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Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
You and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and it's just the three of us, Oscar the Grouch in it here on Stuff you Should Know.
Yeah, I think this I think there may be one more in this sort of semi suite that we've been tackling over the years, which is to say, the the operations of New York City.
It's fascinating stuff.
I love it because every time I'm there, I'm like, yeah, how do they deal with all this trash and deliver all that mail? So if mail is interesting enough, well, I'm gonna do a little research and see if New York City mail is worth its own deal.
Okay, we did one on the USPS before.
Oh, sure, that was as done stuff on landfills and all kinds of things. But New York City is very specific to its own self.
Yeah, as they say, living it up between the Moon and New York City. I can't remember the rest living it up.
Yeah, and then he says, no, I like, it's if you get caught, But I like, I like.
Living it up better too. All Right, so we're talking New York City trash, Chuck. I didn't ever really give much thought to it. I've been in New York plenty of times and have been like, wow, there's a lot of trash everywhere all the time, some of it in bags, some of it on the street, some of it in overflowing trash containers. But it turns out that it is an enormous issue and has been an ongoing and very
long standing issue in New York. And they now have a mayor and a sanitation commissioner who's like, enough, it's done. We're cleaning the city up once and for all. And what's yeah, Eric Adams, he's got a whole like, his whole campaign is called get Stuff Done, and the the trash branch of that is get Stuff Clean. And just Katish, the new garbage commissioner is from one of the wealthiest
families in America, possibly the world. Oh wow, who's decided to dedicate her career to civil service, specifically in New York. So she's worked in a few agencies and now she's the head of the Sanitation Department the dsn Y and is basically just like steamrolling through with new changes and just being like, oh, I don't care. That's the way you used to do it. Apparently it's wrong because it didn't get it done. We're doing it this way now.
So they're actually making huge enormous changes by leaps and bounds that seem like they actually possibly could clean New York up in the next couple of years.
Do you know what how the Tish family, what their deal.
Is, what the what their deal is like, how they communicate Thanksgiving?
Well name, he said, one of the wealthiest families in the world.
I was kind of curious, Oh, I get what you mean.
So what from or whatever?
Her father is the CEO of like the Loew's theaters, the Loewe's hotels. Apparently they own a distilling brand like the parent companies, the CEO of the parent company. But I have a feeling like her family is like legacy wealthy. That's my impression.
Yeah, New York NYU has the Tish School of Arts, but I'm sure it's the same family.
Yes it is. As a matter of fact, there's a really interesting profile on her and the New York Sanitation Department in the New Yorker of all places, and they rattled off like three different things that are named after her family. So, yes, they've been around for a while. But apparently it's pretty cool. She's like, I'm incredibly wealthy, but I'm going to go, you know, work my way up in New York bureaucracy.
You know, it's really pretty incredible. So should we go back in time.
Yeah, let's yeah.
We've talked before about what old New York was like, and when you see movies about old New York, they you know, they might grunge it up a little bit, like Scorsese's Gangs of New York probably did one of the closest, truest depictions of early New York and just kind of how disgusting it could be. And we've talked about the amounts of manure from horses on the sides of the street, but it was really really gross. New
York was a disgusting place back in the day. They did have a law, and this show's kind of got it, has kind of got it all. It's got like amazing facts of the episode. Right off the bat. We have a great album title, which was this law from the sixteen fifties that banned tubs of odor and nastiness. If that's not like a stooge's album title or something, I
don't know what is, but it was gross. I think the first fact of the podcast for me is that about twenty percent of Manhattan, or really the whole metro area is built on land that didn't used to be there. It's literally land that came from garbage, bill from construction debris, dirt from the subway project. Like Lower Manhattan in particular, just kept growing and expanding in size. And here's another fun fact on that Ellis Island is twenty eight acres
now it started out as three acres. Oh wow, It's was literally built from I guess just waste.
Yeah, because I mean, if you think about it, if you just go dump one load off of an island, you you've just littered. But if you keep doing it, you're developing the land.
It becomes art.
Yeah, it's got to stick with it, and eventually it becomes an okay thing. Right.
Yeah, It's really pretty incredible to think about that when there are overlays that show, like, you know, how Manhattan, Lower Manhattan grew just from dumping stone.
Oh yeah, oh, but there's pretty cool maps like that. I love that kind of stuff too, Like I love walk looking around and being like, what was this building originally? You know what used to be here? I asked that out loud.
Sometimes, right, just the building never answers that.
No. So this is not the first time, under Eric Adams and Jessica Tish that a New York administrator has tried to clean the city up. Plenty have tried, but the last truly successful one was in the century before last a Civil War. I think colonel a Union colonel named George Waring who became the head of the Department of Street Cleaning, which is what the sanitation department was called back then, and he cleaned up the city starting around eighteen ninety five. But he was not the first
head of the Department of Street Cleaning. That department was almost twenty years old by the time he came along. But it had just basically been a place where Tammany Hall and the political machine gave jobs to supporters, political supporters, and it was like, you don't need to show up to work, You're still going to get a paycheck kind of thing.
Yeah. I mean, they either did that or they outright just stole money that was allocated for those cleaning up projects to begin with. I saw a name back then in the eighteen hundreds that the sledge of just manure and garbage and cess sess a thing.
I guess cess is the best.
Pol I know it says pools that they is sess the thing in the pool.
I would think so, all right, anyway.
They called the sledge that lined the streets corporate pudding no gross, because I guess it was just you know, it wasn't getting cleaned up because all that money, like I said, was either stolen or reallocated and to cronies. There's someone named Robin Nagel who's an NYU professor who it's an unpaid position but has basically worked as the unsanctioned unsalary anthropologists from for the Sanitation Department of New York and just has an incredible amount of knowledge about the stuff.
Yeah, we've talked about Robin Nagel before, and George Waring and the changes he made so supposedly you can look at Harper's Magazine between eighteen ninety three and eighteen ninety five, and it's like it's like George Waring came along and waived a magic wand like the difference is so distinct. Like he created kind of like a military type institution hierarchy. He outfitted as people with white outfits designed by John Paul Gautier and pith helmets, and they went around and
they cleaned up New York. And apparently they throw parades for him once in a while because they were just so successful and loved and revered because they did such a good job. But you can see the difference between these photos and Harper's Weekly that Robin Nagel had. And I think we talked about all this in the Typhoid Mary episode. I think it was in the beginning.
Of that one, that makes sense.
I'm pretty sure that's where it was.
Yeah, I imagine George Wern came in on day one. It was like, for starters, how about you get that dead hog off the side of the road.
Somebody's like, she did it.
He was famous, by the way for designing the Memphis sewage system after the Civil War. Before New York. They're like, hey, he did such a good job, you know, working out the or sewage. I guess in Memphis. Come on to New York because we have sewage in the streets.
Nice. He worked his way up. Yeah, if you could make it in New York sanitation, you can make it anywhere with sanitation, believe me.
So as things were going, they had landfills that came along, obviously, but a lot of the trash was handled by incinerators. Still is just great controversy, as we'll get to later, but a lot of these smaller apartment buildings had their own incinerators. They would just burn their trash. The city was like, this is an air quality nightmare, imagine, So let's ban these things. And I thought it said eighteen eighty nine, but they were banned finally in nineteen eighty nine.
Yeah, that tracks. I mean, it wasn't until the nineties that New York really started to kind of turn around some.
No, that's true.
So one of the other things they did, aside from banning individual buildings having incinerators, which just seems like madness
in retrospect, you know what I mean, kind of does. Yeah, they also started slowly shutting down the landfills that were within the city limits, and finally the last one, Fresh Kills on Staten Island, was famously shut down in two thousand and one, and the one of the reasons it became famous is it was the landfill that accepted a lot of the waste from the Twin Towers after the
World Trade Center attacks, and that was it. It's kind of like kind of fitting, you know what I mean, in a really weird, bittersweet, poetic way.
Yeah, like a turning of the page, I guess.
So, yeah, but that was it. So the thing is is New York still has tons of trash that they accumulate every day. I mean, just as we'll see a mind boggling amount of trash is generated by New York every day and they have trouble getting it off the street. But then also they're starting to find like we are having problems identifying where to send this trash.
Yeah, for sure. So getting back to wearing, back then, he was like, all right, we gotta we got to figure out a way to get this trash. Like people just throw it in the street, and Wearing is like that that's not a good system. I don't know if anyone's noticed, but just throwing your trash out of your literally out of your windows sometimes of your apartment isn't the way to go about things if we want to live a healthy life as a city. And so so
why don't we get trash cans? You mentioned Oscar the Grouch. They were just sort of the standard metal Oscar the Grouch cans for a long long time until nineteen sixty eight when there was a sanitation strike that was only nine days long. But it doesn't take long for a sanitation strike to really I guess, get a little steam not New York, a little steam going, because there were one hundred thousand tons of garbage on the city streets by the end of that nine days, and it was
just a mess. So they said, all right, how about this. These trash cans were working for a long time, but you're just dumping your trash right in these cans. Why don't you put it in trash bags inside the can, And very sweetly, they thought that that might help the rat situation, like contain the smell enough where rats wouldn't get to it, which is kind of cooky to think about. Course, rats,
we'll get to trash anywhere. And it was better than you know, lifting up these heavy trash cans, because they could just pick the bags out of the trash cans and throw them in. And then finally, just a few years later in seventy one, they said, let's just get rid of these cans and just put it in bags and put it out on the sidewalk.
Yeah, that's one of the greatest, most important cities in the world. Just leave our trash laying around in bags for hours on end, multiple times a week, every week. Let's do that instead, because you can stick them anywhere. They'll fit anywhere. Yeah, and that's one of the challenges that New York has is it lacks a lot of the alleys and a lot of the little side well alleys I think is good enough to where people in other cities store trash cans and trash bins like seeing people.
So instead they have to use these trash bags and basically tuck them wherever they can kind of out of the way, and very frequently not out of the way. You have to walk around them on the sidewalk pretty often too. So that is that's the state of New York trash collection.
Now.
People leave their trash out and bags on the sidewalk. The sanitation department workers come along and pick up the bags and throw them in the trash manually, throw them in the garbage trucks manually. And this is staggeringly behind the times, Like garbage technology has advanced by leaps and bounds since then, in New York just because of some of its unique characteristics and traits, has had a really hard time implementing them like other cities have.
Yeah. Absolutely, but like you said, there's good news on the horizon. You want to take a break now, yeah, all right, we'll take a break, good little setup, and we'll come back and talk about just how much trash there is right after this. All right, so we promised talk of just how much trash New Yorkers produce. I don't think, like per person, they're creating an exceptional amount
of trash. Not picking on New Yorkers. Sure, there's just a lot of people there, eight hundred thousand, more than eight hundred thousand residential apartment buildings, and they produce about four and a half million tons of just residential trash every year, So twenty four million pounds a day, or about twelve thousand tons per day of just residential people trash from apartments.
Yeah, so every day they generate an equivalent weight of trash to fifty million, five hundred and twenty six thousand, three hundred and sixteen big macs.
I knew something like that was coming.
That's a lot of big max. Imagine all of that being produced every day.
Is that netweight after cooking?
Sorry, that's yes, that's the completed weight. That's what you get when they put it on the tray.
Okay, gotcha.
And what's interesting is eating either one has about the same impact on your health. Uh, that's good, thank you.
It's mourning for us, which is unusual. So I'm a little slower, yeah, and a little little less giving with my laugh count.
As long as I'm getting a little bit of it, A little bit goes a long way.
You've had plenty. You got me right off the bat there with the what was that first.
Joke that really got me the Oscar the grouch one?
No, that was okay though, Oh.
The mistaken living it up in New York City.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that got me going right off the bat. So you would not be surprised to learn, h dear listener that the ds n Y, which is the New York City's sanitation department, is the largest in the country. One reason is obviously because there are so many people in so much trash, but also New York is a little bit unique among large cities and that they are responsible or more trash than other large cities are.
Yeah right, Yeah, a lot of other cities. They still handle some like maybe houses or something on the outskirts of town or in neighborhoods, but you know, the apartment buildings and commercial stuff, all that's handled by private companies. And then in other cities, that's all private companies these days in some cases too, especially suburbs. But yeah, with New York, they're like, nope, we're going to handle it. If you're a resident, we're going to take care of your.
Trash, that's right. And as we'll see they on the private side, they handle the commercial trash that's coming up shortly, but as far as the residential stuff goes, they collect from each residential building two or three times a week. There are fifty nine different districts that cover New York, each having its own garage that house more than two thousand collection trucks over those fifty nine districts.
Yeah, and that's just the collection trucks. They have other kinds of trucks too.
Yeah, I saw that. I was trying to find out about maintenance of these things. But collectively, the just the garbage trucks of New York drive about four and a half million miles a year.
That's crazy.
Yeah, it's a lot of miles.
So yeah, they have all sorts of different trucks. This is where the part of me who was once a little boy who loved looking at picture books of like Caterpillar earth movers and those giant Volvo dump trucks really kind of came back to the surface. But they've got some dual bin models and if you look at them, they basically do what it says on the tin. There's half divided into half for trash and the other half for a recycling so you can pick up both on
the same day at the same time. Yeah, they have top loaders that you know, go up to like a dumpster and just pick it up and shake it like an enemy you might on the street who weighed much less than you, all right, And then they also have just the regular kind that are called the white elephants, and those are just so incredibly massive. Each of the New York City regular single bin garbage trucks can hold twelve tons of waste.
That's incredible.
A full size American standard school bus weighs fourteen tons, so they fit almost a school bus weight of trash in just one single truck at a time.
How many big backs is it?
I didn't do that one.
Okay. This is the other fact of the podcast for me is that every garbage truck in New York has two sets of steering wheels and pedals on both sides, So either person can drive and no matter who's driving, each brake pedal is live. So if someone doesn't see somebody and the person that's not driving see someone, you know, dart in front of the garbage truck, they can hit the brakes as well.
Yep, it's a good idea. They also have street sweepers aka mechanical brooms, and I should say I've seen those are starting to be rolled out in electric versions, but apparently they're trying to slowly electrify their entire fleet. It seems like street sweepers were one of the first to be electrified. Salt spreaders, snowplows, front end loaders, basically everything you could possibly need to clean up and clear trash. The New York City Department of Sanitation has.
It, yeah, for sure. And if you're like, well, why do they have snowplows and all that kind of stuff, is because besides trash and recycling and composting, which there is sort of a newer program, and it came about because it's a big problem. I think about twenty percent of New York City's garbage's food waste. Man, they can really really cut down on that with a good composting system. In the city, but they're working on that. We'll get to that later. But they have to clean vacant lots.
They're the ones who remove the snow. Here's another fun fact. If there's a car on the street that has the license plates torn off of it and someone has just dumped it and it's worth under twelve hundred and fifty dollars, the police say, that's a garbage car. It's not our responsibility, so it's the DSNY has to take care of it.
Yeah. So I looked up a little bit on that and I couldn't find how they make that assessment of how much the thing is.
Worth Kelly Bluebook.
I guess I would think just by virtue of having the license plate removed and it being abandoned on the street would indicate that it was worth less than twelve hundred and fifty dollars.
You know, usually the fifty dollars is what kills me, like that's where they landed instead of just twelve or thirteen hundred. Yeah, hey, I guess it was a formula.
Similarly, they also clean up abandoned bikes that are like chained to public property if the bike can just no longer be ridden because it's so bent or it's missing some essential parts, they will take care of it. They'll clip that chain and throw the whole thing away. But if you have a bike that you want to get rid of, you don't have to abandon it in New York City. You can take the wheels off, put them in with your trash, and then you can put the bike itself out with your recycling.
Oh very nice.
Yeah, I thought so too.
And as if that wasn't enough last year in twenty twenty three, Eric Adams, the mayor, said all right, you also now have to regulate and enforce street vendors. You got to clean up the highways and take care of the graffiti in New York. And I'm sure they were like, great, it's not like we didn't have enough to do already.
Well, what's interesting is that's creating a lot of grumbling because there's a lot of jobs from other agencies that are just being taken.
Oh, I'm sure.
And the justification is like, hey, you're doing other stuff. You have other stuff to focus on, so this part has become kind of low priority. So it makes sense the Department of Sanitation would clean up graffiti. We're cleaning up the whole city. And apparently there was a backlog of one thousand requests for graffiti removal. They cleared eight hundred of them in one month. So they're doing work there.
That's awesome. I mean, I like good graffiti, like graffiti art.
Yes, So if you're a resident of New York, you put in a request for graffiti removal. You can also request that graffiti be left alone. And there's like this whole procedure and process, but they give you like a certain amount of time between the time you say I want this graffiti removed and then the time they come out, I guess, to give you a chance to really think about whether you want it removed or not, and then they'll remove it.
Yeah, Like do you want the vulgar tag just spray painted across the front of a business removed? Or is it art?
Exactly depends on who did it.
I guess. So eight thousand sanitation workers total, two thousand other employees well eight yeah, so I guess that's ten thousands total, but eight thousand actual, you know, sort of. You know, bag slingers and cleaner uppers. They're known as New York's Strong. They are ninety percent mail, right, now, so props to that ninety percent, and really props to that ten percent of these ladies that are getting in there and getting their hands dirty, because it is tough, tough, dangerous work.
Yes. So one of the things, one of the reasons that it's particularly dangerous for sanitation workers in New York is again because they use bags. They're not in cans. If you've not been to New York, just imagine bags of trash just piled everywhere. The problem is when they're grabbing them and throwing them in the truck, they're probably trying to avoid garbage juice, which is a very distracting thing.
It's very gross. It's rarely harmful, but you don't want it on you, but it can distract you from things that can harm you, like some rusty, sharp thing poking out of the bag that you put your hand on. There's a lot of hazards. Sometimes the stuff that's in there could pose a hazard to you in other ways,
like garbage juice. There's an article I found from nineteen ninety six where sanitation worker named Michael Hanley died because some jerk threw hydrofluoric acid away in with the regular garbage and when it was compressed in the hopper, it exploded and Hanley inhaled it and died basically on the spot.
Yeah, I mean that's the thing that happens when that hopper, you know, squishes all that stuff down, there's gonna be stuff that sprays out. They you know, try to get out of the way, but sometimes they can't. And Olivia found this another fun little factoid here that apparently enough of that garbage juice is coffee related that whatever season it is, if it's like pumpkin, spiceason and whatever, the sanitation workers just like it's like, oh God, here comes the pumpkin this you know, this fall.
Yeah, I can imagine that just gets really old, really fast, you imagine, Yeah, because it's the worst version of that coffee. It's not hot and fresh and in the it's cold and runny and mixed with other stuff and leaking out of a garbage bag.
Like hydrofluoric acid.
So there's also it's also just hard, Like a lot of this stuff is very heavy. You can fit a lot of stuff into a trash bag, and apparently residential places with compactors use what are called sausage bags where you can fit multiple compacted rounds of trash into one single bag. You need two people to toss those in, and then the cans. They're also in charge of the cans, right Like I think those little very famous kind of mesh wire New York City trash cans that open like
a door, I think at the base. Yeah, am I making sense here?
Sort of just streak winner trash cans.
Let's just call them that.
Those weigh thirty pounds empty. So I've never seen a New York City trash can that wasn't absolutely overflowing. So that's a lot more weight, and they're doing that by hand. Some of these routes can have as many a four hundred of yay.
So that's so crazy.
I just really really really hard strenuous labor.
You also, so you said that there's never a New York City corner of trash can that is empty. So I found a study from nineteen eighty seven that estimated that a sixty pound can so a trash can with about thirty pounds of waste. You can imagine that's probably pretty average. To lift it the forty inches into the hopper and dump it requires three and a half horse power from the sanitation worker, and then, like you said, there might be four hundred of those on a route.
I just can't imagine how just tired you would be at the end of.
This well and all this stuff you're breathing in too, especially if you're a street sweeper. All kinds of you know, sort of respiratory issues can pop up before COVID, you know, before people are like, hey, maybe we should wear masks and sanitize things. Thousands of New York City workers got sick during the early COVID days. Nine of them died. About one hundred sanitation workers died from illnesses cleaning up
Ground zero. So it is a you know, not only is it a strenuous job and can be dangerous because of you know, sharp and rusty things, but it's just it's just hard on your body period. Right.
Fortunately they have a really good union. They're are members of Teamster's Local eight thirty one, the Uniform Sanitation Men's Association, and thanks to the union, they when you are an entry level sanitation worker, you start out making forty three thousand, three hundred and five dollars a year, not great, which is no especially in New York. It's hard to live on that but if you stick with it for five and a half years, it more than doubles to eighty eighty nine hundred and seventy nine.
That's pretty great.
Yeah, And once you reach that point, there are plenty of New York City sanitation workers that are making one hundred thousand dollars or over from all of the extra pay that can come from bonus work, like they get triple overtime for snow removal and stuff like that. So you can make a pretty good middle class income for New York City as a sanitation worker just from sticking with it for a few years. Plus Also, you can retire in just over twenty years too, with full benefits.
Yeah, I mean that's that's a big deal. You get about eighteen days of vacation. But if you start in your early twenties, you put in your twenty two years. They don't have like an age thing where like you have to work to a certain age. So if you start in your early twenties, you could potentially retire with your full pension in your early to mid forties. And you know, you could do a lot worse than.
That for sure, Yeah, because I mean you just you can be like, well, I want to keep working, but I'll go over here and take this other job, but I'll still get paid for my old job because I retired.
Exactly. You do have to pass a civil service exam. You have to get your CDL, your commercial driver's license. There's about a month of training and then you have to you know, once you get that license. They have a little practice area where they practice, like a little obstacle course basically to you practice driving that garbage truck, because you know, driving the New York is I find it enjoyable and kind of fun and exciting, but driving
a garbage truck, imagine, is tough. There's stuff all over the place and you can't just mad max it through there, you know, No.
You can't because people get killed like that. Because there's a lot of people walking and running and riding bikes around New York that you have to look out for.
Yeah, increasingly distracted people, we should.
Add, right.
Yeah, So we said that they shut down all of the landfills within New York's borders, but that means that they have to ship this trash one way or another outside of New York. Some of it gets diverted to incinerators. They're like we don't want incinerators in New York because it contributes to poor air quality, but we'll pay you
to burn it for us elsewhere. Fortunately, they've now converted some of those incinerators to waste to energy plants, so you're actually getting something out of burning the trash.
As far as these waste of energy plants go. If you're thinking, like, what do you mean they burn trash and get something out of it, it's it basically works just like coal would like any kind of energy creation like that is just burning something to create steam to spend that, you know, to boil water to create steam to spin that turbine. And in this case, they just burn trash instead of coal, right, which you think is like,
oh that's great. You know, we may maybe this should be a whole episode at one point, but there there are a lot of people say like, these are an environmental nightmare. You are creating energy, but you're also creating a landfill in the sky by what you're putting into the air, So we might want to look into that as a full one at some point.
Remember we did our plasma waste generator episode, and that thing was flawless in its design and execution, But I don't think that's what they're using for these waste to energy plants. I don't think so. So some of the garbage just be diverted and incinerated, But from what I understand, the vast majority is sent outside of New York to landfills in places like Virginia or South Carolina or Ohio. And the way that they get there predominantly is by
rail and by barge. And so New York set up five what are called marine transfer stations that are amazing if you look into Did you look into them at all, because they're crazy awesome?
I did, and they are crazy awesome. Yeah, those marine stations. I think they built those that were about a twenty year period starting in the early two thousands. There's five of them. The neighborhoods you know where these were going to be near, were obviously not too excited about them when you know when they were first proposed. But apparently they've done a pretty good job. As far as the
smell goes, They aren't too stinky. I think it's noise more than anything, because you're you constantly just have trucks going in and out of there, right, But they've done a great job with deodorizing and venting this stuff. Even have hawk calls being played on loudspeakers to keep seagulls away because that would be a nightmare. Oh yeah, but apparently they're not as bad as everyone thought they were gonna be.
No plus, Also, the neighborhoods that they're in are like already kind of ports, and there's other industry nearby anyway, And they set up essentially access roads so that when the trucks start backing up, they're not on the street, they're off of the street. And then the whole thing is enclosed, right, So garbage truck goes into the building, sealed shipping container comes out the other side, and inside
the building. Like you said, they've taken all these measures to keep the smell down and just keep it from being gross. But what happens is a garbage truck comes in, backs up to the tipping station, tips its contents all the way down to the next story down. Next story down is just basically like that trash compactor in Star Wars,
the first one. It's essentially like that, but rather than having like that pneumatic arm crush everything, they have front loaders that basically push all the stuff into shipping containers, and a shipping container can hold just over about two full trucks worth of waste I think twenty five tons. They top that thing off, seal it and say here you go, waste management take over from here.
Yeah, and you know you mentioned some of this goes to different states. I saw that almost all of Manhattan's trash goes to New Jersey. Oh nice, sorry, New Jersey, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio is where most of the rest of it goes, as far as landfills go. And then weirdly, Staten Island trash goes to South Carolina.
That is a little weird.
I don't know why, but I guess they just, you know, worked out an exchange program or something.
Yeah, and I guess it's totally up to private companies. Like I said, waste management's a good example of taking possession of the shipping containers, stacking them up on barges. I think you can fit like forty eight full on a barge and taking an on a slow boat to South Carolina, or taking it upriver to Niagara Falls. I think that's where one of the incinerators is. Niagara, New
York yeah. And then also if it's somewhere like Ohio, it's very tough to sail a barge to Ohio, so you just take it to a rail station and the shipping containers get shipped by rail to Ohio where it gets dumped.
All right, maybe all actually right, before we take a break, let's cover this one more thing I think, which is if you've lost something and you want to get it back in the trash, it's probably not going to happen, but it really depends on how good of a looker you are, because what you'll do is is you'll call up You'll say I lost a wedding ring in the garbage. I'm pretty upset about this, and they say, oh great, we have a program called the Lost Valuable Search. Just
come on down to the Marine transfer station. We'll work with you to determine which truck is yours. And then there's a huge pile of trash and you have ninety minutes to go through and find it by yourself, and or I guess, with whatever friends you are able to talk into coming with you.
And people have they found all sorts of stuff.
Sure it happens, Yeah.
It does happen. Apparently, Also there's people who are like, oh, that's what I have to do. Just forget about it. I'm good. Thanks anyway, Yeah, I'll get a new wedding ring. So let's take a break and we'll come back and talk about some of the shady business that goes on in the private industry.
All right, cool, okay, Chuck.
So we said that the city picks up residential trash, but for the most part, commercial trash like stores, office buildings industry that's handled by private companies. And that's not actually new. That goes all the way back to I think the mid to late fifties, nineteen fifty seven, I think when the city was like, hey, we could use some help collecting trash. How about private companies get involved? And the mafia sat up and said, yes, let's do that.
And apparently the Gambino and Genovese crime families were really big into what's called karting. It's private trash collection. Yeah, for decades it was extraordinarily corrupt, and finally in the nineties, New York did something about it, got the crime families out of the karting business. But the companies are like no less shady than they were before, and they're just shady in different ways. Whereas before they were screwing over
the customers, now they're screwing over the workers. Because back then, at least they had they were mob run, but they were in really good unions. And as these private companies came along, they don't have very good unions. So I saw somewhere that a worker at a private company today makes less as a driver for a truck than a helper made in nineteen eighty five. Wow, sixteen dollars an hour. They make less than that nineteen eighty five to twenty sixteen.
Isn't that crazy? Yeah, that's what happens when you have a union that's good, that goes away in favor of union that's bad and that's in cahoots with the ownership, or if there is no union at all, which is in case some true wouldn't.
Tony Soprano win sanitation?
Or didn't he say he was, yes, he was in karting?
Yeah, yeah, I remember that. I also remember when I lived in New Jersey, the Italian. I'm not saying it was a mafia truck because that would be wrong to as but whoever picked up our trash had a big Italian name on the side of the truck. And it was during that time of the Sopranos where I was kind of like, what's going on here?
Oh, you know, what's going on there? But supposedly that was after they cleaned things up, although that was Jersey huh, So yeah, they probably didn't. That was probably mafia run well.
And it was also mid nineties, so I think they were just like, that's when they were cleaning it up.
Gotcha.
So there are about two hundred and fifty private handlers that are now overseen by the Business Integrity Commission, which may as well be called the Don't let the Mafia get Involved Commission And sometimes yeah, except exactly so you mentioned, you know, just bad conditions in some of these private companies, like very long work hours, maybe safety training maybe not,
maybe safety gear maybe not there. If you hear of a story about a pedestrian that's killed in New York by a garbage truck, chances are it's a private company. Not always, but they're much much higher incidents of I didn't say incidences. Somebody called us out on that.
You remember that, Yeah, Yeah, it's what we're really progressing here in year sixteen.
Hey, we're trying to, but many more incidents from the private companies, you know, running over somebody than the DSNY, and largely because of training, but also because they're just they're working too long, they're too tired, and they have too much to do in general.
Yeah, an investigative journalist named Kiara Feldman wrote an article for Pro Public called Trashed, and I don't remember what came after the colon, but it is. It's really eye opening. I mean, even if you don't care about trash collection or New York City, just the fact that people are being treated this way is just nuts. Man. So it's definitely worth a read if this episode piqued your interest at all.
Yeah, there's an African immigrant name uk Diallo. And I don't think we mentioned that some of these private companies will just like, you know, pick up the dude in the parking lot that's looking for day work. So they're not covered at all or insured or anything like that. They'll just like, we'll pay you under the table to like run out in front of the truck and get bags out, you know, to where they can be collected easier. And Muktar was one of these guys, and he was
crushed under a truck. And when it came time to talk about this, the company said this, we do know this guy. He just is a homeless guy that ran out in front of the truck. And of course it later came out what really happened. So in twenty nineteen, a New York passed a law that said, all right, we're dividing this into zones. Now there can be no more than three companies picking up in each zone, just trying to sort of rein in the chaos a little bit.
And you have to if you want to do this, you have to sign a contract that meets certain standards of safety and working conditions. And it's you know, it's kind of being implemented now, so it is still currently changing for the better.
Yeah, and you mentioned all the miles that the DSNY travels just on their routes every year, these commercial haulers might be driving from what you know, one one spot to many many blocks over to the next spot. Yeah, and just wasting so much time and burning so much gas. Whereas if it's like there's only three companies in this one quadrant, they're going to be driving a lot around
a lot less. And they're also going to be burning a lot more, a lot fewer fossil fuels and releasing fewer emissions too, So it's all together a pretty good plan. Of course, the companies are like, can't do that, Like what about competition? But New York's not really listening apparently,
And that's what's happening right now. And that's just part of another again, this larger push for reforming the whole place under Eric Adams and Jessica Tish, and one of the big ones is getting rid of the black bags in favor of container like the same plastic bins that you see in basically every other city in the world in one way, shape or form or another. New York's finally being like, we're going to get in on that.
Are they black backs? I think they were blue?
There's blue too, Okay, yeah, they have all different colors, but there's definitely blue as well.
Yes, okay, how was it? Sure? It's been a while, but I just have a visual in my head of like mountains of blue bags on trash Day. And if you've never been to New York at all, or you haven't been many times, you would probably be shocked to come out on trash Day on a hot summer, rainy trash day, because it's quite a sight and quite a smell. But like you said, they're moving toward bins in just a few months ago. In February of this year, they said, all right, here's our new plan we're going to get.
If you've got a smaller apartment building, you're going to have those little wheelie bins. Like almost every other city in the United States, if you are in a really big apartment building, it's basically a dumpster, but it's plastic, but it's like a large container. You mentioned the fact that there aren't a lot of alleys in New York.
It's kind of a movie trope when you've seen alley scenes set in New York City, probably not being filmed in New York because most of the buildings on a block are just you know, crammed you right next to each other. So these dumpsters have to go somewhere. And they said, all right, we'll make them small enough to
fit in a parking spot. We'll lose one hundred and fifty thousand parking spots all over the city, but we have to do it, and it'll also help us reclaim some of this sidewalk space that we're losing.
Yeah, and apparently parking spots is one of the most politically charged issues in all of New York politics.
I'm sure.
So that's really gutsy to be like one hundred and fifty thousand parking spots are going away so we can put these bins there. And it's not even across the board. There's some blocks I read that are losing a quarter of their parking spots.
Oh, I'm sure.
So it's definitely going to take an adjustment, for sure. But there won't be bags of trash everywhere. They'll just be like different colored bins that are on the street, just off the sidewalk that a truck comes along and picks up. That it doesn't require human hands to throw bag after bag into the truck anymore.
Boy, in New York City, the residents really have to get on board with this to make that work.
Well, they did a pilot study of it in Harlem and this is back in September twenty twenty three, and apparently it was extremely successful. Yeah, rat sightings were down sixty eight percent.
Where did they go?
I don't know. I think they just kind of where they disappear. They go poof into nothingness after they don't eat for two days.
Boy, that means they're organizing. This could get really scary.
But supposedly they the people of Harlem were like, this is this is cool. We can definitely deal with this. So they're rolling it out to the rest of New York.
Yeah.
I think they will see the benefit to where people get on board, because what real would really screw up that system is that truck is going using the mechanics to dump those cans, but then there's four or five bags that wouldn't fit in the can just sitting there. So you're still going to have to have some people down there slinging bags.
Definitely, for sure, but it should.
Speed up the whole thing and clean it up if everyone If everyone chips in.
Yeah, and isn't that what living in New York is all about. Everybody chipping in a little bit.
For sure.
You got anything else?
No, just another mention of composting. They're getting that going I mentioned earlier, still pretty new program. Since twenty percent of that total waste dis food waste. If they really got a pretty efficient composting system going, then it would do a lot to reduce trash and do better things for Mother Earth.
So you did have something else I did. Well, if you want to know more about New York trash collection, go to New York and just walk around and you'll find find out everything you need to know about it. And while you're booking your flight, how about it's time for listener, ma'am.
I'm going to call this what is this? Oh Arson investigation? Hey guys. In twenty nineteen, I moved to Saint Paul with some friends from college. It's really fun. I made many new friends in back. Two of my roommates I had never met. One was a local rapper, the other was a firefighter.
EMT Saint Paul is the arson capital of the country.
Is it really? It wouldn't surprise me. After listening to this story, this guy said it was a glorious era of my life, filled with healing, fun and young adulting. Within a few months, I got a job at a discount movie theater and I was working one day when the theater got a call from our boss and said, Hey, your house is on fire. You should come by. So the firefighters walked me through the burning home. I saw no flaims, but it was smok. I went up to
my room. Nothing was burnt there, which is great, but it did smell like a bondfire for about a year after that. Man, everyone was gone at the time, so nobody was heard about a month later my landlord slash boss, same person, which is why that sounded weird. Earlier I mentioned that there was a big break in the fire investigation, but made me do a little work to figure out
who it was. It turns out the firefighter EMT that I lived with decided he didn't want to live with us anymore, so a week before he moved a couch to the basement and set it on fire and walked away.
Oh my god, with.
I only found out because he admitted it to me. My life went haywire for a while after that, but I'm happy to report that I'm settled in full on adulting with love.
That is.
Teagan Tour is fantastic. Quite a great, great story. Thanks a lot, Tegan, who saw that coming. I did not me that was a twist that you'd find at a discount movie theater.
Right.
Well, if you want to be like Tea in and send us an amazing story about something we talked about, we love that kind of thing. You can send it via email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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