Urban waste managment in NYC Flashcards
Who runs the waste management in NYC?
The New York City Department of Sanitation (DSNY)
How much waste do the DSNY collect a day?
11,000 tonnes a day
Staten Island composting
-New York City first began composting in the borough of Staten Island in 2012
-By 2017, the program had expanded to include 300,000 households
-In 2019, the city collected 50,000 tons of compostables from curbside services
What happened to composting because of the COVID-19 pandemic?
-In 2020, citing budget cuts related to COVID-19, New York suspended its curbside composting and organic recycling for schools.
-Through the effort of community campaign “save our compost”, enough funds were retained in the city budget to allow four community scale compositing sites to remain open
What did the city stop doing in the 1930s?
-In the 1930s, the city ended the practice of ocean dumping of trash, instead incinerating trash at 11 municipal incinerators and dumping the resulting ash in landfills scattered across the five boroughs
Staten Island’s Fresh Kills landfill
-At the height of its use, was the largest dump in the world, sprawling across 2,200 acres, Fresh kills first opened in 1948, and closed in 2001
-The last municipal incinerator closed in 1990 and last municipal landfill closed in 2001, all of the trash is now exported to landfills and incinerators far outside the city.
How much waste did DSNY dispose of in 2017 far outside the city?
-3.2 million tons
Sewage in NYC
-NYCs sewage system carries more than 1,000 tons of solids per day to 17 wastewater treatment plants
-majority of liquid waste is extracted, treated and discharged into the waterways
-remaining sewage sludge is carried on a ship to Wards Island Water Pollution Control Plant on Randalls Island
How many tons of greenhouse gases are emitted by the city’s trash each year
-1.7 million tons according to a report from the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability in 2017
When was recycling made mandatory in NYC?
-Recycling began in NYC as a voluntary program in 1986
-In July 1989, with the passage of local law 19, recycling became mandatory.
Impact of September 11, 2001 tragedy on recycling
-Recycling programme experienced funding cutbacks between July 2002 and April 2004, collection of certain materials was temporarily suspended and collection was reduced to alternate weeks
Impact of COVID on plastic recycling
-Plastic recycling declined to 5% in 2021 vs 9.5% in 2014
How much waste is produced from the city a day?
-Over 800,000 buildings produce 24 million pounds of waste a day
-commercial buisnesses produce 20 million pounds daily
Impact of attitudes on waste
-People in HICs like USA have a ‘throwaway’ culture, wear clothes a few times and throw away, generates high levels of complex waste streams, which most cannot be recycled
-High levels of food waste due to people throwing out food near to or just past best by dates
Steel recycling fact
-If NYC recycled all of the steel they could build 9 new statues of liberty a week
