baldwin here. Before we launch our next season of Here's the Thing at iHeartRadio in January, I thought i'd play some of my favorite shows from the archives. Next up is Pam Alardo, former Deputy Commissioner of the Bureau of Wastewater Treatment in New York City. I enjoyed talking with her about what happens to all the water that goes down the drain in New York. Also joining us is Ron Gonan, former Deputy Commissioner of Sanitation, Recycling

Day of every week.

Today you'll hear from two of the best people tackling all that waste after the break. New York City's first recyclings are but first. Pam Alardo a big name in sewage. Since last year, she's led New York City's Bureau of Wastewater Treatment. Mayor Deblasio poached her from Seattle, where she spearheaded an unprecedented upgrade of that city's wastewater treatment infrastructure. Why'd you leave Seattle to come here?

Great question?

Do you ever look at your life as an older person and you kind of look at your life as a third party? Like that wasn't me. But I'm observing it right, And there's a few things that are foreshadowing. Like I my both my brothers at one time another lived in Manhattan, and so I would visit New York frequently, Yeah, a couple once or twice a year, and I would come, I would land, I would have a great time.

I'd be thinking about Holy Cow.

I can't imagine what it'd be like to work in New York City with just think about all the pipes under the street.

It's crazy. And I would take a tour on the Hudson.

I would see one of the treatment plants is on the Hudson up by Harlem, be like, wow, that's a treatment plant.

It's huge.

And then I would get on a plane and I would fly back to Seattle and go, oh my god, I don't have any problems here.

This is easy. There's there's no comparison.

You know.

And in Seattle I did great and I plateaued at the top of my game.

In the wastewater world.

There would you one of the Killiman Jarro of wastewater Treatments.

Yeah, yeah you.

Are, Yeah, the kill him and Jaro of waste Mount Everest.

Maybe because you know, I used to work in the pall, so that's kind of where I got my appreciation for the value of wastewater. In Peace Corps experience. Actually, children don't make it to their fifth birthdays or their twelfth birthdays often because of the amount of disease that's out there.

They want it to go away and be gone.

And we have the luxury in this country for it to be taken for granted, and it's because we do such a great job.

So by and large, are the systems generally in principle in terms of science and so for that engineering, are they the same in all major cities where what happens to water that goes down a sink, down, a shower, a bathtub, a toilet, It all pretty much just managed the same way.

There's there's a variety of technologies. I mean they're that's a good one.

Uh.

Let me just talk about what happens from the beginning to the end that might be. So let's say you use your toilet. It goes down out of your house and then into a local collection line, so there might be one down your street, and that'll dump into a larger collection system, which is a larger pipe you just called it interceptor, and that eventually will take it to a wastewater treatment plant. And New York City, for example,

So the pumping stations continue to force the material and the liquid and everything whatever's down there down toward.

The train plant. So we at the tream plant.

Moving water is expensive and going by gravity is always cheaper. So where there's a hill, we take advantage of the hill, but at some lower points we always have to elevate it and get it back to gravity, so we can flow it to the treatment plants. Very expensive the pumping system. So when it gets to the treatment plant, the first

All that stuff gets it gets stuck, get stuck.

And if it weren't trapped there, it's actually on the way. It messes up a lot of the pumping systems because we have so much of this material, So we take it out there. We spend about seven million dollars a year just in land filling the trash to people flush. And then it goes to some kind of grit removal to move remove like sand and chunks of rock, and then to a primary sedimentation basin that allow solids, in organic solids for the most part that are suspended to

Via that method, you're bringing things in that it will consume.

It is food, right, And from there it goes to another settling tank where we settle out the biomass that just consumed all this organic matter. But the water that comes out of the final settling tank gets disinfection basically household bleached to take any particular pathogens out, and that gets either discharged to receiving water or in some cases in some cities they're able to polish a little bit more easy for irrigation purposes, especially in the arid Southwest.

And you said, what happens to it here?

What happens to here?

It gets discharged deeply into the surrounding water bodies after getting cleaned up. You might have noticed. And I'm taking credit for this, and all the people who work in the Bureau of Wastewater Treatment can eighteen hundred people. We take credit for the whales coming back because because of the work that they do twenty four to seven and the experience and skill those whales have been able to come back into as.

Ort of is discharged deep into the neighboring waters, it's that clean, very clean. And what about the solids? Where were human waste solids? Where does that salid?

So the solids are basically the bacteria that's settled out as well as the solids we collected in the primary basins, and that gets thickened and then it goes to a anaerobic treatment process.

So if you're in Brooklyn and you.

See those big eggs shaped metal eggs, those are actually digesters and those are heated to ninety eight degrees and within that we're using an anaerobic bacteria, so bacteria that live without oxygen, and they'll digest those solids even more.

And then that is a valuable fertilizer product. So it's a very viable product.

So who sells it?

It's called bioslids.

Now in New York's biosolize. Yes, I'm thinking of like a conveyor belt, like a giant brownie is coming off there. Where does it go?

Every day?

About fourteen hundred wet tons we create of biosolids. Now, it's no only great because it's a great resource that we don't want to waste, but it returns carbon to the soil and you actually can run a wastewater treatment plant at carbon neutral because of all the carbon benefit, we have the sequestration benefit from that bioslids product.

Now, another thing I think that occurs to me is that there's auto mechanics, and there's places where work is being done and chemicals of every fashion are being used to clean parts and cleaning solvents and motor oil just to pick one industry. I'm not even talking about, you know, PCBs up the Hudson from ge and the fifty, that kind of thing going into the Hudson River. I'm talking

So some of those chemicals break down very easily. They're biodegraded quickly within the plant. They respond to the biological conditions within the wastewater plant, and you won't find traces of it in the effluent. Some of them break down into different types of chemicals, pharmaceuticals, right, you'll get you know, people have chemotherapy. You know that waste from their bodies might even end up in the treatm plant system, and you can't get all that no, and so there are microcontaminants.

You know, it's interesting. I'm a strong environmentalist.

I have been my entire life since third grade, as a matter of fact, and I care about trying to do the best we can by nature and get us back to nature the best we can. We live in a world that's got plastics and papers and also so many things. We're really we're really doing a fantastic job

And when I'm.

Safe to say that it's been about environmentalism for you, Yeah, and an environmental environmental work.

I became an environmentalist in third grade and I'm still environmentalist. It kills me now that some environmental groups think I'm a polluter. I'm a very practical environmentalist. We've we're spending public money. We've got to be good to the dollar and make sure that we're doing the most effective way. There's not an unlimited amount of money.

What would you say, what's the Mercedes Benz, what's the Rolls Royce of? For lack of a better way of putting of wastewater management around the world? Who has a Mercedes over us?

So let me Wastewater treatment, like many things, is an evolution, right. The Cadillac version depends on the situation you're in now. Back when everybody were farmers and people did not live in concentrated cities, it didn't matter that people pooped in

And so that's now the standard to United States.

Some places are treating to the extent where they can drink it directly. And then is Singapore, and they what they do is they do everything it just described, add additional filtration and then a reverse osmosis, which is very very fine filtration to create drinkable water. The city has strict difficult a lot of difficulties, strict limitations on the amount of water that can come to their city freshwater, so they create water.

Yeah, but you started your education in nineteen seventy nine. Not a lot of women were doing this kind of work, were they.

I think I was like the first quote wave of women in engineering, which the wave has never grown.

I think it's kind of fat.

You know.

My high school advisor, who was advising about college, told me I can't be an engineer because that was a man's job. Flat out told me that. And my response was, I'm not going to listen to you. If you told that to one hundred girls, there might be eighty of them who said, oh, okay, no, you know what I'm saying, and that you know.

That's too bad.

You went to college.

I went to college, my undergraduate Northwestern University, got a chemical engineering degree back in nineteen eighty three. You're in the technology building, the engineering building. You can't find a woman's bathroom. You got to go to where the secretaries.

That you know it was. It was frustrating.

You know, the forms all started out mister period than blank. It wasn't like you get to choose. I'm like, come on, you can update this stuff. They're like, oh, we don't want to waste paper. I don't care, you know, so stuff like that. It wold and some of the older professors are just their minds were blown. But you know, I just had the calling and I what I did, I think was imprinted in third grade.

To be honest, what was it about it.

That intrigued you? Just the problem solving them?

No, in third grade, I had a student teacher, you know, probably I was probably eight, so this person was twenty twenty two, taught us about environmental science.

Changed my life that day forward.

I said, I want to learn this, I want to know about I want to fight polluters. I want to make the world a clean, healthy place. That commercial with the people throwing trash on the ground and there's a Native American person standing here.

I mean, that was what I was all about.

Well, that's the difference in New York to me now. I mean I got my first home here in nineteen seventy nine, and in the years that I've lived in New York, New York is a lot dirtier, and New Yorkers are a lot dirtier. How does New York strike you when you got here and you saw the amount of stuff going into those screens compared to Seattle.

I've noticed things like there's a trash can sitting on the corner. Somebody walks by throws their plastic bottle on the street. I don't get that. I do notice too. I have a dog. I pick up my dog poop. I put it in a plastic A lot of people don't do that, right.

I want to do a video for you. I want to do a video for the Department of Sanitation Wastewater Management. Alec wants you to know when you flush the toilet, let's keep the diapers, coloss of your read and the condoms. Let's okay, let's be an equal opportunity. Fingerpoint to hear. It's the tampoons in the cons.

They don't break down.

Poop, pee, puke, toilet paper, four piece that's all we want to see.

What's hi. I'm Alec Baldwin here with the four reminding you of the four p poop, pee, puke and paper.

I think the more people know what happens after they flush, the more people are gonna respect what they put down their toilet and the more the less they're gonna want to litter. And that's why I really appreciate talking with you, and I'm so glad you have this interest. It's just over the top interesting. You're taking pool water and making it clean.

New York City's Deputy Commissioner for Wastewater Management, Pam Alardo, a woman so passionate about her job that we had to interrupt the interview.

I'm hitting the table.

Don't mash your hands in the table. I think it even says here that you are from an Italian Catholic factory town. Are you an Italian Catholic? Yes, absolutely right, Well, then sub pounding on the table and the Italian Catholics too, you can help it. Waste management, with all its implications for our health and the health of the planet, is still about politics. Like everything else. We can't fix the problem if we don't elect leaders who devote their resources

I joined the administration around was thirty seven. I'm about to turn forty three.

Okay, But Gonan got a very early start. As a kid, he cleaned houses and babysit to help his mom out with the bills. One day, he ended up in the house of one of the pioneers of the sustainability movement, architect Paul Mocked.

I met Paul Mocked when I was in seventh grade. Probably the most important thing that happened to me in my will tell me about this. I grew up with a single mom, lower middle class neighborhood in Philly, got a sports scholarship, financial light opportunity to go to a great private school called Germantown Academy. But needed to get a job because I needed to earn someone for my tuition, and started working for Paul and his wife.

This is the late eighties.

Early nineties, and I was doing everything from babysitting to housework. But he would talk to me about what he was doing over dinner. He gave me a book called Cradle to Cradle, the first book around circular economy. He would talk to me about these issues. I was really I was blessed to be around someone like that. So oftentimes people will come to me and say how do you start these ventures and say, I've been thinking about this stuff for twenty twenty five years.

And the first recycling company was what.

A friend from high school approached me with a concept of could we pay people for recycling? And that's what I ultimately became Recycle Bank. I ended up building the business model and developing the software for my first recycling company.

I'm a recycling I'm not going to say nut but I take it very seriously. And even if recycling it's just an exercise, people want to believe they can participate to make things better. I'm like, don't discourage that, but is it just an exercise or it's not.

As far as you're concerned, it's absolutely not just an exercise. Recycling has tremendous environmental value in terms of resource protection. It also has tremendous economic value to you as a taxpayer, and that's part of the message that oftentimes doesn't get out. So I appreciate that you have great spirit behind recycling. You should keep that, but also feel good about the fact that you're doing something really important for the environment and something really important for your city.

When those bags of recyclables hit the street, where do they go?

All of the metal, plastic, and glass goes to a recycling facility in Brooklyn called SIMS Metal Management. They actually have a phenomenal education program there, so I highly recommend folks to go to see the SIMS facility. And they

The box that it comes in was your New York Times. Could be was you were a New Yorker magazine a couple a couple months ago, could be that's amazing.

Could BET's let's break it down to brass economics. If you threw that paper in the garbage, the city would be paying one hundred dollars a ton to export it to a landfill. If you put it in your recycling bin, the city will get paid a minimum of ten dollars a ton, So there's one hundred and ten dollars swing there. Then it will go over to a New York City business and employees. People in New York City turn it into a pizza box.

What's the stuff the city collects and what don't they collect? What are some of the biggest misconceptions.

So for recycling, the city collects dry paper and cardboard, aluminum and metal, all glass, an all rigid plastic like a Fiji bottle, exactly, So any plastic that's rigid goes into the city's recycling program. A plastic a plastic that's flexible like a bag or plastic wrapping, does not.

You mean, so like a cup from Starbucks can go in there.

A paper cup from Starbucks can go in there.

There's not a plastic cup.

No, a plastic cup can because a plastic cups has.

Rigidity too, correct, So any formed plastic like cups so forth, the city will take that exactly well, and the city exempts those businesses from doing their recycling themselves. Well, Starbucks is not obligated to recycle.

So the city currently collects all residential recycling, so they collect from every home in the city, not the businesses.

Not the businesses.

The businesses are responsible to contract for their own waste and recycling collection independently.

Does Starbucks recycle.

They that's a so so right, So they're not obligated to. They technically are obligated. What the city is working on is a better enforcement system to make sure that everyone actually is recycling. One of the challenges in New York City sometimes you have so many businesses, the enforcement cost of checking on every business is very expensive.

Starbucks could be doing a better job.

We're the recycling bins on the street, I don't see very I've seen some of them by Washington Square Park.

Work live, especially in Manhattan. If you just look around, you'll see there the metallic looking bins with a green top and a blue top, and the blue top is for your metal, glass and plastic, and the green top is for your paper.

Talk to me about a timeline to your knowledge about this movement over the last fifty years or forty years, I mean, before you got started with Bloomberg, What was recycling? What was the dawn of recycling in this country? And is there somebody who's the mother or father of that to your knowledge?

Sure, it's a good question.

So up until the early nineteen hundreds, Americans didn't waste things because there wasn't that much packaging recycling really became necessary when a lot of packaging came along. Now, up until the nineteen thirties and forties, in New York City, Department of Sanitation legally collected everything, including all of our bodily waste and whatever waste there was, and just dumped it in the East River. At the Department Sanitation, we literally have pictures of our trucks lined up on the

This part of the war, effort exactly waste exactly.

Post World War Two, you actually saw a major divergence between what was what York was doing where they were very poor in the fifties, sixties and seventies, They were rebuilding their economies and countries and they had very little land, so recycling was critical to their economy to what you saw in America in the fifties and sixties and seventies, which is people moved out to the suburbs, there was no collection infrastructure, the concept of more and more and

We're taking a break. Stay with us now. When you started with Bloomberg, which was in twenty twelve, I believe he had been in office for how long by then he'd been nine years? He was there already there for quite a while. And give some insight into what made him want to hire a recycling czar, What did he see and what pressures you think were brought on him to take this to another level.

He had a deputy mayor named Cass Holloway, who, when he came in too be deputy mayor, looked around and said, New York City taxpayer spent four hundred million dollars a year exporting waste to out of state landfills. We have recycling companies in New York City that will pay the city for that material. What is going on here? I want to get someone in here who can fix this system.

Turn it into a business exactly.

And that's what I was brought in to do.

Why do you think Bloomberg chose you.

People associate me with being very left progressive but had some successes as an entrepreneur, and the waste guys were comfortable with me. So I sort of fit everybody's everybody's criteria.

And how did you start?

Infrastructure and communication? So in infrastructure, we started rolling out containers all over the streets to make sure that there's infrastructure collect material. But people would also see recycling bins. We made sure that all rigid plastics could be accepted, so people didn't have to worry about can I put this in? Connect put that in? That was the first

Is it safe to say, therefore, that you would discourage people from putting their compostables in their organics into the garbage disposal.

That's not bad. That's actually much much better than putting in the garbage. But there's something even better that we could be doing, which is collecting the food waste separately and turning it into clean natural gas locally, which the city started doing on the Bloomberg is now expanding.

Describe how that happened. You take that, you collect that bround bin and it goes where.

There's a process called anaerobic digestion. Anaerobic digestion converts food waste into gas. If MIMX goes into yours, where there's one anaerobic digester right now in the city, which is at the wastewater treatment facility out in Green Point, all the food waste goes there and it gets put through the anaerobic digester.

The gas is generated and right.

Now it's pumped right into the grid. Ten twenty years from now, people are going to look back and scratch their head and say, let me get this straight. New York City was spending two hundred million dollars a year to pay to export food waste to out of state landfills. That can't be possible because what we do with it today is we use it to generate fuel for our city vehicles and gas for our homes.

That's what they do. What were people thinking, is that where they do?

Yeah, well, today it's generating gas that's going into the grid. I'll give you a forecast. Ten years from now, New York City will be picking up food wasts, driving it to the anaerobic digester, dumping it going ten feet away, and refilling their gas tank from the gas that was generating from the food waste that they dropped off the day before.

You think it'll become a break even proposition or better or you always be losing money on that.

Probably you'll always be making The city will be making hundreds of millions of dollars off of it, because right now the city is spending two hundred million dollars a year to export.

It to land stuff just doing the organics exactly.

So if you don't make any money on the process, you don't make any money on the sale of the gas, you've saved yourself two hundred million dollars.

Now, when you have ten thousand restaurants or whatever it is, you're always hearing different figures twelve thousand and fifteen thousand. I don't even know anymore. What do you need to do to get them to comply? How do you do it? Is it a law you make? I'm sure they're going to fight like hell against that, aren't that? There's no law now that for there's a law that forced them to separate their organics.

That the Bloomberg administration passed legislation that the Blas administration is now continuing that by certain years, all food service generators in New York City, by law, are banned from sending that food waste to landfill. This year it came into practice with all large food service generators that the stadiums,

So has it been It's been successful. It's been successful.

What do you think we're not doing that. We should do what's the next level for recycling.

Great news about recycling is the money is there because we're already spending it sticking the stuff in a hole. So there's a lot of opportunity the Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Ohio. But there's a senator, Senator Casey in Pennsylvania that he's trying desperately to get legislation passed to enable Pennsylvania to stop the importation of garbage. He

Want your garbage.

Does the city have a plan for that?

No, the only plan for that is recycle. Right, eighty percent of what's in the New York City waste stream can be recycled. Anybody who talks about recycling doesn't work. We shouldn't be recycling. They're living in an alternate universe.

So why are they saying that? You think obviously there's a business interest involved. What business interests are they representing?

What they say that, there's a few interests.

There's the landfill business, interest, Right, there's the interest of the companies that export this out of the city, and then you've got some political interests of folks that like to pupoo anything to do with the environment. But they're all living in an alternate universe because if you don't recycle where you plan and to put the stuff.

How has Deblasio done in terms of upholding this process that Bloomberg installed.

He's done a good job that most of the credit goes to the sanitation commissioner, Commissioner Garcia. She was the chief operating officer of Deep under Bloomberg, and Deblasio, to his credit, brought her over to become the sanitation commissioner, and she's done a fantastic job continuing the programs or developed on the bloomberginistration and implementing her own programs.

Someone told me that dumpster divers as people call them, people who are going into the waste stream and taking out recyclables for their own use to claim the money, is hurting the city's program. Correct. Correct, The city's relying on that stuff being available to them to monetize this whole thing.

Correct.

That's one of the cure things about people saying that recycling doesn't work. In fact, the city Sanitation department has fifty sanitation police scouring the city trying to stop people from you stealing recycles.

People are opening garbage bags in front of my apartment on those nights that stuffs put up there Monday night or whatever it is.

One caveat to that is that it's actually not waste pickers anymore or homeless people going around. That's what it still appears to be, but in fact it's organized. So if you were to follow those guys for a couple of blocks, you'll see that they end up at a very large truck with.

About there had a union, they got a union.

Now they're coming in from Jersey, they're coming in from Westchester, and they fan people out. They go cut bags, take the material, put it in their trucks, and they drive it out of the city and sell it. And that's a major problem for the City of New York for two reasons. One is that's revenue that's supposed.

To go to the city.

Number one relying on that, yeah.

Number two is it impacts our ability to do reporting and understand how successful the program is because the numbers end up going down and then people will say, oh, see, recycling's not working in Park Slope or the Upper west Side. The numbers are low. It's like, no, no, actually it's working incredibly well.

Someone's stealing all the procts know to go there right now? Do you believe if they if everything went went I mean, I mean, I know this is a fantasy, but let's play it out anyway, and that is that restaurants and delis markets, Starbucks type of takeout places and everything where there's a big, big flow of recyclable heart plastics and

The city could absolutely handle that flow. Under the Bloomberg administration, a lot of money was invested in the infrastructure around recycling. All that being said, the most important thing today is what you're referring to, which is people need to get the message that when you throw paper, metal, gloss and plastic in the garbage, which that costs the city money. And I'm not interested in subsidizing your laziness.

You you don't want to put it in the.

Recycling but no problem, but you got to You got to pay the tab Number one. Number two is if you see somebody just throw something on the street, you got.

To say something. Uh.

And that's that's a really critical part of actually making this better is there's a lot of more money that needs to be spent, there's a lot of innovation that needs to come into place, but the messaging also needs to change, and the expectation of people needs to change.

Give me an example of some city around the world where how they're handling their recyclables is commendable.

Almost any German or Scandinavian city, And what are they doing that we're not doing?

Everybody recycles.

I was meeting with a government official in the Netherlands and I said to him, how much do you find somebody when they put something in the recycling bin that shouldn't be put in there? They put something in the garbage that's recyclable, so we have no fines, So well, what do you do when they don't do it correctly?

Why wouldn't they do it correctly?

And that's how culturally different we are, is there to your point? There's that expectation around civics that if you've been asked to do something for the betterment of your community society, you do it. So if you look at communities in Scandinavia, they're doing a great job. In the United States, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco doing a pretty good job. New York City and a lot of neighborhoods doing a great job actually, and a lot of neighborhoods in New York City.

What's one thing we're doing, just pick one for the time being. What's one thing we're doing here across the country that you'd love to see us stop? First stop doing.

What allowing companies to manufacture products or packaging that is not recycled, for example, styrofoam good call. Part of the communication that needs to come out around this is those styrophone beads are terrible for the environment. You know what else are teleb before you? As a tax bank, Why can't we ask all that? New York City we did that under the Bloomberg administration. The industry sued, the city countersued. But the city has been trying for a really long time to ban.

Styrifise cities at garverrit of plastic Bags.

Gyriodp plast Bags, And my point of all this has always been it's absolutely bad for the environment, but we need to make sure that people clearly understand the economic argument. Let's take blocks and bags for an example. New York City this year will spend twelve million dollars of tax payer money landfilling plastic bags.

So if you're the plastic they can't be recycled, can't be recycled.

They're trying to recycle only if they're absolutely clean and priesteam.

You can't steam clean them, you can't put them through the hot.

Too expensive to expensive.

But the point that should be made to the plastic bag industry is, hey, we don't need to ban these. You can design, manufacture, sell whatever you want, but if it's not recyclable, we're not interested in picking up the

So close loop partners, you're a fund that you're helping to manage. Are they looking for technology to invest in to kind of replace styrofoam? Are you looking for people that are going to make the next level of packaging?

All the time, we scour the country and scour the world for innovative new materials, innovative technologies. We just invested in a company called amp Robotics. It's the first artificial intelligence and robotics company and the recycling industry, We've invested in a lot of super innovative technologies as well as just large facilities to recycle material. So we're always looking for innovation and investments.

Well, I want to wish you the best of luck with that, because that's something that everybody's counting on. I mean, they really are. I just feel like so a lot of people are sitting home thinking what can I do? What can I do? When we want to say to people, just recycle aggressively, don't give up, keep keep doing that,

That would be great.

You want to get into business with me, If you want to get into the recycling business, it would be great to have you.

I'll leave it to the professionals, but I'm glad there are people like Ron and Pam Alardo in New York City making a difference one flush and bottle at a time. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio.