W.L. Rathje

By W.L. Rathje

The recent comments by New York City Mayor Bloomberg suggesting a possible suspension of some recycling activities for 18 months while at the same time advocating the construction of a waste-to-energy burn facility have raised something of a local firestorm.

If any New Yorker asked me what I thought about these comments from my position as an ardent supporter of recycling and not such a friend of incineration, perhaps surprisingly I would say give the mayor a break for a while. Here’s why.

Based on 29 years of hands-on archaeological refuse analysis and not just accepting on face value what people report or assume is discarded, I have learned that talk about garbage and the actual garbage being talked about are often two different things. From this perspective, what people say about refuse is often figuratively “talking trash,” a contemporary personification of the Emperor’s New Clothes.

From this perspective: Let Mayor Bloomberg say what he likes about garbage. If he is as cunning as he could be, the refuse results will likely be very different—thank goodness—from all of the negative expectations. My rationale is based on a few key principles of waste management:

Long-term, successful—usually meaning cost-effective—waste management, including recycling, is based on flexibility. Ask any of the middlemen who broker recyclables. Access to alternative buyers gives them the leverage they need to keep their revenues above their costs.

Flexibility is also at the heart of “integrated” waste disposal systems, often touted by EPA and currently common throughout Japan, an island with plenty of incentive to safely and efficiently dispose of its waste. There, each community divides discards into types and destines some to small but comprehensive recycling facilities, some to petite-size WTE burners, and the rest to rationally sized landfills.

These measured measures are not the US’s style. The American way has been an almost messianic quest for a single “silver bullet” that will recycle everything down to nothing or burn everything in a WTE plant large enough to heat Detroit or bury everything in a Valhalla-size landfill. But so far, no silver bullet.

Perhaps the closest any community has come is New York City and its Fresh Kills Landfill, a mega–refuse burial ground founded in 1947 within the Big Apple’s own boundaries. This famous/infamous facility that was supposed to be “temporary”—three years of operation tops—ended up the largest landfill in the world and crowned New York as the master of its own waste destiny, albeit often in violation of environmental laws, for more than 50 years.

But Fresh Kills has rarely been recognized as a blessing. For one thing, the landfill has been a highly visible and olfactory thorn in Staten Island’s side, symbolizing the power and status differences among boroughs. In addition, perhaps because the Kills was always there in the past, planning where the garbage would go in a post-Kills world has been lame at best.

Once Fresh Kills was closed in March 2001—whether in the name of social justice for the surrounding populace, for the environmental protection of Staten Island, or for political advantage (as some have suggested)—the city lost most of its waste disposal leverage. What little leverage could have been left had vanished when the landfill closure deal struck in 1996 included scrubbing the only incinerator that was nearing physical viability, if only in the planning process.

So how is anyone to negotiate with the prescient organizations that knew that the city’s waste disposal alternatives were nonexistent and so had built megalandfills in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere for New York’s unremitting 22 million tpd of waste without a home? At a great disadvantage, that’s how!

As a result, the city has been hit by a financial tsunami. For a time before Kills’ end, part of its refuse exited the city at a reasonable cost. With the definite closure of New York’s one reasonably priced waste disposal alternative, the floodgates opened—nay, were launched into the stratosphere. In fact, landfill tipping fees all along the Eastern Seaboard doubled. No one doubts the trend will continue; some even suggest that New York City’s disposal tab will quickly explode to half a billion dollars a year.

Amid an extraordinary financial crunch based on unforeseen causes, what’s a mayor to do? Find some viable long-term option, but in the meantime float some options that will make Eastern Seaboard landfill operators think twice about jacking up their prices any further.

Don’t forget that the megalandfills designed to cash in on New York’s (and perhaps other megalopolises’) waste glut have cost big bucks to site and build. In addition, it might be hard to believe, but on the East Coast there is currently much more waste disposal space to fill than there is garbage to fill it. Thus, if New York City has disposal alternatives, the brokers of landfill space will set their financial sights lower to get the rubbish they need to remain solvent.

The mayor must be given the flexibility to explore all options—and there are many to explore:

1. At the top of the list would be a waste minimization education campaign to tell people how to conveniently use less stuff, such as buying concentrates and products in refillable packages and in easily crushable versus rigid packages (coffee in foil-wrapped bricks versus steel cans).

2. The waste minimization campaign would achieve the best results if it were tied to a unit-pricing or Pay As You Throw policy. Waste collection and disposal is now a service derived only from generic city taxes, so there is no incentive for individuals to cut discards. As with water bills, the price of garbage collection in the Big Apple cannot be linked to individual residences, but it can be cued to buildings. While this situation would not be ideal, some incentive to reduce discards would come into play along with appropriately measured payments to the city for garbage services.

Except for the cost of implementation, the mayor should not have too much trouble with these two proposals. The next tier of options will be rougher because they are embedded in politics.

3. Benjamin Miller, past director of policy planning for the New York City Department of Sanitation and author of Fat of the Land: Garbage of New York, the Last Two Hundred Years (2000), has suggested placing refuse disposal at Fresh Kills back on the table (including, of course, a buffer around the sacrosanct remains of the World Trade Center). Sadly this would be an insult to all those Staten Islanders who don’t work at the landfill, but technically Fresh Kills could receive refuse for another 10 years—Fresh Kills has in fact been retrofitted with retaining walls sunk into the dense clay underneath the garbage to contain, then collect and clean, leachate. Just the possibility of another decade of disposal at the Kills, however improbable, would make New York City waste disposal a ball game again.

4. Miller has also proposed creating a New York State regional landfill. Why let Pennsylvania and Virginia get all the jobs and New Yorkers’ money? More than a decade ago, BFI conducted an examination of a significant portion of the land in the state looking for safe potential sites—not over aquifers, etc. The company determined that only 1% of the land investigated met their stringent criteria. All the same, that 1% was some 200 mi.2 in area!

Now the really tough options.

5. Consider (the operational word is “consider”) temporarily (oops! Does the siting of Fresh Kills come to mind?) cutting back on recycling by excluding bottles and cans, and the city would keep the 5 cents levy on each. This is a tough sell since (a) the central nerve of the environmental movement is arguably recycling and (b) given the immense complexities of collecting materials within the city’s intricate political and physical infrastructure, New York City is doing a great job if you accept that recycling efficiency isn’t measured by making money; recycling efficiency means that recycling costs less than exporting and burying recyclables.

6. Consider (again) building new incinerators. Gasp! Stopped and even killed more than once before, can the specter rise again? That question, of course, is the subject of endless debate. Incineration facilities, even ones that generate energy, are the most scientifically and politically contentious players on the garbage disposal stage. The mayor is correct that emissions control has improved considerably over the past decade. But Allen Hershkowitz, a senior research scientist at the National Resources Defense Council, is equally accurate when he stresses that all of the new devices are there because of a better understanding of potential dangers that are also there. And some of those dangers, such as mercury emissions, are still not fully eliminated, at least to the satisfaction of potent advocacy groups and many residents who might have to live near a burner. But the mayor, wrong-headed as he might be, can still explore the option, right?

7. Finally, John J. Doherty, the man in charge of New York City’s Department of Sanitation, recently suggested that trash could cross borough boundaries to take advantage of better prices on hauling waste for export. To an outlander such as myself, this seems quite reasonable, but I know that to many New Yorkers it is anything but.

All of these options are likely to create problems for the mayor—big problems. So does spending tens and maybe hundreds of millions of dollars more on exporting garbage.

As any successful scrap dealer or Japanese waste official will tell you, the garbage game is about the skillful portrayal—not necessarily the actual use—of options. Talking options will give the mayor leverage to lower export costs and also provide everyone with an opportunity to vent on all sides of every proposal. If the mayor looks as if he is getting too far with the wrong propositions, jump in with both feet—I will be there right beside you. Until then, allow the mayor a little latitude to parade some new clothes!

Archeologist W.L. Rathje is founder and director of the Garbage Project.

MSW - November/December 2002