AGENCY TESTIMONY
Overview of New York City's waste management system
0:11:22
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53 sec
New York City manages 24 million pounds of waste daily, with most of it sent to waste-to-energy facilities or landfills outside the city. The Department of Sanitation (DSNY) is committed to finding more beneficial ways to reuse this waste.
- Waste is sent to facilities in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and upstate New York for energy production
- Some waste ends up in landfills in Virginia and South Carolina
- DSNY has been working on waste diversion strategies since 1896
Joshua Goodman
0:11:22
Every day, £24,000,000 of waste go from the curb and into the white trucks of the sanitation department.
0:11:27
If observing life in New York City is the greatest show on Earth, the New York's strongest or its most dazzling performers, making the bags and bales of material disappear from our streets and sidewalks like master magicians.
0:11:38
But we all know that the rabbit doesn't really vanish inside the hat.
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And the waste, our waste produced by 8 and a half 1000000 New Yorkers, including you and me and everyone in this room, doesn't just go away either.
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Most of it is either sent to waste to energy facilities in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, or upstate, where it becomes heat and power for homes, or to landfills in Virginia, South Carolina, and elsewhere, where it can sit indefinitely and become nothing.
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DSNY does not accept this as an inevitability, and the diversion of ways to differing forms of beneficial reuse has been part of our strategic planning for the department's entire history, at least from the first contract to produce fertilizer grease and soap out of garbage on Bear Island in Brooklyn in 1896.
