(This is not just a local problem: A decade ago, the National Resources Defense Council estimated that Americans were sending 40 percent of the food they bought straight to landfill.) Combustion facilities, known as waste-to-energy plants by their owners and incinerators by their neighbors, operate at capacity, and building more is about as popular as opening a fresh nuclear reactor down the street.īecause I live in Manhattan, my bag will likely meet a fiery, comparatively harmless, and useful though unpopular end, producing a glimmer of electricity. About 65 percent of everything city workers pick up goes into a hole, and for commercial waste the proportion is probably higher. In 2016, the Department of Sanitation announced a goal to send zero waste to landfills by 2030, but so far that looks like wishful thinking. But they are infinitely preferable to landfills, which remain noxious even after they’ve been closed - and most of ours are approaching that moment. Combustion, recycling, and composting all have their drawbacks. In an ideal system, those proportions would be reversed. But ignorance is a luxury New Yorkers can no longer afford.ĭepending on where household trash starts its final journey, it might follow one of a skein of paths: A little gets composted, a bit more gets recycled, some is burned, and the vast majority is dumped in the ground. The question of where garbage goes is one politicians don’t like to think about any more than the rest of us do. (San Francisco claims to recycle more than 80 percent of its waste, though some New York experts complain that the city is pumping the numbers.) The result of this slow-moving, multipronged crisis is a closing window to solve it. Only 17 percent of the city’s trash tonnage gets recycled, and just 1.4 percent winds up in compost. Today, while many urbanites agree that composting and recycling are fine things, most of us don’t actually contribute much to either. Only relatively recently did refuse start performing its daily disappearing act, swept up, bagged, chewed up, and carted away to … somewhere, usually a big open field hundreds of miles away. Even after New York began deploying an army of street cleaners and garbage collectors in the 1890s, the stuff poured onto the shoreline or got dumped in the rivers to resurface as a floating mire. It wound up in pigs’ slop or flowed along the street, joining a mighty ooze. Garbage piled up outside the window or in empty lots. In 19th-century cities, when waste disposal was a private matter and not yet a public responsibility, households lived close to their own putrescence. Throwing out is an act of forgetting, and modern urban bureaucracies have tried to make that progressively easier to do. It’s taken care of: That is all ye know and all ye need to know. What happens to the several daily pounds of garbage we each produce - where it goes after it exits our homes and gets tossed into the jaws of a sanitation truck - is a topic most of us would like to avoid. When the stew starts to smell, I tie up the bag and drop it down the building’s chute into oblivion.Įxcept it’s not oblivion at all. These new arrivals cover a fistful of worn-out pens, a tube of dried-up glue, a glob of ancient salad dressing, and a layer of coffee grounds. Bones and fat and stray clumps of spinach slide from my plate into the bin beneath the sink, landing on a length of plastic film still clinging to a supermarket foam tray. After the meal comes the ritual cleansing.
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