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April 17, 2002-6
Copyright © 2002 Earth Policy Institute
New York: Garbage Capital of the World
Lester R. Brown
The question of what to do with the 11,000 tons of garbage produced
each day in New York City has again surfaced, this time with Mayor
Michael Bloomberg's budget, which proposes to halt the recycling
of metal, glass and plastic to save money. Unfortunately, this would
mean more garbage to dispose of when the goal should be less.
The city's garbage problem has three faces. It is an economic problem,
an environmental challenge, and a potential public relations nightmare.
When the Fresh Kills landfill, the local destination for New York's
garbage, was permanently closed in March 2001, the city found itself
hauling garbage to distant landfill sites in New Jersey, Pennsylvania,
and Virginia--some of the sites 300 miles away.
Assuming a load of 20 tons of garbage for each of the tractor trailers
used for the long-distance hauling, some 550 rigs are needed to
move garbage from New York City each day. These tractor trailers
form a convoy nearly nine miles long, impeding traffic, polluting
the air, and raising carbon emissions. This daily convoy led Deputy
Mayor Joseph J. Lhota, who supervised the Fresh Kills shutdown,
to say that getting rid of the city's trash is now "like a military-style
operation on a daily basis."
Instead of rapidly reducing the amount of garbage generated as Fresh
Kills was filling, the decision was made simply to haul it all elsewhere.
Fiscally strapped local communities in other states are willing
to take New York's garbage--if they are paid enough. Some see it
as a bonanza. For the state governments, however, that are saddled
with increased road maintenance costs, the arrangement is not so
attractive. They also have to contend with the traffic congestion,
noise, increased air pollution, and complaints from nearby communities.
Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore wrote to Mayor Rudy Giuliani in 2001
complaining about the use of Virginia as a dumping ground. "I understand
the problem New York faces," he noted. "But the home state of Washington,
Jefferson and Madison has no intention of becoming New York's dumping
ground."
The new governor of Virginia, Mark Warner, proposed in early April
2002 a tax of $5 per ton on all solid waste deposited in Virginia.
This is expected to generate an annual cash flow of $76 million
for the Virginia treasury, but it will not help New York with its
economic woes.
In Pennsylvania, the General Assembly is considering legislation
that would restrict garbage imports from other states. As landfills
in adjacent states begin to fill up, there will be progressively
fewer sites to take New York's garbage, pushing disposal costs ever
higher.
Landfilling garbage uses land. For every 40,000 tons of garbage
added to a landfill at least one acre of land is lost to future
use. A large surrounding area is also lost as the landfill with
its potentially toxic wastes must be isolated from residential areas.
Mayor Bloomberg's office has proposed incineration as the solution
to the garbage mess. But burning 11,000 tons of garbage each day
will only add to air pollution, making already unhealthy city air
even worse. Like hauling the garbage to distant sites, incineration
treats the symptoms, not the causes of New York's mountain of garbage.
The amount of garbage produced in the city is a manifestation of
a more fundamental problem--the evolution of a global throwaway
economy. Throwaway products, facilitated by the appeal to convenience
and the artificially low cost of energy, account for much of the
garbage we produce. (See Chapter 6
of Eco-Economy.)
It is easy to forget how many throwaway products there are until
we actually begin making a list. We have substituted facial tissues
for handkerchiefs, disposable paper towels for hand towels, disposable
table napkins for cloth napkins, and throwaway beverage containers
for refillable ones. In perhaps the ultimate insult, the shopping
bags that are used to carry home throwaway products are themselves
designed to be discarded, becoming part of the garbage flow. The
question at the supermarket checkout counter, "Paper or plastic?"
should be replaced with, "Do you have your canvas shopping bag with
you?"
The challenge we now face is to replace the throwaway economy with
a reduce/reuse/recycle economy. The earth can no longer tolerate
the pollution, the energy use, the disruption from mining, and the
deforestation that the throwaway economy requires. For cities like
New York, the challenge is not so much what to do with the garbage
as it is how to avoid producing it in the first place.
New York recycles only 18 percent of its municipal waste. Los Angeles
recycles 44 percent and Chicago 47 percent. Seattle and Minneapolis
are both near 60 percent recycling rates. But even they are not
close to exploiting the full potential of garbage recycling.
There are many ways of shrinking the daily mountain of garbage.
One is simply to ban the use of one-way beverage containers, something
that Denmark and Finland have done. Denmark, for example, banned
one-way soft drink containers in 1977 and beer containers in 1981.
If Mayor Bloomberg wants a closer example of this approach, he need
only go to Prince Edward Island in Canada, which has adopted a similar
ban on one-way containers.
There are other gains from reusing beverage containers. Since refillable
containers are simply back-hauled to the original soft drink or
brewery bottling sites by the same trucks that deliver the beverages,
they reduce not only garbage but also traffic congestion, energy
use, and air pollution.
We have the technologies to recycle virtually all the components
of garbage. For example, Germany now gets 72 percent of its paper
from recycled fiber. With glass, aluminum, and plastic, potential
recycling rates are even higher.
The nutrients in garbage can also be recycled by composting organic
materials, including yard waste, table waste, and produce waste
from supermarkets. Each year, the world mines 139 million tons of
phosphate rock and 20 million tons of potash to obtain the phosphorus
and potassium needed to replace the nutrients that crops remove
from the soil. Urban composting that would return nutrients to the
land could greatly reduce this expenditure on nutrients and the
disruption caused by their mining.
Yet another garbage-reducing step in this fiscally stressed situation
would be to impose a tax on all throwaway products, in effect a
landfill tax, so that those who use throwaway products would directly
bear the cost of disposing of them. This would increase revenues
while reducing garbage disposal expenditures, helping to reduce
the city's fiscal deficit.
There are numerous win-win-win solutions that are economically attractive,
environmentally desirable, and that will help avoid the unfolding
public relations debacle created by the image of New York as garbage
capital of the world. A response to this situation that treats the
causes rather than the symptoms of garbage generation could work
wonders for the city.
Copyright
© 2002 Earth Policy Institute
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FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
From Earth Policy Institute
Lester R. Brown, Eco-Economy:
Building an Economy for the Earth (New York: W.W. Norton
& Company, 2001).
LINKS
Earth 911 (information on where to recycle and the
facilities available in your area)
http:/www.earth911.org
Grass Roots Recycling Network
http:/www.grrn.org
National Recycling Coalition
http:/www.nrc-recycle.org
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Reduce, Reuse,
and Recycle Waste Page
http:/www.epa.gov/msw/
reduce.htm
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