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