I kind of like the rats. I get really bored walking down the street and seeing some wildlife, which in New York City is just pigeons and rats. I look, I love all animals. I'm a long-time vegan, but the fact is that there is a visceral reaction to a rat for most people. You walk down a street in New York and a rat runs across your foot. You remember it every time you're on the block for the rest of your life.
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway and I'm Joe Weisenthal. Joe, I was talking trash with a guy at a party recently.
Now, I met this guy at a party. Yeah. You know, some people are so into their work, an area of expertise, that they just start talking to you about it. And this guy happened to be an expert in trash.
That's really cool. I don't know much about trash. I'm impressed at, like, what a complex logistical operation it must be to collect trash in a city like New York City. Yeah. I also understand that, you know, it's sort of one of those classic things. Where is there a cliche like there's no Democrat or Republican way to pick up trash? That's like some famous politician once said that. And they were talking about city management and what makes city management different than other sort of political things. It's like the trash isn't picked up. It's not picked up, and it's not an ideological thing.
Well, it's interesting you say that because the person I was talking to at this party, who we're about to have on the show, described trash collection in New York City as one of the last services untouched by neoliberalism, and that's when I knew. I knew we had to have him on Odd Lots. And then he introduced his wife as his garbage queen. And then I was doubly sure that we needed to have him on our show. But trash collection is such a fascinating thing. I wasn't planning on doing an episode on it, but I've been converted, I guess, after this conversation, because you think about in a city like New York, just how much trash has to be dealt with on a daily basis. And obviously in New York specifically, it's not like we're putting it, you know, in the city, we have to find other places to store our trash. And at the same time, New York City is not well known for being the cleanest place in the world. In fact, we famously stick our garbage out in bags on the curb and wait for collection, and we are in a giant process of trying to change that. So there's a lot to discuss here.
There's a lot to discuss. By the way, that quote, according to Google Gemini, there's no Republican or Democratic way to pick up the garbage. Former Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia was the one who said that. And so he was out running as a Republican on a fusion ticket. Anyway, that's not the point. But it is, you know, it's just a thing. Either you do it or you don't. And people get really upset if you don't. New York is tricky for multiple reasons. But, you know, you think in a suburb, right? You put the trash out, but there are cars in the way between the trash bins and the garbage truck, etc., because they're in the driveway or the garage or something like that. New York has all kinds of things in between the road and the bins. I know there's, you know, there's this big effort to do containerization. I think at one point there were headlines about some, you know, outside study from like McKinsey, etc., but there's a lot of interesting logistical questions about trash collection. And so it's a topic, even though we haven't done it, it's firmly in our wheelhouse.
Absolutely. All right. So without further ado, we have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with Joshua Goodman. He is, of course, deputy commissioner at New York City's Department of Sanitation. So Josh, thanks so much for coming on Odd Lots.
Thank you both for having me.
Is trash collection apolitical?
So obviously we all admire and respect Mayor LaGuardia. It's a famous quote. You hear it all the time. You hear paraphrases of it all the time. It's patently untrue, right? The moment you start to dissect it, you realize that, of course, an enormous public space logistical initiative is going to be colored by ideology. Partisanship, maybe not, but the sort of implication behind the quote that it's a binary — yes, it's picked up, no, it's not picked up — really undersells substantially the amount of planning that needs to go into this, both in the short term and in the long term. In New York City, we at the Department of Sanitation pick up, process and export 24 million pounds of trash, recycling and compostable material every single day. Now, that's one of the things I like to tell people is that there's a word that you'll hear a lot: Sisyphean. Right? And you hear it used imprecisely, in my opinion. It's often used as just a synonym for hard. Oh, I, you know, school was a specific task or this home improvement project or whatever, but it ended, right. And we have the definitional Sisyphean task, just as Sisyphus faced the boulder again. Each day we pick up 24 million pounds. Today we pick up 24 million pounds. Tomorrow we pick up 24 million pounds. The next day. There will never be a time when DSNY says, great news, everyone, you know, we got it. Right. Exactly. And this is, as Tracy mentioned, we think of it as the last free unlimited service. There's no sign-up, there's no opt-in, there's no means test. You put it out, we come and get it. It's basically us and the public library at this point. And that means — and that's specific to New York, of course — but it means that as we think about changes in global best practices, we need to keep that commitment to full universal service.
I don't want to, like, get too bogged down in this question of Sisyphean and the philosophy of what the Greeks were trying to teach with the lesson of Sisyphus, and the philosophers like Camus and so forth who studied Sisyphus over the years. But one element of that lesson is the boulder. Yes, it was endless, and it never ended, much like trash collection. But there was no purpose to it. There was no internal satisfaction that one could perceive from the outside, whereas helping the public, that could in theory be satisfactory. So had Sisyphus pushed up the boulder every day, and then something great happened at the end — oh, it was clean — maybe that would have been satisfying internally. And what's torturous about the Sisyphus metaphor is that there does not seem to be any reward for it.
Well, it is true that most New Yorkers think of cleanliness as the natural state, right? It's not. Wow, you did it. Are you sure about that? That's the goal, right? The idea is that a street is supposed to be clean. And, you know, you mentioned Camus. Our guy at sanitation has actually said that because many people notice black bags of trash, they notice piles of trash, they rarely, if ever, notice the absence of piles of trash. Yeah. You know, and so there is a philosophical element to this, but obviously, I know we're going to spend a lot more time — we could just talk about that the whole time — when it really came down to was about four or five years ago. But we had spent decades with people coming to New York from Barcelona, from Buenos Aires, from Paris, from London, even from Chicago and L.A., and saying, why do you live like this? You know? And for many decades, our answer had basically been like, well, you know, have you tried a bagel? You know, we have better pizza than you do. We had not gotten serious about addressing these challenges in a meaningful and long-term way. And that's what's begun to change over the last few years through a process that we call the trash revolution, which is a complete reimagining of the relationship that 8.5 million New Yorkers have with 24 million pounds of trash a day — what they expect from us, what we expect from them. And it's required an enormous amount of data analysis of streetscape, redesign of work across agencies and breaking down silos. And fortunately, it's getting results. There's a lot we can talk about that really shows that this is working.
Before we get into all the ins and outs of the trash revolution, which I love as a designation, how did black bags of garbage become a thing in New York in the first place? Because I remember this was one of the big culture shocks when I first moved to New York for college, and then I dropped out, so I was only here for two or three weeks. Maybe all the trash bags had something to do with it. But walking down the street, coming from places like London and Tokyo, and seeing these bags of trash laid out, it was kind of weird.
Yeah. There are really two key events that led to New York's unique status here. One is the 1811 street grid in New York City. The only nonrenewable resource is public space. There is a finite amount of room. And so when the streets were laid out in the 1811 master plan, the city was built without alleyways. You go to Chicago, which has similar density, there are alleys behind almost all buildings to store the trash. So if you're watching a movie and it's set in New York and someone jumps out of a dark alley, it's almost certainly shot in Chicago or at an L.A. soundstage because we don't really have them. So that meant there was no storage space behind the buildings, which other cities have. And then throughout much of the 19th and 20th century, the city used sort of the old Oscar the Grouch metal garbage can. Following the 1968 sanitation strikes, the last major New York City sanitation labor action, there was an overflowing amount more than those metal cans could handle. And when the strike was resolved, Mayor Lindsay put together a group to study a number of aftereffects of the issues the city had faced during that time, one of which was a task force called the Committee on the Black Bag. It studied plastic trash bags, which were basically new at that time, and the plastics industry pushed them as rodent resistant, which obviously we know they're not. And you can easily find New York Times coverage from that time of people proudly stating that the transition from metal garbage cans to black bags will reduce rats while freeing up public space. Obviously, it became clear almost immediately that that was not the case, but it took another five decades or so to get serious about promoting a new solution.
So I understand, and we're going to get into this, that there are different approaches, etc., to picking up the trash, etc. But why is the LaGuardia quote wrong? Like, I understand different views, but that still doesn't necessarily mean to me — it still seems like it could be right in the sense that different views don't necessarily map to politics. But it's true that it's not a neat left-right split necessarily, but it's not true that who you put into office has no bearing on what happens to the trash, right? I guess my point was that, you know, that it transcends ideology and it doesn't — or else this would have been done a long time ago. Okay, then what are the different ideological frameworks from which we can view the question of optimal trash collection?
So one of the things to think about is that cleanliness is not just — it's an abstract concept. It has a tremendous impact on a person's quality of life. Every morning, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers get up, they go out, they go to work, they go to school. If they walk down a dirty street, the first thing they think is, no one cares about me. And I can't necessarily blame people for feeling that way. Often thoughts about cleanliness in public space are — you have to think about who you're prioritizing, right? So is it someone who spends the bulk of their time in public in a car versus someone who spends the bulk of their time in public walking? Is it someone for whom a rat is a curiosity versus a reality that they have to live with?
I kind of like the rats. I get really bored walking down the street and seeing some wildlife, which in New York City is just pigeons and rats. I look, I love all animals. I'm a long-time vegan, but the fact is that there is a visceral reaction to a rat for most people. You walk down a street in New York and a rat runs across your foot. You remember it every time you're on the block for the rest of your life.
And the same goes for public space trash, which I know certain New Yorkers have sort of romanticized. I think that you can only do that if it's not your reality. You know that living around trash and rats is not a good thing. And we would like it to — you know, people sometimes assume that anyone at the Department of Sanitation loves the trash. And I always tell them, no, no, no, our job is to get rid of it. We hate the trash. The trash is our enemy, as fascinating as it is to study. And so, you know, when we thought about putting global best practices into place just the last few years, we had — this is actually a very data-driven agency, probably not surprising — but we had about a century of data about the weight of the trash, which had long been our primary metric for efficiency. And what we needed was data about the volume of the trash. That's what you need for containerization programs. And so we had to do a 70,000-block volumetric analysis. We went block by block and converted those weights into volumes and developed the programs that are coming out now. And there were a lot of different, both left and right, thoughts about what approach we should take, if any. And, you know, we've developed a strategy that we think will work for the unique streetscape of New York. You know, one of the — when I first got involved in this work, I would often hear from people, well, you know, there's no place as dense as New York that does — not true. There's no place with as much weather flexibility as New York — not true. You know, there's no place that produces as much volume of trash — not true. We actually produce per person less trash than most other Western cities. There's no reason that they can't have this everywhere else in the world other than political inertia. Right. And that's what's begun to change based on the data that we produced.
Well, to me, one of the obvious political choices that's been made in New York is also we don't have a pay-as-you-go service, or you're not paying per pound of trash that you produce, right? I can produce a lot of trash, and it's sort of incumbent on the city to collect it, versus someone who's trying their best to recycle and compost and things like that. Why don't we talk about logistics for a second, just to better understand the current state, so that we can figure out where we're trying to get to. I take out a bag of trash from my apartment building, and it's a Wednesday in Soho, and I place it on the curb. What happens to it from there?
So a collection truck — we don't call them garbage trucks because they also pick up recycling and compost — comes by sometime, generally between midnight and 8:30 in the morning. We try to get as much of it done before peak rush hour. The trucks are on routes that are optimized for a few things. They hold about 12 to 13 tons of trash each. You want it to get full on its route, and you want the route to be completed in a single shift. So they're optimized around those factors. And then once the truck is full — or loaded out, it's the jargon — it's taken to a network of transfer stations. So prior to 2000, it was all taken to the Staten Island landfill. When the landfill closed, the city moved to a waste export model, which was a multibillion-dollar, 15-year infrastructure project to build five transfer stations around the city. These are places where the truck comes, it dumps out onto a big — the tipping floor, a big floor where a large front-end loader pushes it down holes in the floor into, like, a shipping container that's underneath. Robotic arms seal up the shipping container. A giant crane puts it on either a barge or a railcar, and it's taken to its final destination outside the city. This is obviously far more environmentally sustainable than an inner-city landfill. And also than the old trucking model, right? Barges and railcars. Much, much better for the environment. When you see these barges with 50 or 75 packed storage containers on them, you think, wow, that would have been 75 trucks driving to a landfill. That's for your regular trash. Refuse is the term that appears in our materials. For your metal, glass and plastic, they're taken to a facility in Sunset Park, where they're palletized and prepared to be sold on the recycling market. New York City — this is a great opportunity for me to mention something really important, which is lots of people in sort of the demographic that listens to Odd Lots — educated, smart people, the cocktail party set — think that it makes them sound really smart to say, I heard recycling is a scam. Didn't someone once tell me — I have to tell you, I can't speak for other municipalities. New York City's recycling system is protected by long-term contracts that guarantee beneficial reuse of those materials. If you properly sort a can or bottle in New York City, it will become a new can, bottle or other reusable item.
Wait, slight tangent. What about a styrofoam cup?
So styrofoam — are they banned in the city, right? So you shouldn't see them too often, but styrofoam actually hits on the great issue with this. Styrofoam is often used as the archetypical example of a non-recyclable item. Keep your eye on — it can be recycled on a pure molecular level. Of course it can be recycled. It's just plastic. The issue is that it's so light that no plastics manufacturer would ever feel that they had enough in one space to make money off of it. It's a good example of how this is actually a market-based system for recycling, specifically because many more things are recyclable from a chemical standpoint than are actually accepted as recycling in New York City. You probably know that in 2017, 2018, there were domestic policy changes in China that collapsed a lot of cities' recycling markets. New York was protected from those changes by long-term strategic planning. Before that, we also had resisted an urge that a lot of cities get into in a few years before that to combine their paper and their metal, glass and plastic so it's easier for residents. It turned out to be a huge money loser for cities that did it, and also for the environment.
When this market change happened in 2017, 2018, what was the argument for doing that? Because when I think about it in my head, it's like, well, of course it's going to cost more to sort it out.
The idea was more people will participate because it's easier, which is a good motivating principle in general. But on this specific topic, the technology is not there yet, or at least we don't feel the technology is there yet. Your paper — just to get back to where it all goes — it goes to Staten Island, where it is actually one of the fastest processes in the waste stream. Cardboard and paper that you recycle today might become a new pizza box tomorrow. Pizza boxes are one of the primary things made at that facility. And then your compost, which is sort of our biggest and newest and most exciting stream. Your food waste goes to a few places, but primarily to our Staten Island compost facility. It's a 33-acre site where over a period of three or four months, we turn and aerate your material until it's broken down into finished compost, which we give away to parks and gardens to residents directly. We just finished our summer compost giveaway season. We gave away about 15 million pounds of finished compost to New Yorkers.
Oh, I didn't know you could get New York City — nyc.gov compost.
You can find events near you to get 40-pound bags. And some of it goes to the Department of Environmental Protection's Newtown Creek digester eggs. If you've been on the BQE right as you go over the Kosciuszko and come between Brooklyn and Queens, you'll see the big eggs. Those are large facilities where your food waste will be mixed with wastewater. So it gets mixed there with everything that you put down the sink or that you flush down the toilet, where it's digested into biosolids for fertilizer and usable biogas that heats homes in Brooklyn. So your waste goes to a lot of different places. But the idea is to divert as much of it as possible to beneficial use, and hopefully to reduce the total amount over time.
I'm thinking about that guy, and it's a guy at the cocktail party, and I heard her say, you know, it's like the classic — like I heard a two-minute segment on the radio once. Hey, that guy. I think our listeners are better than that. They only say things if they research the topic for at least 30 minutes. Right. They certainly — I'm sure a lot of listeners know that person. At least they know that. Oh my God, oh my God, I can't stand that person. On the other hand, and I don't want to get into it, might the fact that, like, New York has guaranteed contracts anyway not necessarily vindicate recycling? It might vindicate it from the New York City perspective, but let's move on. All right. That's the old — that's a rough overview of, let's say, the old regime. What are you — give us the equivalent sort of like rough overview of the new regime of like what we're going to.
So the big changes in what I just described were conducted between 2000 and 2015 to move from a landfill model to a waste export model. Those were huge back-of-house changes right on our radar. Oh, I see. And what we're doing now is making sort of front-of-house changes for how New Yorkers interact with the trash. It's actually — I don't mean to use it as an excuse, but it's one of the reasons why, as other cities moved to on-street containerization, New York didn't. You know, we had this big project going on about transfer stations. Obviously, we should be able to do both. But so now what we're doing is, after we completed this 70,000-block volumetric analysis, we were able to come up with a model for on-street containerization.
Can you say a little bit more about the analysis? Because I am not — I don't even know how you would start such a project, because if you look at an apartment building, it's like, okay, maybe they produce like X pounds of waste on a certain day, but then the day after Christmas that suddenly explodes and becomes five times as much.
Yeah, absolutely. So when you look at — one thing that I think it's important to remember as we talk about this is that even though New York has a reputation for being behind the curve, there's actually no city in North America that does on-street containerization. Right? It's a purely European, South American and Asian thing. And when this program is implemented, New York will have gone — I would never say worse, but have gone from the back of the pack to first. And that means that we had to develop a system that would work for us specifically. Right. As we first started to confront this, I heard from a lot — from sort of two groups: urbanists who would say, this is a solved problem, copy-paste Barcelona, copy-paste Amsterdam, and also community leaders in the city who said this would never work here. Right. And when we did this study, what we really found was that both of those groups were wrong. It is, of course, achievable. And it is, of course, difficult. So when we had all this data about the weight of the trash, what we wanted to do was, again, as I mentioned, that there's a finite amount of street space. You want to establish a containerization model that can hold all the waste, but that is not oversized, because then you're wasting that space. So we planned for one extra day. You mentioned Christmas, and we planned for basically one extra day above their collection. And we went out and measured piles of trash. We eventually were able to come up with a conversion formula to use, but it was a lot of on-the-street work measuring both the trash itself and also the streetscape, because you might know the length of a block, but you know that you can't put the bin in front of a curb cut. You know, it can't go in front of a fire hydrant there. Even when we had determined that we were going to go with a side-loading model — there are different ways the trucks can be serviced — that meant that we had to think about tree canopy height. The bin can't go up into the tree. Yeah. There are so many factors in really four dimensions on this to consider. And in Europe in particular, what you see are open shared bins. And this was what had kind of been contemplated in earlier pilots that we had done going back to 2021. Okay. Just a European style, basically a dumpster on the street that everybody on the block is to use. We always had a lot of issues with that as an at-scale solution, because a few reasons. First of all, in New York City, we provide this free unlimited service for residents. Businesses have to pay for trash collection through a network of private carters. And so there was a concern about, well, if it's a free open bin, why wouldn't a business just steal space in that bin? Yeah, throw their trash in there. So we didn't want to go forward with that model. We also knew that there are many neighborhoods in the city where an on-street container was not going to improve the situation. If you think about a low-density neighborhood, making everybody all of a sudden walk down to the middle of the block, that doesn't help, just in the name of saying, well, we've done the whole city. So the model we eventually came up with after we had this volumetric data was a containerization system for low-density buildings, one to nine residential units, up to a single-family home, up through a small apartment, using a wheeled trash bin, and then eventually a specific wheeled trash bin. But largest buildings, 31 or more units, is the point we came up with, where they can certainly support at least one of what we call empire bins, the on-street containers. And then the 10 to 30s, the midsize buildings, was where we found there's a lot of variety. Might be 11 studios, there's 11 people in the building versus, you know, 29 two-bedrooms. They have to use one or the other, but they choose. And that program with that model was implemented. And the city is divided into 59 community districts. We began in one community district, Manhattan 9, which is West Harlem, Amsterdam to the river, 111th to 155th, in June of last year, 2025. And now fall 2026, this is coming to a second district, Brooklyn Community District 2, which is downtown Brooklyn through Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Brooklyn Heights. That is the point that this really moves beyond a pilot and becomes a real program that New Yorkers can expect to see in their neighborhood. And the mayor has actually committed to funding this program for a full rollout by the end of 2031.
