Voyage of the Gross

Even though every other option is better most of New York's trash still goes into a hole in the ground

- By Justin Davidson

After the meal comes the ritual cleansing. 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. 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. When the stew starts to smell, I tie up the bag and drop it down the building’s chute into oblivion.

Except it’s not oblivion at all. 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. It’s taken care of: That is all ye know and all ye need to know. Throwing out is an act of forgetting, and urban bureaucracies have tried to make that progressively easier to do. In 19th-century cities, when waste disposal was not yet a public responsibility, garbage piled up outside the window or in empty lots. It wound up in pigs’ slop or flowed along the street, joining a mighty ooze. 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, resurfacing as a floating mire. Only relatively recently did refuse start performing its daily disappearing act—swept up, bagged, and carted away to … somewhere, usually a big open field hundreds of miles away.