New York s Garbage System Faces Mounting Challenges of Cost, Carbon and Equity
Cole Rosengren
Garbage is one of the only things that unites all New Yorkers. Everyone creates it—yet few people want to think about what happens next.
Since the Fresh Kills landfill closed on Staten Island in 2001, New York has shipped every single ton of refuse outside its borders to be buried or burned. The complicated process behind this has inspired debate among city officials, environmental activists, academics, business owners and local residents for years. Almost everyone agrees that the current system has become environmentally and financially unsustainable.
On April 22, Earth Day, Mayor Bill de Blasio vowed to change it.
"The whole notion of a society based on constantly increasing waste and then putting it into a truck or a barge or a train and sending it somewhere else – you dig a big hole in the ground, you put the waste in the ground – that is outrageous and is outdated and we're not going to be party to it," he said at a press conference in Hunts Point, one of the city's waste transfer station hubs.
http://citylimits.org/2015/05/18/new-yorks-garbage-system-faces-mounting-challenges-of-cost-carbon-and-equity/
Part 1 of a five part series.
