Our Local Correspondents – Trash, Trash Revolution

What would it take to really clean up New York City?

- By Eric Lach

Every night, black plastic garbage bags appear on the streets of New York City, like blackheads on a teenager’s nose. A little more than a third of each bag is food scraps: vegetable peels, moldy berries, unwanted tuna salad—organic matter that, in another city, might have been composted. About a sixth is material that should have been recycled: junk mail, plastic water bottles. The rest is what the Department of Sanitation calls “refuse.” This is the actual trash. Broken phone chargers. Cat litter. Expired pills. Nail clippings.

Two or three times a week, depending on the neighborhood, large white collection trucks make their rounds, each operated by two Department of Sanitation workers, who collect the bags. In the summer, the bags reek. In the winter, they’re frozen solid. When lifted, they often leak a dark, viscous juice whose smell can linger for days. Sanitation workers quickly learn that the liquid can be a distraction from other dangers in the bags. Wire hangers. Chicken bones. Things that puncture not just plastic bags but human skin and flesh.

Many bags can be carried in one hand, but outside large apartment buildings superintendents put out “sausage bags,” long, unwieldy monstrosities that typically require two sanitation workers to toss into the hopper, the open mouth at the rear of a collection truck. With the pull of a lever, a worker activates the hopper’s powerful hydraulic jaw, which chomps down on the trash and compacts it. Workers stand away from the truck while this is happening, as liquid and small metal objects sometimes fly out at high speeds.