Chapter 1
A Neverending Game of Catchup
1898 to Today
When New York City consolidated the boroughs of Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island in 1898, there were grand visions of an efficient and rationally-planned metropolis. Then, as now, a key selling point of consolidating regional government was that poorer areas would be able to share in the region's overall wealth. With access to Manhattan's tax base, the other boroughs were promised the same level of services the central city enjoyed, from street-cleaning to parks to transit. But what happened?
In 1898, Manhattan had begun achieving success with the most forward-looking waste management program of its time. During the previous four years, Streets Cleaning Commissioner Col. George Waring had stopped dumping the city's garbage in the ocean, instead implementing a radical program that included recycling and composting. Diversion of reusable materials had significantly reduced the waste stream and solved a major regional environmental problem.
Consolidation, however, led to an unfortunate change in the political winds. By forging new coalitions in the outer boroughs, Tammany Hall recaptured the mayor's office. The reformers were out after only a single term. The recycling program was soon scrapped and the city resumed ocean dumping.
As the city's population and waste stream grew in coming decades, the city supplemented ocean dumping with landfills and incinerators. A successful federal lawsuit brought by a coalition of New Jersey coastal cities forced the city to end ocean dumping in 1935. Ambitious plans for new incinerators had to be scaled down during the Great Depression and World War II, so the city's sanitation infrastructure continually lagged behind its needs. Most garbage ended up as landfill for public works projects like Robert Moses' parks and highways.
In an effort to stem the rising tide of garbage it handled, in 1957 the city stopped collecting commercial waste, instead requiring businesses to hire private companies to take their garbage away. This strategy succeeded in diverting some of the waste stream to incinerators and landfills outside the city. But this shift created a business that soon became a mafia cartel that inflated the cost of private garbage collection by up to ten times the reasonable market price. The mob controlled the business until just two years ago, when federal prosecutors finally succeeded in cracking the industry and sending the leading bosses to jail.
By the 1960s, the city was burning almost a third of its trash in its 22 municipal incinerators and over 17,000 apartment building incinerators. Since then, public awareness of the environmental costs of landfilling and incineration have gradually forced the city to shut down its old landfills and incinerators, including those in apartment houses. The last municipal incinerator closed in 1992, leaving only a single waste disposal option for the 14,000 tons of residential and public waste DOS collects each day. Sanitation trucks take the trash to the nearest of the city's marine transfer stations and dump it in waiting barges that carry it across the harbor to the Fresh Kills Landfill.
Chapter 2 -- Fresh Kills: You Can't Fill a Bottomless Pit
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