When it comes to trash, New Yorkers are creatures of habit, and they like to bestir themselves as little as possible. To prove this, one need only leave a small pile of garbage out on some streetcorner. It will grow exponentially, all of a sudden a designated trash collection site.
The problem of what to do with what they throw away has bothered residents of the nation’s largest city almost since its inception. Now, in an effort to close New York’s yawning budget gap, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has decided to suspend part of the city’s recycling program. Citing the lack of a profitable recycling market, Bloomberg has decreed that the Sanitation Department will no longer make separate pick-ups of plastic and glass. Instead, they will again be mixed in with the bulk of the 928 pounds of garbage each city resident throws away in a year.
This has come as something of a shock to many New Yorkers, who had just become accustomed to squeezing as many as three, four, or even seven separate recycling bins in their famously undersized apartments. Separating their trash was always a nuisance, but it was a tangible thing people could do everyday, to let them feel they were helping their community. It made New Yorkers—so thoroughly cut off from their natural environment—think about just how their city is able to function, with all of its gargantuan needs and output. The end of recycling marks another chapter in a long tug-of-war in which the city’s physical and fiscal health have often been balanced against each other.
Right from the beginning, the burghers of old New Amsterdam were embroiled in battles to keep residents from simply throwing their garbage and the contents of their chamber pots in the streets—where they counted on stray dogs, and especially the city’s many loose pigs, to eat them. By the 1800s, the muck in lower Manhattan was reportedly as much as two to three feet deep in the wintertime. When, in 1832, the city finally began a concerted effort to clean its streets, an old woman reportedly cried out in amazement, “Where in the world did all those [paving] stones come from?…I never knew that the streets were covered with stones before.”
Even then, trash collection was sporadic, and during the Civil War draft riots, striking sanitation workers smashed the new street-cleaning machines (essentially water barrels on wheels), yelling “Death to the labor-saving devices!” Landlords illegally hooked their cesspools and outhouses up to the city’s vastly inadequate sewers. During the worst of the summer heat spells, dead horses routinely littered the streets.
Sanitation lagged even as the consequences of its neglect became increasingly evident. Waves of cholera and typhus swept regularly through the city, carrying off rich and poor alike. The Collect, a large, beautiful pond that was a favorite Manhattan gathering place throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, became so polluted with the refuse from butchers’ and tanners’ shops that by 1813 it had been finally, clumsily, filled in. From this fetid, slowly sinking soil rose the notorious Five Points slum. There, the mortality rate for children under the age of five reached 50 percent.
Forms of recycling did exist throughout much of the nineteenth century. The laissez-faire city that was routinely handed over much of its trash to rag- and bonepickers, some of whom used it to make dolls that were sold at Macy’s, and other department stores. In 1896, a new sanitation commissioner, George E. Waring, Jr., reorganized the department and instituted a more systemized plan. For the first time, New Yorkers were required to separate their garbage at the curbside. Much of it was sold to private contractors, who boiled it down for grease and fertilizer, or used it for landfill and other purposes.
But by the 1920s, this earlier recycling effort had also been defeated by a falling market in trash. The city had some 80 open dumps, including the monumental ash heap in Flushing Meadows that F. Scott Fitzgerald described so memorably in The Great Gatsby, “a fantastic farm, where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens.”
Garbage lined much of the Manhattan waterfront along the Lower East Side; from there it was transported to one New York’s 22 incinerators or—until the practice was banned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1934—towed out and dumped unceremoniously into the sea. The sea often threw it back, onto local beaches, along with the city’s untreated sewage. By 1940, according to a recent study by Columbia Professor Daniel C. Walsh, New Yorkers were producing an all-time high of 2,068 pounds of garbage per person each year—or more than twice the weight they toss out now.
Over the years, better public policy and real estate pressures consolidated the dumps in Staten Island’s Fresh Kills landfill, and neighborhood objections put the incinerators out of business. Most of the city’s refuse is simply shipped out of town now, to landfills in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and elsewhere. New York has probably never been cleaner than it is today, due in large part to deindustrialization, and the demise of leaded gasoline, coal as a heating fuel, and the end of horse-drawn transportation. (Even in the years just before the Civil War, when the population of Manhattan was still under one million, its horses unburdened themselves of over 500,000 pounds of manure and some 45,000 gallons of urine, every day.)
Professor Walsh expects the city’s trash stream to continue to diminish, especially as digital technologies continue to replace paper. And at least one expert, former city Sanitation Department official Benjamin Miller, expects recycling to return as the rising cost of landfill disposal makes it the cheaper alternative. Keep those bins handy.