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New York City's trash dilemmas—and
opportunities
27 April 2021, by Russ Kuhner
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the city has seen
increases in household garbage produced by New
Yorkers under lockdown. Meanwhile, a pandemic-
related city-budget shortfall resulted in a $106
million cut in the Department of Sanitation's budget
that led to a city-wide waste pile-up.
I engaged Cohen in some "trash talk," discussing
shifting trends in how the city has dealt with its
garbage, and what could be done to equitably
improve its environmental impact. The following
interview has been edited for clarity and length.
When did you first notice that waste
management was a problem in New York?
The section of Brooklyn where I'm from is called
Bags of trash and recycling spill out onto a New York
Flatlands, and a lot of Flatlands is actually landfill.
City street. Credit: Jess Hawsor/Wikimedia Commons
In fact, when I was growing up, there were two
landfills still in Brooklyn: Fountain Avenue and
Pennsylvania Avenue. The reason they had to stop
Steven Cohen has been working to improve waste
using them is that they had gotten so high, they
management both at the federal and local level for
were concerned it would interfere with navigation
over 40 years.
into Kennedy Airport.
Hired by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
When I was growing up, I saw those landfills. I
in 1980, at the inception of the agency's Superfund
would ride my bicycle along the Belt Parkway.
program, he helped develop policy to guide public
There was a bike path, and you would see them
awareness and input in the hazardous waste clean-
getting higher and higher.
up process.
There was this story, I don't know if it was
For 12 years, Cohen was executive director of
apocryphal, but the story was that astronauts could
Columbia University's Earth Institute. Currently, he
see two human-made structures from outer space,
is the senior vice dean of the university's School of
the Great Wall of China and the Fresh Kills Landfill.
Professional Studies.
Both emblematic of their civilizations, right?
In addition to being a lifelong New Yorker, Cohen
What then drew you towards waste
has co-authored three books and authored
management professionally?
numerous articles detailing New York City's solid
waste management challenges and strategies
When I was in graduate school in Buffalo, the toxic
since the closure of its last landfill, Fresh Kills, in
site at the Love Canal became a political issue. I
2001.
followed it pretty closely as this woman Lois Gibbs
was the head of the Homeowners Association
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there, and she organized very effectively. advancing. That's really been the story of the United
States—we've increased our gross domestic product
First, there was no federal Superfund yet. The since 1970 and reduced the amount of pollution
State of New York came in, and they were that Americans are exposed to. A lot of that has
discovering that toxic waste from this abandoned been through the application of technology.
canal was leaching into people's basements. In the
winter of '77-'78, there was a lot of ice and snow. The two major sources of air pollution are power
During the thaw, there was a tremendous amount plants and motor vehicles. We have many more of
of water, and [leaking waste-disposal] barrels came those today than we had in 1970. The catalytic
out [of the formerly drained and soil-covered canal]. converter, the stack scrubber, and converting from
People were getting sick, really sick, in this working- coal to natural gas have had a tremendous impact
class neighborhood. That made me aware of the on air quality, and I think now that we're going into
problem there. the decarbonization era, we're going to have
renewable energy and electric cars. There'll be far
By coincidence one of my professors, Marc less air pollution than there was before, and that's
Tipermas, was on Jimmy Carter's transition team all the application of technologies.
and he hired me to go work in EPA while I was still
in graduate school, first in the water program and With a mayoral election coming up, do you see
then eventually in the Superfund program, where an opportunity for a new administration to make
he was the head of policy analysis. progress on this issue?
In 1981, you returned to New York City to work Well, I think Mayor de Blasio hasn't paid any
at Columbia. How did you engage with waste attention to it, so you couldn't do much worse. They
issues through your work at the university? did pick up the food waste, and then he ended it
when the pandemic started.
Early in 2001, I worked with an engineering
colleague, Nick Themelis, and we did an analysis When Bloomberg was mayor, at first, he also shut
on what to do with New York City's waste after down recycling, but then after a couple of years he
Fresh Kills closed later that year. The rollout of our started to understand the importance of
proposal and its visibility got obscured because we sustainability, and so things changed. I think in
were going to release it in September of 2001, but most elections, it's not a particularly hot issue. But I
something else happened in September of 2001 think at some point, this issue comes back because
that got a lot of attention for good reason. So, we you have to do something with the garbage.
didn't release our report until January.
When you export all of your garbage to landfills and
It got less attention than it should have. New York to facilities that aren't under your control, you're at
City now exports all of its garbage, and the issue is the mercy of the market. If the landfill in Alabama
waste transfer stations. All the garbage must be wants to raise their tipping fee, you have to pay it.
taken from the garbage trucks to waste transfer That's an uncontrolled cost the city really doesn't
stations, where it is shipped out of the city, and want.
nobody wants waste transfer stations in their
neighborhood. In the time that you've lived in the city, have you
seen changes in everyday New Yorkers'
I've read that you were appointed to the EPA's relationship with garbage?
Advisory Council on Environmental Policy and
Technology in 2002. How did this inform your When I was a kid, litter was still a problem. They
work? had a whole campaign where they said a cleaner
New York is up to you. They would put up little
It's really one of the places where I learned how posters just to get us to throw trash into garbage
quickly the technology of pollution control was cans. Over time, of course, there's more of an
2/4emphasis on source separation and things like that, able to have the whole facility built that way.
but you know New York is a very fast-paced place
and people don't often pay that much attention to The issue would still be though the value of the
the garbage and to the waste treatment. land. It still might be too expensive to do it that way,
but what I was attracted to is then every community
At the household level, there's been a lot of would have its own, and so the issue of equity
change. There's been an increase in recycling. For wouldn't come up because you have to treat your
a while, although they've stopped it for now, they own garbage. The argument would be that it might
had food waste recycling, and about half a million be more expensive, but it might not be.
people were doing that. There's been some greater
attention paid than before. When reading that waste-to-energy plants can
reduce waste sent to landfills by 90%, turning it
In general, the cost of waste disposal has gone up, to ash, it seems like this technology is the
largely because we have to transport it and bring it future.
someplace. But the other thing is that the value of
land in New York City has gone up. Things that we You could also use the ash as construction material
used to do in New York when it was a for streets and for sidewalks. The problem with
manufacturing city, you would never do now waste-to-energy is that if the plant isn't well-run, it
because the land is simply too valuable. can pollute. You can have dioxin emissions from
the stack. You have to work really hard to make
The cost of transporting the waste is still probably sure that it's under control.
cheaper than the cost of land. One thing I wrote in
an op-ed in the Times, maybe 15 or 20 years ago, Locally, We Act, a community-based
was what we really ought to do is barge the waste environmental justice organization in Harlem,
up to river towns in New York that were depressed, and nationally, the Sierra Club, have come out
like Poughkeepsie and Peekskill, and build for them against the combustion of waste. However, the
a waste-to-energy plant. In return for giving them New York League of Conservation Voters states
free garbage disposal and energy, we would have a that waste-to-energy could be a viable option
cheaper place to bring the garbage. for waste management.
Politically, of course, nobody wants New York City's In Japan they've developed a way to treat garbage
garbage, so that was never going to go anywhere, where you don't burn it, you chemically transform it.
but I think environmentally it was probably one of It's still pretty expensive, but there's no stack.
the better ideas. Essentially you break down the chemical content of
the garbage and you can still generate some
In your 2008 article for the Observer, titled energy from it, but there's no combustion.
"Wasted: New York City's Giant Garbage Problem
," you proposed a similar solution that would What you really want is something where the raw
equitably distribute waste-to-energy plants materials inside the garbage are pulled out so that
throughout New York City so we could manage you can develop a circular economy. When burning
our own waste. garbage, you end up taking finite resources and
destroying them.
It turns out, now with computers, cheap
communication, and cheap information, you could A more sophisticated way would be to mechanically
actually have 59 waste-to-energy plants in every and automatically separate the different
community board in the city and have it controlled substances. The stuff that's most usable, you use,
in a control room in downtown Manhattan. You and the stuff that isn't, maybe you would burn.
could completely automate it, maybe one or two
people working in each place. In 10 to 20 years Combining municipal waste facilities with
from now, using artificial intelligence, you might be amenities, like the state park on top of the North
3/4River Wastewater Treatment Plant, seems like
an encouraging way to expand newer
technologies into dense cities like New York.
We've built a water filtration plant underneath a golf
course in the Bronx in the last decade. The
community didn't like it, but now it's there and it's
hard to know it's there. I think you'll see again,
through the use of technology and design, there are
ways to make these noxious facilities less noxious.
By creating amenities, even Fresh Kills is going to
become Staten Island's major regional park. It'll be
like Prospect Park, or Van Cortlandt or Central
Park. That's going to be Staten Island's park in 20
years. It's a huge expanse of land, and once they
get enough separation between the toxics and the
people, it'll be a very popular place to go.
This story is republished courtesy of Earth Institute,
Columbia University http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu.
Provided by Earth Institute at Columbia University
APA citation: New York City's trash dilemmas—and opportunities (2021, April 27) retrieved 27 April 2021
from https://phys.org/news/2021-04-york-city-trash-dilemmasand-opportunities.html
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