Discard Anthropology (GARBAGE) Encore with Robin Nagle

Landfills! Treasures in the trash! Corporate conspiracies! Composting! An instantly classic conversation with the incredibly knowledgeable, frank and wonderful Dr. Robin Nagle of New York University’s Liberal Studies! She is a clinical professor, author, TED speaker and former New York City sanitation worker and truly the best person on Earth to trash talk with. We cover what you can and can’t actually recycle, sticky mustard bottles, drugs in the trash, Swedish Death Cleaning, mobsters and landfills, Bitcoin in the dump, the future of garbage and exactly how screwed we are. Enjoy.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alie Ward?

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• 0:44Alie Ward?

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• 1:28Alie Ward?

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• 2:13Alie Ward?

  Oh, hi. It's the French fry under your seat you won't find for another four months, Ali Ward. And here we are, the trashiest episode of Ologies ever made. This is another one of those years in the making interviews. You're going to talk about it forever. So I came across this person's name in relation to garbage, and I thought, I must meet this garbage person. They seem great. They are a clinical professor in New York University's Liberal Studies Department. They teach on the topic of garbage. They have worked intimately with garbage. They did a TED Talk about garbage. They have three anthropology degrees from Columbia University and an undergrad in anthropology

• 2:54Alie Ward?

  from New York University, and even authored the book Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City. The perfect fit. Rubbish research is their life's work. So on a crisp fall day in Manhattan, I navigated the cobblestones to a conference room on the NYU City campus. And as a side note, this episode was recorded in 2022, but I'm sharing it with you again for Earth Day Month because it's a favorite among the entire Ology staff. And listeners say that it has impacted them for years. They think about it all the time. I love it. So yes, it was an autumn afternoon in 2022. And I routinely test for COVID for shoots and stuff. I had tested negative the

• 3:37Alie Ward?

  day before, but I had been in an indoor gallery event that week, so I wanted to keep my mask on for our interview, just in case, because COVID is awful, but masks are easy. Oh, one other easy thing to do, if you don't mind, is maybe tell a friend about this podcast, Ologies. Or you can support by becoming a patron for $1 a month at patreon.com/ologies. Also, rating, subscribing, and leaving reviews helps the show so much, and I read every single one, such as this very recent one left by SJC Mudhut, who said, "Ali is my new best friend, and I really can't help believing she makes this podcast for me and me alone." SJC Mudhut.

• 4:20Alie Ward?

  It is all for you. Don't tell everyone else. Okay, on to the episode. Your brain is about to come a dumpster of facts about what people throw away, where garbage goes, who takes it there, finding treasure in landfills, when an item becomes garbage, what plastic you can actually recycle, burning trash, building on trash, cherishing trash, and more, with professor, scholar, author, garbologist, discard anthropologist, one of the two, Dr. Robin Nagel.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  My name is Robin Nagel, and my pronouns are any, all.

• 5:16Alie Ward?

  Her most commonly used are she/her, so we'll go with that. The title of this episode, that's more ambiguous. But garbageology, not your favorite word, which I'm like, let's hear it. Because it is one of those words that it, it sounds like a company that makes garbage cans.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  Okay, I'll accept that. But as a description of what we could call a field of concern, of study, of crisis, of environmental, profound environmental relevance, it's too narrow, because garbage is only one way of thinking about waste, right?

• 5:56Alie Ward?

  But is there a particular way that you describe your niche in anthropology?

• 6:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's kind of under the umbrella of what we call applied anthropology. My goal in working with New York City Department of Sanitation is twofold. One is to help the public understand what it is to be a sanitation worker in the city, for the city, and why should you care to know that? And the other is to help the workforce recognize ways in which they are valuable on this meta-level that sometimes they, they don't even necessarily acknowledge. I have said many times,

• 6:36Speaker 01

  The sanitation department is the most important workforce in the city of New York. And I get pushback, even from people on the job. And I like it when I get pushback from them in particular, because then I launch into my whole rap about public health and the diseases that would make COVID look like a sneeze if garbage were not managed, more or less, very well. And I'm not saying it's perfect. We certainly had huge problems during the pandemic because of budget cutbacks and how the operational side of the job was thrown into ca- not chaos, but how do you prevent it from being thrown into chaos, right? So those realities are always out there. But if sanitation isn't on the street every day,

• 7:20Speaker 01

  this is not the- New York is not the glittering global capital we imagine it to be.

• 7:25Alie Ward?

  Mm-hmm. And you know, I was thinking about it on the way over here, too.

• 7:30Alie Ward?

  The difference between focusing on the garbage, which is dirty, which is something we all fear, versus the sanitation, which is the solution. So do you find that the way that we talk about garbage versus sanitation really depends on if we're focusing on like, the good or the bad?

• 7:50Speaker 01

  I didn't- I never thought of it that way. I like that distinction. And I think you've pinpointed a key element here, which is garbage equates with fear for fascinating reasons.

• 8:00Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  But sanitation, one of the challenges with the word is that we could use sanitation to only be talking about things like sewage, right? So when we say sanitation, do we mean garbage? Do we mean other forms of waste? Do we mean the kinds of protocols that are in place in medical facilities and healthcare? All of that has a sanitation connotation or context. So same with the word garbage, though. Like, what exactly do we mean by that word? Because it's a multifaceted category of material. And depending on how it's defined, that- Dictates, I'll say, what happens next and where it goes and what workforce is responsible

• 8:45Speaker 01

  for it and what harms does it cause or do we prevent it from causing, all by the definition.

• 8:50Alie Ward?

  So to say something is discarded implies that it's useless to the person discarding it, but not inherently valueless. But garbage can mean food waste or useless stuff. But does even waste have an inherent value? We shall discuss.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  It also allows for thinking about forms of land, categories of people, ways of using time. Do we waste time? Do we save time? Are we discarding time? Like, it's just far more, it's a far broader and thus perhaps more exciting way to think about both the problem, the analysis, and then some of the potential solutions.

• 9:31Alie Ward?

  How long have you been in this field and why of all the fields of anthropology did you be line for this one? Or did you ping pong around a bit?

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Well, my earlier work in anthropology was about religion, but I've always been intrigued by the problem of garbage in particular and waste in general. And when I had a chance to teach about it, I came up with a syllabus that became a class called Garbage in Gotham: The Anthropology of Trash.

• 9:58Alie Ward?

  That's amazing.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  And one of the speakers was a sanitation worker I had met just on the street who took great care when recycling rolled out in New York City to customize the chrome on his truck and make it look like such a clean vehicle that you could not imagine putting garbage in the back, because people were still throwing garbage in the back of his truck when it was supposed to be just recyclables. And it really pissed him off. So he decided to address this himself. And it got him a lot of really good media. So he was a guest speaker in my class, which was wonderful. But the more I learned about the job, the more I realized, especially as an anthropologist, you can't just hear stories and then draw conclusions

• 10:44Speaker 01

  about what is essentially a subculture, right? It is its own world. So then I realized I had to do fieldwork in person, participant observation, the classic anthropology methodology. And then I realized, no matter how detailed that work was, I was not responsible for, or even legally allowed to drive a truck. I wasn't on the job, right? If I said I'd be at a given garage on a given morning and I woke up that morning, I'm like, "Yeah, I don't feel like it." Which, I will admit, once in a while that happens. My bad, but once in a while it happens. Well, no consequence to me, except that I now have a reputation as being flaky. But there's no, there's no, no hammer falls.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  But if I'm on the job, I have a legal obligation to be in that garage for roll call. The city has a legal obligation to make sure I'm qualified to drive the truck, to operate the broom. Those kinds of far more detailed trainings and relationships, that's what I needed to do. So, I went through the whole process. I took the test, I got hired. It took about a year from taking the test to actually getting hired, because it's a very long, slow, tedious process. In part because the city of New York must make sure by its own metrics that you, the individual, are qualified and capable to do the job they're hiring you to do.

• 12:08Alie Ward?

  As we recorded this in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, trucks of all kinds, garbage and delivery rumbled outside. So just enjoy the New York ambience.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  It's been a puzzle and a, kind of an obsession of mine for as long as I can remember.

• 12:24Alie Ward?

  Have you, before you got the job to do the research, had you ever driven anything bigger than like a U-Haul before?

• 12:31Speaker 01

  So, my high school sweetheart, his dad owned a moving company.

• 12:35Alie Ward?

  Ah!

• 12:35Speaker 01

  And so he taught me how to drive a double-clutch Mack.

• 12:39Alie Ward?

  Oh my god!

• 12:39Speaker 01

  Now, but this was only in a cab. I never had a trailer behind, but it was, it was a blast. And he also taught me how to, the beginnings of how to operate a bulldozer, which is not the same as an FELA, front-end loader. Like, each of these pieces of equipment requires specific skill and time and forms of knowledge that we don't, we don't acknowledge the expertise that is required to do those particular kinds of jobs really well. Like, you can use a bulldozer to gouge them out of a landscape when you Meant to have a nice, smooth surface, right? And it, same with driving a Mack truck. Which is why I'm glad we didn't have a trailer when he's teaching me how to do the double clutch thing. So cool, that Mack truck.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  So I was, that was, and then most of the cabs for sanitation trucks are also Mack. But they're all automatic transmission now. There are no more standard transmission trucks, which is probably just as well. But not great for fuel efficiency, but that's a whole other thing.

• 13:36Alie Ward?

  But before you are able to drive a garbage truck, do they let you do donuts in like a church parking lot? Like when you're 16 and you've got to figure out how to drive a car?

• 13:50Speaker 01

  So, no, short answer. Longer answer. When I took the test for the permit for my commercial driver's license, I already had a regular driver's license. Cause I didn't grow up in New York City. So we actually did donuts on frozen parking lots in high school, in the wee hours of the morning with no grownups around, being a little bad, misbehaving children. So when I took the CDL and went through the, the training that sanitation offers, which is very thorough and meticulous. And then the road test and all of that, I was very nervous. But when I arrived for that first day of class, I'm sitting next to a young man, half my age.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  And he never drove anything before he got his CDL because he was born and raised in New York City, where you don't really need a car, the way a suburban high schooler or a teenager may need a car. In fact, I've, I don't know if this is true, but I have read that in, that the rates of teenage mortality are the lowest in New York City around the country because they're not driving cars.

• 15:02Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:04Alie Ward?

  I checked into this. And the state with the highest teen death rate? Not New York. The top three were Louisiana, Alaska, and Arkansas. So be careful on those roads, kiddo. You gotta slow down, pay attention. You know what? Just so a tip for me, designate a driver. My sister was the victim of a drunk driving accident when she was 16, and she was airlifted to a hospital. The windshield was shattered by her face. And luckily for us, she made it out and she is fine. But she was picking glass out of her forehead years later. The guy driving broke a bunch of his legs.

• 15:47Alie Ward?

  So designate a driver or volunteer to be one for one of your friends, who will love you all the more, knowing that they have a safe ride home during which they will not get killed or arrested. Just saying. And buckle up. Thank you.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  So I knew how to do donuts in a parking lot, right? But that doesn't mean you know how to do it with a garbage truck, with a collection truck. That's its own. I will say, you do own the road in a collection truck, because nobody wants to be near you. They don't know if you're empty or full. They just don't want to be anywhere near you. So you kind of are the king. Your majesty. Which was fun.

• 16:23Alie Ward?

  Robyn's 2013 TED Talk is titled, "What I Discovered in New York City Trash." And she explains that a childhood camping trip left a really deep impression. And by that, I think I mean it scarred her. But thankfully so for us.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  We got to our campsite. It was a lean-to on a bluff, looking over a crystal beautiful lake. When I discovered a horror. Behind the lean-to was a dump, maybe 40 feet square, with rotting apple cores and balled up aluminum foil and a dead sneaker. And I was astonished. I was very angry. And I was deeply confused. The campers, who were too lazy to take out what they had brought in, who did they think would clean up after them? That question stayed with me, and it simplified a little. Who cleans up after us?

• 17:16Alie Ward?

  Now, you mentioned that this was an early obsession for you, but talking about the history of garbage, if we could go back, when does garbage start in humanity? I mean, we have probably piles of charred bones and things from dating back to the beginning of humans gathering, there have been garbage piles, right?

• 17:37Speaker 01

  Depends, again, on your definition of garbage. Right. So, one of the fun challenges is to decide, when is it "garbage," quotes around the word, and when is it evidence, archaeological treasure, some kind of tidbit of a story of our own past? I did a lot of work before, just as part of the bigger project, with what's called the Human Relations Area Files, ATRFs. So, the Human Relations Area Files are a compendium of ethnographic data cross-referenced around, you name the category, kinship, child rearing, economic, and, you know, to say

• 18:17Speaker 01

  "economy," that's a huge subject, so underneath that, inheritance rules, ways of organizing what we might call religious belief and ceremony and ritual. And so, I spent quite a while looking at how cultures have dealt with waste, how do they define it, and what do they do about it? And one of the intriguing findings, I think, is that we've kind of never come up with a particularly great way of dealing with it. Some small-scale cultures, when it just got to be too much, they just upped and moved to a different location. Others have buried it over time to the point where they raise their elevation. In fact, some of the older cities of the world, this is true, in Rome and some of the

• 19:00Speaker 01

  other great cities in Europe and parts of Asia, some have specific scavenger species they rely on to take care of what we would call waste. Putting it in a nearby waterway has been very fashionable for millennia.

• 19:14Alie Ward?

  Wow.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  And not a problem until, of course, we, well, until many things came to pass, but when we were all smaller scale, it didn't decimate that waterway. We've burned it. We've used it for fuel. We've ignored it. We have mapped it onto different classes so that if you are closer to a given form of waste, through no fault of your own, you are considered sort of, there's a contagion kind of belief that goes with that, and then your status within that culture is diminished. In other words, we've, we kind of only to ever burn berry or dump in the water or give to scavengers. Recycling, we call it recycling, but before that word, it was just reusing something until it fell apart, right?

• 20:00Speaker 01

  Which we used to do more commonly. And now it's coming back almost through this, and I don't mean this in a derogatory way, but this almost boutiquey DIY, like, "Look, I unraveled this old sweater and now I'm reknitting with that yarn," which I think is really, really cool. It doesn't scale up necessarily, and that's a problem. If we want to solve the challenge, the problem that is solid waste broadly defined, sweater unraveling by itself, let's, let's put it this way, it's a good first step.

• 20:29Speaker 02

  You're doing great.

• 20:31Alie Ward?

  And was there a really big difference in terms of how sanitation was handled pre and post-plastic era?

• 20:40Speaker 01

  Plastics have changed the whole game. We would like to believe that plastics are recyclable, but that's not really true. They degrade each time they go through a recycling process. So after a few times through, you really only have a slurry that you can't build or do anything with, and it ends up in an incinerator or landfill anyway. Plastics also off gas, always. So there's always some kind of chemical component that's inside the water of the plastic water bottle, inside the food in the plastic packaging, inside the baby's mouth when they're suckling on some plastic, you know?

• 21:22Speaker 01

  So that's another waste product that is invisible to us, but that is, that we now carry in our bodies, especially in our fat cells. There is almost no species of being on the planet that does not have Some of these so-called forever chemicals inside of ourselves. All like, name the animal, name the insect. Those chemicals are present.

• 21:47Alie Ward?

  These chemicals, I looked into it, are called per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances, or PFOS. And there are close to 5,000 different types of PFOS. But one thing they have in common is that they don't occur in nature, and bacteria can't break them down. And neither can fire, or water, fun. Why don't you want such a hardy, toxic compound in your system? Oh, just things like changes in liver enzymes, increased risk of high blood pressure or preeclampsia in pregnant people, small decreases in infant birth weights, increased risk of kidney or testicular cancer, increased cholesterol levels, and decreased vaccine response in children,

• 22:29Alie Ward?

  according to the CDC's Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. But wait, maybe we have a solution here. In August of 2020, a study was published called "Low-Temperature Mineralization of Perfluorocarboxylate Acids" by some environmental chemists at Northwestern University, who found that a few types of PFOS can indeed decompose using some inexpensive and easy-to-obtain reagents, sodium hydroxide and dimethyl sulf oxide, in case you're taking notes, at about 248 degrees Fahrenheit, which is a relatively low temperature. That won't even bake a cookie. But the end product is non-toxic and benign. This is amazing. This just came out a few months ago. Did we fix forever chemicals?

• 23:14Alie Ward?

  Not at all, not at all. This only works on certain types of PFOS, and environmental scientists still say to stop making and dumping them, like we learned in the oceanology episode. The first task in cleaning up the ocean is to stop letting so much trash into the ocean in the first place. Otherwise, you're just chasing your toxic tail. Oh, speaking of plastics.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  Plastics also connects to a kind of industrial process and complex of planned obsolescence and

• 23:49Speaker 01

  Trying to convince a larger public that each of us as an individual is responsible for making sure that plastic object goes into the right bin to be recycled, even though the recyclability of it is mostly a myth. But there was a deliberate campaign that started in the 1950s to teach us that we are the individuals responsible, and by extension municipalities are responsible.

• 24:15Speaker 03

  The responsibility for sanitary refuse disposal falls upon every citizen.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  Not the manufacturers of those products. That changes everything. And the other problem with plastics, of course, among many others, is their longevity. They don't biodegrade, or if they do, it's very, very, very slow. And meanwhile, they are contributing their chemical composition to these larger environments and animals.

• 24:45Speaker 04

  I just want to say one word to you. Just one word. Yes, sir. Are you listening? Yes, I am. Plastics.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  So, yeah, plastics, plastics has changed everything.

• 25:00Alie Ward?

  Does it change the way that you live your life or what you use? I think we're all, we're all so anxious about it. We don't know what to do.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, that's a real problem. And especially this complete contradiction. I have been taught that I, as an individual, am responsible for saving the planet by making sure to recycle my plastics, and glass and paper and metal. But I know, partly because I study it, and then other people know this sort of in their gut, like, yeah, this doesn't, I'm not sure, we've had recycling for a while now, I don't see the earth getting better, so what's going on? So it creates this cognitive dissonance. It erodes trust in the systems that are telling us to please recycle. I think that learning the practice of recycling, being religious about it,

• 25:49Speaker 01

  no pun intended, I think that's important because it can create a push from the ground up, from those of us as individuals, together to press for, are there plastic polymers that could actually be recycled? Are there compostable plastics that could work in municipal compost systems? Because if something says it's compostable, okay, that's great. Compostable in what context? Through what specific mechanisms of heat and time? And those are built very carefully to account for whatever is the primary material you know you're going to be dealing with, like yard waste and food scraps. But if you add compostable plastic, that doesn't necessarily come out the other side

• 26:32Speaker 01

  as compost, but as still breaking down pieces of plastic that need a different system. So if enough of us are frustrated enough, but we also practice this, we do recycle, that's a great raw material for what could become an effective political agitation to make plastic recycling real, if that's chemically possible.

• 26:56Alie Ward?

  So it's time to get mad as hell, if you're not already, about a lot of stuff. And there are so many triangles with a number in the middle.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  Those don't mean anything.

• 27:05Alie Ward?

  What?

• 27:06Speaker 01

  Well, let me back up. They mean, they tell you the primary polymer component of that kind of plastic. But it does not mean it's recyclable. And in fact, the only ones that can go through the system a few times are numbers one and two.

• 27:22Alie Ward?

  Ah!

• 27:23Speaker 01

  The PET and HDPE, high-density polyethylene and, I forget what PET stands for, polyethylene phthalate, something.

• 27:31Alie Ward?

  PET, side note, stands for polyethylene terephthalate, and it's the most common thermoplastic polymer resin of the polyester family, if it does say so itself. It's very common. PET isn't so much, it's in your clothes, it's in fiberglass, it's in a bunch of manufacturing items, but where you know it best is probably food containers, while squinting at the bottom of them.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  So the chasing arrows symbol was a college student who won an award when there was a design competition in the 70s to come up with some way of indicating recycling matters. But then it got co-opted and most people believe like if the chasing arrow symbol is on the bottom of a plastic container, well, it's recyclable.

• 28:18Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  Nuh-uh.

• 28:19Alie Ward?

  Wow. I've been lied to.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  Yes, you have. Oh, you have. We all have. That's what I talk about propaganda. That's what I mean. And it is a deliberate strategy of a conglomeration of corporations who go under the umbrella of Keep America Beautiful.

• 28:33Alie Ward?

  Mm-hmm. Ah, my internal monologue here was like, what? And yes, I looked it up. Keep America Beautiful is a nonprofit. It was founded in 1953 by the beverage and packaging industry and Philip Morris and other tobacco giants. So by campaigning to have volunteers picking up cigarette butts on their weekends, they could sway legislation away from smoking bans on beaches and in parks. So Pepsi, Coke, Nestle, McDonald's, Dow Chemical, and other places with deep pockets and high stakes fund Keep America Beautiful to make sure that the focus stays on litter and recycling and your personal

• 29:17Alie Ward?

  responsibility instead of the responsibility of the manufacturers and the distributors of plastics in the first place. And there's this one infamous 1970 Keep America Beautiful ad, and in it, an indigenous man, wearing a fringed buckskin pantsuit, rows his birch bark canoe down a river that's thick with trash and in the shadow of these billowing factories, so ominous. And he hauls his canoe onto a littered beach. And in a close-up, we see a single tear streaming down his face with the message.

• 29:53Speaker 02

  People start pollution. People can stop it.

• 29:58Alie Ward?

  That native actor, Iron Eyes Cody, side note, was actually not at all indigenous. He was Italian. His birth name was Espera Oscar de Corti. He lied his whole life about it, but the message, people start pollution, people can stop it. Does that include companies? The PSA seems to skirt over the American notion. Of corporate personhood. But if you don't own a multi-billion dollar company that sells sugar water in plastic bottles, how much responsibility can a person bear? We can make a difference, though, right? And so when you see, you know, three different trashcans, one says recyclables,

• 30:40Alie Ward?

  one says composting, and one says landfill, which is like a good way to make you think, like, am I going to be lazy and put it all in the landfill thing? You're like, no, that makes me a shitty person. I'm going to sit here and figure out which of these napkins is compostable. Do those things really make it to those destinations?

• 30:58Speaker 01

  It depends. Where are we talking about? Do we mean New York City? They're called PSRR, Public Space Recycling Receptacles. They are collected by different trucks with different destinations.

• 31:08Alie Ward?

  Oh, OK.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  The problem becomes, as you touch on, are those different bins contaminated? So for compost, does someone throw out the plastic water bottles or the plastic bag? Well, if it's contaminated beyond a certain point, you cannot take it to the recycling facility or the compost yard because it really now is just garbage. Same with recyclables. If you put too much food waste in the recycle bin, you gum up the works at the recycling facility. So, yes, it's going to go to the right place if we put it in the right bin, but then it's often very confusing. If you have a single-use coffee cup from, you know, name the major barista source of coffee. It's a paper exterior.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  It's often a plastic-lined interior. And then you have the plastic of a different polymer that is the lid. Where does that go?

• 32:01Alie Ward?

  I don't know.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  It depends on the system that a given collection process is using. Does the municipality take that plastic-lined paper and they do it through paper recycling? Or does that go through plastic recycling? So there is no national standard.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  Should there be? Maybe. If there isn't, that partly means that manufacturers can keep making it up as they go along. And then you have this plethora of materials that have no clear next step, and also are very complex to break down into components that can be recycled.

• 32:34Alie Ward?

  So you can check with your local regulations, but I just checked, I'm in California, and plastics with a 1 or 2 on them, it's called an SPI code for Society of the Plastics Industry, which sounds very fake, but the SPI codes, 1 or 2 chuck in the recycling bin. And I guess plastic bottles with codes 3 through 7 can be returned to recycling centers, and you may get a deposit back for them. But recycling cans and clean aluminum foil is definitely possible. Electronic waste should never go into landfills, but recycling centers will take it. Batteries, same thing. And of course, recycling organic waste by composting is

• 33:14Alie Ward?

  a great idea. Apparently 20% of the US food supply is tossed away. It's about 96 billion pounds of food waste a year. That, plus yard waste, is a third of what gets thrown into landfills. And I was like, well, at least that's biodegradable, right? Not as much as you think. When it gets tossed in a landfill, it makes way more methane gas, which is 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide in terms of greenhouse gases and global warming. But when you're composting it, it's broken down aerobically because it's interfacing with oxygen more, and it produces way less methane than when it gets tossed in a landfill. And you got a lawn to mow, suburban dwellers? Leave those lawn

• 33:57Alie Ward?

  clippings right on the lawn. You don't have to rake them up. You don't have to go put them in a bin. Apparently, it'll act as fertilizer. Your lawn's gonna love it. So now you don't have to get a bunch of cut grass up your nose, throwing it in the green bin. So you're welks. But back to Manhattan.

• 34:14Alie Ward?

  Getting back to you, just going over cobblestone, driving a garbage truck.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:21Alie Ward?

  Is it called a garbage truck?

• 34:22Speaker 01

  Collection truck.

• 34:23Alie Ward?

  A collection truck?

• 34:24Speaker 01

  And which, which, let me just add.

• 34:25Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  I find that the coolest euphemistic, it's quite real and a euphemism.

• 34:30Alie Ward?

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:30Speaker 01

  I'm on collection. What do you collect? Old clocks? You know, like Barbie dolls, cabbage patch? Yeah, I'm, I'm on collection today. I do collection.

• 34:39Alie Ward?

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  But I'm collecting, I am collecting garbage. So a collection truck, it's a very accurate.

• 34:44Alie Ward?

  That is accurate.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  But it's also, it could mean so much else, right? I love that, I love that it's called that.

• 34:51Alie Ward?

  And when you are collecting, how, were you collecting just the garbage bags on the side of the sidewalk? Which, by the way, as a Californian, as a West Coaster, I'm like, oh, you just put the hefty bag on the sidewalk. It just goes on the sidewalk. There's no like cans to drag in necessarily.

• 35:10Speaker 01

  Depends on the neighborhood.

• 35:11Alie Ward?

  Okay. Oh, okay. I didn't know that.

• 35:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:14Alie Ward?

  Do those get flung on the truck and sorted later? Or where does that go?

• 35:18Speaker 01

  So when you say sorted, what do you mean?

• 35:20Alie Ward?

  Like, let's say that you've got a black plastic bag full of garbage. Do, does that get opened and cans go one way?

• 35:29Speaker 01

  Robin was shaking her head no, like I had just landed from a distant utopian galaxy.

• 35:36Alie Ward?

  No, that just goes landfill.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  Or incinerator. I'm sorry, waste to energy facility.

• 35:41Alie Ward?

  Waste to energy facility. Is that, so yeah, walk me through a little bit, what happens when you're a plastic bag on the sidewalk? And where does it, where does it go when someone like you says, I'm here to make the city cleaner?

• 35:56Speaker 01

  It goes in the back of the truck.

• 35:58Alie Ward?

  Mm-hmm.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  And then depending on what part of the city that truck is in.

• 36:02Alie Ward?

  Mm-hmm.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  It will go to a transfer facility.

• 36:07Alie Ward?

  Mm-hmm.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  Meaning I'm now emptying the truck into a different point of its journey. And then, in some cases, that, that next step is the last step. So in several different Manhattan districts, all of the household garbage goes to that waste to energy facility in Essex, New Jersey. It's a fascinating plant. It's, I was lucky enough to have a tour last spring and. Incineration is always the big bad guy in the room. However, and I'm going to get killed for saying this, but in terms of what gets off-gassed and the kinds of pollutants that are released and the kinds of hazards that are created,

• 36:50Speaker 01

  incineration, by some arguments, is a far better choice than a landfill.

• 36:55Alie Ward?

  Wow.

• 36:56Speaker 01

  So if someone says to you, "All right, we have to put a land..." You're going to live downstream, downwind from a landfill or an incinerator, pick one. I would pick the incinerator.

• 37:05Alie Ward?

  Wow, okay.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  And it's partly just what I've learned doing research on this for years, but then also seeing the kinds of standards that those facilities are held to and the oversight that is imposed on them to make sure those standards are met. It's not perfect, of course, I'm not saying that, but there is no perfect solution yet. And yeah, I would choose, oh man, I'm going to get absolutely slammed.

• 37:32Alie Ward?

  But that's also, that's an informed opinion, though. You know, it's informed and it's an opinion.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  But you write an opinion, quite so. It's my opinion.

• 37:41Alie Ward?

  Mm-hmm.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  But so, all right, so from some districts, it goes straight to that facility. Other districts, it goes to a transfer station where it goes out by barge or by rail, and then it ends up in upstate New York or Virginia. There is no longer a location within New York City where we dispose of our own garbage. The last landfill closed in 2001, it's fresh kills on the west central coast of Staten Island. Yeah, so we send it far away. Last I knew, the recyclables, once they are sorted at facilities in Brooklyn and Queens and New Jersey, they go to nine different states for the next step of their processing.

• 38:27Alie Ward?

  And with plastics, I understand that we sell our recycling overseas sometimes?

• 38:33Speaker 01

  We sent a lot of our plastics to China. And China said to us, okay, look, we have an agreement about rates of contamination that can only be a very, very small percentage. And you all are blowing that percentage over and over and over. And our side of the Pacific, we're like, yeah, okay, sorry, my bad. And we kept doing it. So China, in 2018, finally said, enough, no more, we don't take it.

• 39:06Alie Ward?

  Wow.

• 39:07Speaker 01

  And so it created a ripple across the world of recycling that is still, it's, those ripples are still being felt because they were our primary buyer of plastics, plastic waste recyclables. And so now where do they go? It could have sent that ripple back up the manufacturing process to be like, ah, maybe this is a good time to take a look at why we create so much plastic waste and figure out how to stop doing that. It hasn't yet had that impact.

• 39:39Alie Ward?

  Was this from people who don't fully rinse the mayonnaise jar before tossing it in the recycling?

• 39:45Speaker 01

  I think it was more than that. I think it was actually mixing plastics with, like, really gross shitty trash in big enough quantities that when you break open the bale of what's supposed to just be plastic and now you find stuff that, not only can you not reprocess that, you're now putting those workers in harm's way. And like, it just, from what I understand, it was more than just Mrs. McGillicuddy did not rinse her yogurt container.

• 40:13Alie Ward?

  Okay. Because every time I've, like, got a peanut butter container, I'm like-

• 40:17Speaker 01

  Those are the worst, right?

• 40:18Alie Ward?

  I know. I'm like, I gotta get some hot water in this. You know what I mean?

• 40:21Speaker 01

  And then how much energy are you using to clean it versus how much energy is going to be used to recycle it, but really not, you're going to downsize? So I feel you.

• 40:29Alie Ward?

  You are not the only person to wonder how clean is clean. And according to the employee-owned San Francisco Waste Management Company, Recology, well done. They say, please empty all food residue and liquids from your food containers, from your cans, bottles, jars, before tossing them in the recycling container. And they say, for example, if there's a small amount of ketchup remaining in the bottle, give it a quick rinse to ensure you don't contaminate other recycled paper or plastic products. And they suggest to conserve water, you can rinse the containers with sink water after you wash dishes. Just kind of like sploogey, sploogey in there. So if you have ever thrown away a squeeze bottle with two fingers of stubborn mustard at the bottom and then created a narrative that they probably like boil off the mustard,

• 41:14Alie Ward?

  we have something in common. We were both wrong. Now, what about recycling in a less melt it down and reform it kind of way? What about you on the collection route? Did you ever see like an antique hutch that you were like, well, holy shit, I'm gonna come back here with a truck later and get that myself?

• 41:32Speaker 01

  All the time.

• 41:33Alie Ward?

  Really?

• 41:34Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. And so that's a category of garbage called Mongo. And Mongo is either the thing itself or the act of deciding to retrieve that thing. My best ever was after a big snowstorm, when the whole workforce of the Department of Sanitation was put on snow removal, meaning they're not picking up the garbage. But we're still making the garbage. We never stop making the garbage. And it piles up and piles up and piles up. So finally, the streets are clear enough to put people back on. Then it's called chasing garbage. And I'm on a block behind the Dakota, the fancy apartment building on the Upper West Side. And it's, the garbage is as, the pile is as high as my shoulder

• 42:18Speaker 01

  and it's from one end of this long block to the other. And it's raining and it's cold and it's late in the day. And the truck is so full, it's almost bulging. And

• 42:30Speaker 01

  We're done. We just, we can't fit anymore in the truck. And one of my partners, there's one bag. He just tosses one last bag, but he has a sense of like, where there might be something cool inside of a given bag. So he opens it up, which you're not supposed to do, but he opens it up. And inside, folded as if on someone's closet shelf, are a set of really beautiful clothing. Not fancy, but like high-end brands of jeans and shirts. And they all happen to be my size. And so he says, do you want this? I'm like, hell, yes. So I take those home. I did take them to the cleaners, you know? But then for years, I had this really great wardrobe addendum

• 43:12Speaker 01

  that all came from somewhere in, I mean, who, the famous people live in the Dakota. I don't know, maybe it was somebody's famous Lucky Brand jeans. I don't know. Anyway.

• 43:22Alie Ward?

  That's a good find.

• 43:23Speaker 01

  It was a great find. I've found some great stuff. But then there are people who, there's a fellow named Nelson Molina, who was on the job for almost 35 years. And he worked for the vast majority of those years in East Harlem and the Upper East Side. So his route, that district splits some of the wealthiest zip codes on the planet with housing projects and people who are not wealthy. And he has a very finely tuned sense of when there's something being thrown out that really does not deserve to be thrown out. And over his years on the job, he assembled this astonishing collection of tens of thousands of objects that he has on display.

• 44:07Speaker 01

  It's not open to the public yet. We hope to fold it into what will eventually be the museum for sanitation. But between his genius for recognizing when there's something special in the trash and then his curatorial genius of how it's arranged, it's dazzling.

• 44:25Speaker 05

  My senses go off. I look in the bag and boom, there it is.

• 44:29Alie Ward?

  That was a clip from the 2015 film One Man's Trash, which was directed and produced by Kelly Adams. And I'll include a Vimeo link on my website. But it's delightful and charming and, dare I say, inspiring.

• 44:40Speaker 01

  So that's like Mongo madness, Mongo majesty, Mongo beauty. And the stuff that people threw out.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  Baptismal certificates and wedding photos and really beautifully framed diplomas from high, like Columbia Law and Harvard, you know, like things you think, whoa, these are for life. In fact, one of the diplomas, some journalists were through and they contacted the woman whose name was on one of these fancy diplomas, who's now living somewhere in Europe. And they're like, you want it back? She's like, hell no, I threw it, I don't want it. I don't want it. What? Yeah. Nelson's collection is cool for many reasons, but one of them is, it really asks you to think about how these things that are treasures were defined as trash by somebody, and why

• 45:35Speaker 01

  is it so easy to do that? And shouldn't there be other ways of ridding yourself of something you don't want anymore besides putting it on the curb for a garbage truck? And then what might those systems be? The challenge is time. If Aunt Gladys dies, and I'm her last living relative, and I've got to clear out her apartment, and it's 50 years of whatever were her treasures, but I don't want them, am I going to spend the weeks and weeks and weeks of finding those new homes, or I'm just going to put it on the curb? Right? Yeah, I'm going to put it on the curb. So, I mean, I, generically speaking. So, it just points to the need for different systems, the question about our relationship

• 46:15Speaker 01

  to time in general, and then gratitude for Nelson's stubbornness in deciding, this treadle Singer sewing machine with all its parts should not be in the trash. Or this film projector that can only show really, really, really old films. And look, there are the really, really old silent movies, right? Right. And like, and he has a whole wall of just Furbies, and a whole other wall of just a Pez dispenser. So, some of it is, you know, sort of lovely, silly things, but... He has a whole thing of photographs. You can spend a long time looking at the table of photographs. Who are they and why were those thrown out? And who let go of them? And are any of them still alive?

• 46:58Speaker 01

  And most of them have no identifying information. They're just pictures.

• 47:03Alie Ward?

  If you want to feel sad and scared and oddly invigorated, look up Swedish death cleaning, which is like Marie Kondo-ing your life, but while asking the question, do I want my bereaved loved ones sobbing into this casserole dish I never used? Unsure if they should give it to Goodwill? So clean out your stuff so that other people don't have to make decisions for you after you die. It's pretty simple and the stakes seem very high, which is what I need to get motivated to clean out a cabinet. On that note, a dear friend of mine recently went to an estate sale in LA and left with a box of items that they were going to throw in the trash. They were like, go ahead and take it. Seemed like it had some cool stuff in it. Turns out, the house belonged to a local archaeology professor.

• 47:48Alie Ward?

  And inside the box were some colorful pottery shards. And she asked me if I could find out anything about these pottery shards. And via social media, y'all connected me to an expert in this type of ceramics. And the box that my friend acquired from a late professor contained irreplaceable artifacts from a 1986 Central American archaeological dig. And as my friend looked deeper in the box, she texted me in horror that there was a Ziploc of human bones from a burial ground in Guatemala. So this friend tried to save some pottery from a landfill. And now we're literally working with the State Department and the consulate to repatriate human remains to Central America

• 48:33Alie Ward?

  that should have never been in a box in a closet. So spring cleaning, once a year. Let's go through all of our shit as if we were about to die. Return your desecrated human remains back to their country of origin before a stranger accidentally buys them at your estate sale. Sell some Swedish. Sweaters on eBay, put a lamp on Mercari, Marketplace, Craigslist, I don't care. Use the buy nothing groups on Facebook in your area. Do not accidentally hoard archaeological artifacts. Ever. Has anyone ever teamed up with an economist to try to figure out how much wealth and resource is in the trash? What's the value of the trash?

• 49:18Speaker 01

  So, value defined by whom, in what context? If I am running a private waste company, that trash is worth a lot of money to me. And if I am doing separation of its components and I can find ways to monetize what is otherwise just this clump of something smelly that we call garbage, there's a lot of wealth in that. The disconnect is the individual person is letting go of that wealth and then somewhere in its next step, somebody else is deciding, no, no, there's gold in them, our bags.

• 49:54Alie Ward?

  Mm-hmm. But what is the value and who owns it once it's discarded?

• 49:58Speaker 01

  Right, and who decides what that value is? In terms of who owns it, and we're talking a lot about New York because it's the situation I know best, but once it's on the curb, if it's municipal waste, it belongs to the city of New York.

• 50:10Alie Ward?

  Mm-hmm.

• 50:11Speaker 01

  You don't own it anymore. New York City owns it. And there have been legal tug-of-wars about that very issue. New York also has two other primary categories of waste, though, which is commercial business waste, which is collected only by private companies, private waste companies, and then construction and demolition debris, or C and D, which is a third category. The bureaucracy behind these different categories is pretty thick, which is partly about preventing corruption and partly about health and safety.

• 50:42Alie Ward?

  And what about parts of cities that are built on garbage?

• 50:47Speaker 01

  Well, I do a talk.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  In fact, almost every talk I do about garbage starts with the map of Lower Manhattan, the original shoreline, with this web on top, which is the contemporary street grid. And I have a pin on the five places where Peter Stuyvesant told New Amsterdam colonists in 1657, here's where you are allowed to throw out your trash. And it's all on the water's edge. And if you look at that, the last pin I show is at a place called Coente Slip and Pearl Street. And then I show a slide of that exact place with the same pin, and it's three blocks in from the water's edge. And all of that is various forms of fill, much of which is garbage.

• 51:34Speaker 01

  While Robert Moses was sort of the informal dictator of New York City and New York State, he determined where every ton of garbage was deposited so that he would make land.

• 51:44Alie Ward?

  Robert Moses, what a character, wow. So, he deposited garbage in areas where poor people lived, and even designed low underpasses so that people without cars, meaning folks who ride the bus, couldn't access public beaches. He was like, no car, no beach. And one place where the land was built up is on a place called Barron Island, part of Brooklyn. Exact beach is called Dead Horse Bay, which like can't be called Dead Horse Bay because of dead horses in it, right? That's gotta be metaphorical. Nope, there was a glue factory where all the pre-automobile dead horses were sent to. And the waters of Dead Horse Bay were littered with chopped up dead horse bones. Dead Horse Bay also smelled a lot like dead horses.

• 52:28Alie Ward?

  But the land was filled up with the city's trash and covered with just a dusting of topsoil that washed away. And to this day, you can walk along Glass Bottle Beach, kind of like a watery time capsule of trash deposited in early 1953. There are rusted cash registers, tires, warped crusty leather shoes, soda bottles of all kinds, and yes, the occasional horse bone. And I should say, you can't actually walk along the shore, as it was closed two years ago after radioactive waste was found in 31 different spots. So they're working on it. But you can Google Pictures.

• 53:10Alie Ward?

  So many bottles. People say it sounds like gently clinking champagne flutes or shimmering wind chimes as the bay laps at the glass.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  And so we are literally walking on our own history, our own archaeology, all the time. But that's not unique to New York at all. Cities all over the world have done this since time immemorial.

• 53:32Alie Ward?

  How does the garbage not just float out to sea?

• 53:35Speaker 01

  Well, sometimes it does. Oops. Sometimes it does. It depends on how well-built the landfill is, how, what kind of innovative construction was put in place for it. There are parts of the city where it is just eroding back out into the sea. Not many, but there's some.

• 53:55Alie Ward?

  I have so many questions from listeners. Can I ask you some?

• 53:58Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 53:58Alie Ward?

  Oh, my gosh. But as always, before your questions, we have some money to discard toward a worthy cause chosen by the ologists. And Robyn pointed us toward the Sanitation Foundation, which is the official non-profit partner of the New York City Department of Sanitation. And their mission is to keep the city clean while celebrating and supporting the essential sanitation workforce and advancing the city's ambitious zero-waste agenda. They're also making the first-ever New York City Sanitation Museum, featuring the treasures in the trash collected and curated by Nelson Molina, who we talked about earlier. So find out more or donate yourself at sanitationfoundation.org. And that donation was made possible by sponsors of the show. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace.

• 54:43Alie Ward?

  If you haven't heard me gushing about Squarespace for years, it's an all-in-one website platform. Whether you're trying to grow a business you have or if you're just a baby business getting started, it has everything you need. That's where I secured my domain name. It helped me build a professional site. I can update it so easily. I've been using Squarespace since before ologies existed. After procrastinating for years, I literally built my website in one evening. They have templates, they have flexible editing tools. Squarespace also makes it easy to share your work. You can book clients, you can get paid. They have built-in tools for scheduling and invoicing and email all in one place. Whenever someone I know needs a website, whether they're a scientist that needs to put their work up

• 55:27Alie Ward?

  or someone who's just starting a business, I'm like, dude, Squarespace. So head to Squarespace.com/ologies for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code OLOGIES to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. You can do it. Peppa Pig is your preschooler's best friend. Give the gift of bike riding confidence this year and help Peppa learn to ride her bike. Kids can imagine learning to ride a bike with the Ready Pedal Go Peppa Bicycle Playset. Put Peppa's helmet on, attach the push stick to her bike, and push to make her pedal. Ready Pedal Go Peppa and more from Peppa Pig are now available at all major retailers this holiday season.

• 56:11Alie Ward?

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• 56:49Alie Ward?

  Listen, sometimes you get out of your routine. That happened to me recently when I went out of town and I realized I forgot my Ritual, essential for women 18 plus. It's a multi that I've been taking for years. And guess who landed in another country without them? Me. Didn't feel right. They contain nine key nutrients, two delayed-release capsules designed for optimal absorption. But Ritual, why do I love them so much? They have a team of scientists, they poured over thousands of studies to figure out What are common gaps that people need in their diet, but they don't actually consume? It's also designed to be gentle on the stomach. You can take it with or without food, which I love. Plus, I like that it looks like a tiny lava lamp. I tell you that every time, but it has these beads and oil. And it tastes like mint. Easy down the hatch. I usually take them in the morning.

• 57:34Alie Ward?

  And the reason why I've stuck with Ritual for so many years is because my schedule is all over the place. Sometimes I'm eating breakfast. Sometimes I'm running through an airport with one shoe. So instead of striving for perfect health, aim for supporting foundational health. Save 25% on your first month at ritual.com/ologies. That's ritual.com/ologies for 25% off your first month. Every time I record a Quince ad, I'm like, look at me wearing head to toe Quince. I feel like this is enough of an ad. I can just stop here. But if you're like, huh, what is that? Quince sells clothes and shoes and bags, even stuff for your house that are classic, well-made, and priced at 50 to 80% less than similar brands because they cut out the middleman. They work directly with ethical factories.

• 58:17Alie Ward?

  So you have luxury quality pieces without a luxury price tag. Perhaps this holiday season, do you know what it feels like to get a cashmere sweater as a gift? I don't, because I'm the one getting them for people, and so can you, and they're affordable too. They also have 14-earr gold earrings, high-quality down outerwear, cozy gloves made of cashmere, leather bags. They have great bedding, cookware, luggage. So whether you're giving that to you or to someone else, you can give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, or you can go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK too.

• 59:00Alie Ward?

  And when Quince asks you where you heard about them, just let them know it was Ologies. It's the best way to support the show. Okay, let's dig through your inquiries. They have so much value, so many good questions. Um, I'm just gonna start straight out with Kyla Kelly's question, who asks, how fucked are we? Alia Meyer says, okay, seriously, how much garbage is there? Kelly Shaver wants to know, how much trash is on Earth? Just how fucked?

• 59:33Speaker 01

  So I think because of plastics, we're seriously fucked.

• 59:36Alie Ward?

  Okay, that's what I thought.

• 59:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. In terms of a metric of like, how precisely fucked are we? I'm not, I wouldn't have, I don't know. I have a child and I am often lying awake at night, seriously worried about the future that that child, that child is 23, that child is no longer tiny, but that child is young enough. Maybe they will have a child of their own someday. What? What crisis are we guaranteed to leave them? And I can't answer it, but the possibilities are numberless. So yeah, very fucked.

• 1:00:15Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:16Speaker 01

  Thank you for that question.

• 1:00:17Alie Ward?

  Yeah. I mean, that's a, that was the answer, I thought. Good to hear from an expert.

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  An expert, that's my expert, yes.

• 1:00:24Alie Ward?

  Robin later emailed me to say that though she came off as rather emphatic about it, she wanted to add that being fucked is not the same as being hopeless. And where we're at, if things don't change, is really bad. But that hoping and striving for change and improvement is still the right move, as always. So don't throw your good intentions in the garbage. Besides, is there even room for them? Christina Weaver wants to know, is there a real possibility of running out of places to put our garbage? And the movie Wally comes to mind when they think of this. They say, have you seen Wally?

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  Five times. I love Wally.

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  It's one of my favorite movies.

• 1:01:13Speaker 01

  No, we are not running out of places, in part because more current landfill technology uses a cellular system whereby you are encouraging the decomposition of what's in there. So it happens faster than if you just bury it and walk away. And then each, so there's like a quadrangle of cells. And when the last cell is as decomposed as it can be, it's much less quantity. And so you can reuse it. Also...

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  There are vast stretches of, I mean, if we wanted to, we could fill all those lovely, the plains of the Midwest and the rural area, like, we can, if we want to keep landfilling, we will not run out of space for a very, very, very long time. It's going to cost arms and legs and heads and toes to get it where we want it to go, right, by whatever transportation we choose, but if we want to do that, we're not going to run out of space anytime soon.

• 1:02:05Alie Ward?

  Is it more about not producing so much?

• 1:02:11Speaker 01

  Municipal solid waste in the United States, and that's the technical term for what most people think of when they hear the word garbage, like, what's in your kitchen wastebasket or on the curb in the litter basket, that accounts for, at the very, very most, 3% of the nation's waste stream. So, I talked earlier about propaganda. There is a lot of attention to what's at the curb and where it goes and the harms it causes, all of which are real, but offstage, with far less public attention, are the far more harmful, much larger quantities of waste from a host of industrial and agricultural

• 1:02:54Speaker 01

  and mining and medical systems, among other big categories. So, yes, we should make less, but it's, again, this question of scale, it has to scale up beyond us as people, individuals, and individual cities. Again, I'm not therefore saying we shouldn't recycle, we shouldn't generate less waste in our own lives, because that is the start. We don't smoke in almost any public venue anymore. That happened because of a confluence of influence from scientists, health experts, and just plain old people who were tired of getting their air polluted everywhere they

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  went, as well as the devastating health consequences of smoking cigarettes, right? So, it wasn't because the government woke up one day and said, "Oh, my, we should stop people from smoking because it would be good for them." That's not what happened. It happened from the ground up. One of my dreams is that plastic water bottles will be similarly scarce in the world from a similar kind of push, because if we really believe that, then the change is within our power, together with each other. It has to be a coalition. It can't just be me, myself, and I.

• 1:04:07Alie Ward?

  And for anyone wondering when plastic water bottles started choking the planet, you can look no further than the marketing success of Perrier water in the 1970s. Because reports linking diet sodas to health risks started rising. And so this Franch mineral water became very popular through marketing to the yuppie community. And then Nestle bought Perrier in 1992. Pepsi entered the arena, launching Aqua Fina in 1995. And then Coke hopped in the bottled water waters in 1999 when they launched Dasani. Did you know that Aqua Fina and Dasani are Pepsi and Coke? Did you know that? Did you also know, the huge secret?

• 1:04:51Alie Ward?

  Most of that water, even if it purports to be from Yosemite Springs or whatnot, it's actually just tap water. It's just municipal water, filtered, bottled, and it costs more than gasoline per gallon. We've been had. But patrons Suzy Shipman and Ella Grace both asked if we'll ever go back to a less wasteful and maybe plastic-free existence.

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  There's a brilliant book called Waste and Want by a historian named Susan Strasser. And she delves deep into how disposability became our preferred choice over reuse. For example, you're on a train, you go to the restroom. It used to be a towel that rolled, which I remember.

• 1:05:38Alie Ward?

  I remember those too.

• 1:05:39Speaker 01

  Right? Now, I think people might be horrified to go into the Amtrak restroom and not have a paper towel to use. Same with, there used to be public drinking options around the city with cups on chains attached to the fountain, so you could just dip the cup and drink from the cup. I don't think we would do that anymore. And there are good reasons why we would hesitate to do it. But the alternative of a discardable, single-use, that creates a host of nightmares that are on the other side of it. So, the other thing about the rise of single-use plastics, you're selling more, right? Plastics, they are manufactured and sold. And the more single-use utensils we use with our takeout food, or the more wrap we have

• 1:06:24Speaker 01

  around our throwaway Dixie cup, whatever it is, somebody's making money on that.

• 1:06:28Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:29Speaker 01

  So partly, it's follow the dollar.

• 1:06:32Alie Ward?

  That's a really interesting point.

• 1:06:33Speaker 01

  There are still city water fountains all over the place, and I drink from them without any hesitation, and New York City water is famously wonderful and healthy and pure, et cetera. So, yeah.

• 1:06:42Alie Ward?

  I at least love seeing more places in airports where you can refill a water bottle, especially since, you know, in an airport, the consumerism there comes with a $9 price tag to get a glass of water. So you're like, well. Kelly Brockington and Ella had great questions. Ella wants to know, what's the difference between garbage and rubbish? And Kelly asks, garbage versus trash versus litter? Please define. Are there, are those different definitions?

• 1:07:10Speaker 01

  Not really anymore, I would say, but there used to be. There used to be distinctions.

• 1:07:15Alie Ward?

  Really?

• 1:07:16Speaker 01

  I think now they're just, the thesaurus would give you rubbish or garbage or trash as synonymous. Litter is different. Litter is sort of waste out of place, like you know it's not supposed to be at the curb or on the street. It's supposed to be in a litter basket, or a garbage bag, or a truck, or a landfill. It's not supposed to be loose. There's a fantastic novel by one of my all-time favorite authors, China Mieville, and the author's called Un London. And one of the key characters is feral trash. And I think of litter as feral trash.

• 1:07:52Alie Ward?

  Mm-hmm. It is funny, because once you put it in a litter basket, it's no longer litter.

• 1:07:57Speaker 01

  Correct, but it, trash in general and litter in particular has a way of escaping its confinements.

• 1:08:04Alie Ward?

  And Robin says that in the 1890s, New York had more clear distinctions between garbage, which usually denoted food waste, rubbish or trash, which was other items, and Excelsior, which sounds like a model of SUV, like the Lincoln Excelsior, but it really just means wood shavings and sawdust. And of course, American English favors garbage or trash. Brits call it rubbish, and their garbage cans are dustbins after the coal ashes that they collected. But anyway, yes, nice names. Gross stuff. Rubbish sounds cuter.

• 1:08:41Speaker 01

  Rubbish sounds more sophisticated.

• 1:08:43Alie Ward?

  It does. It sounds less smelly than garbage.

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  It certainly does. Yeah, garbage, garbage sounds gross, but rubbish.

• 1:08:49Alie Ward?

  Yeah. A lot of folks, I'll list them in an aside. Joe Mueller, Bree, Bree Stewart. Maria, Denai, Dejournay, Justin Sessido, and Pauline DePierre. Want to know about people. Are people going to the dump? Is that a disposition method? How often do people turn up in dumps?

• 1:09:17Speaker 01

  What people and what dumps? And what do you mean by dumps?

• 1:09:20Alie Ward?

  Like, how often are there dead bodies or body parts?

• 1:09:24Speaker 01

  Oh, you mean, oh, that. I thought you meant, how often do people just go into the dump?

• 1:09:27Alie Ward?

  Oh, no.

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  Because, you know, it's Friday night, got nothing to do. Let's go to the dump.

• 1:09:30Alie Ward?

  No, yeah.

• 1:09:30Speaker 01

  Which, in fact, people do.

• 1:09:32Speaker 06

  We have fun.

• 1:09:34Speaker 06

  I took you in a dump. I let you shoot my gun at some rats.

• 1:09:37Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:38Speaker 01

  Because some smaller towns, some smaller dumps, they put aside things that might be useful.

• 1:09:43Alie Ward?

  That's great.

• 1:09:44Speaker 01

  And you can do, like, there's a fantastic one I go to sometimes in Vermont that has a whole little building full of stuff that people don't want anymore, but somebody else might want it. And it's always fun to rummage around through that non-rubbish.

• 1:09:56Alie Ward?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:09:58Speaker 01

  In terms of bodies going to dumps, of course. I mean, that happens. It's, uh...

• 1:10:05Speaker 01

  There have been sort of myth-level stories about human bodies who have been buried at Fresh Kills landfill in New York City. Of course, there are cartoonish stories about mobsters getting rid of their enemies in the landfills of the Meadowlands and other parts and landfills in this part of the world. Almost certainly, there are. But I don't have firm stories about it.

• 1:10:34Alie Ward?

  But that's not why Fresh Kills is called Fresh Kills?

• 1:10:36Speaker 01

  No. Fresh Kills, the name comes from, the roots are in Dutch. Kills, like catskill, peakskill. It means of, near a creek or stream. So it has nothing to do with death.

• 1:10:48Alie Ward?

  Okay. But, I mean, you've never seen, like, a hand sticking out of something, have you?

• 1:10:54Speaker 01

  I have not, but there are sanitation workers I've worked with who have.

• 1:10:57Alie Ward?

  What's the protocol?

• 1:10:59Speaker 01

  All kinds of city agencies. Police, county court, the medical examiner's office, Department of Health. There's a whole... I don't know what the protocols are, but there's this... It activates a whole lot of response.

• 1:11:12Alie Ward?

  Yeah. Oh. Are rugs? Do rugs get a bad rep for a reason?

• 1:11:19Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, sometimes, yes. Also, uh, there was, there was a story from a few years ago that a crew was working a block and someone had discarded a couch and as they put it into the, the back of the truck, thousands of dollars worth of cocaine fell out of it.

• 1:11:36Alie Ward?

  Oopsie!

• 1:11:37Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, big oopsie.

• 1:11:38Alie Ward?

  Uh, is there a protocol for that or is it just like, put that on eBay, see what you can get?

• 1:11:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, they would have been fired and jailed if they had done that.

• 1:11:47Alie Ward?

  That's a good point. I guess not worth that. Um, I, did you hear the story about the guy who threw away a disk drive full of Bitcoin?

• 1:11:57Speaker 01

  I did hear that.

• 1:11:58Alie Ward?

  Has he reached out to you to be like, can you help me out here?

• 1:12:00Speaker 01

  Was he even in New York?

• 1:12:01Alie Ward?

  No, I think he was in like Essex or something. I think he was British.

• 1:12:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:05Alie Ward?

  So James Howells, a Welsh computer engineer, accidentally tossed some Bitcoin into a landfill in 2013 and has spent nearly a decade and potentially millions of dollars developing AI trash scanning schemes and robot dogs to help him locate this disk drive with his Bitcoins. How many Bitcoins? Eight thousand, which are worth about a hundred and forty-five million dollars, even with Bitcoin dropping to less than a third of its top price this year. Has he got a chance? No, it's gone, isn't it?

• 1:12:42Speaker 01

  Well, probably. I mean, it, it exists in the world. If it's in a landfill, it exists in the world. If he could convince somebody to go back and, if the records were kept well enough, to go back and have a pretty good guess of exactly where it was buried.

• 1:13:01Speaker 01

  And he was willing to probably pay a hefty amount of money to get them to excavate. Here's the other thing, though. How far down is it and what infrastructure has been put in place on top of it? Because if it's a landfill built today, there are leachate and methane and other volatile organic compound retrieval and treatment methods. So it's not just a hump of earth with garbage inside. It's a very complex, very carefully engineered geography. And if his Bitcoin thing is down many layers, and they would have to disrupt the system that then is part of the entire complex.

• 1:13:42Speaker 01

  I don't know that there's enough money in the world to convince anybody to do that.

• 1:13:45Alie Ward?

  Right. The sad thing is, I think it was like half a billion dollars on a disk drive of Bitcoin. But the sad thing is, is just Bitcoins tanked in the last six months. So it's like every day that he's not getting it is just, I just, I want him to do that eternal sunshine and just be able to take that part of his brain that knows he threw away Bitcoin and just take it out of his brain and just let him live. You know what I mean? But that brings up a good question, though. Bradley Ladwig, first time question asker, longtime listener, says that, "I've heard that new landfills are using enzymes to speed up decomposition and using methane capture to generate electricity. Are those methods being widely utilized yet?"

• 1:14:27Speaker 01

  In a contemporary landfill, yes.

• 1:14:29Alie Ward?

  Oh, okay. That's great.

• 1:14:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:32Alie Ward?

  The methane capture, does that go right back into the natural gas pipeline?

• 1:14:38Speaker 01

  So I don't, I don't know the physics or the chemistry of this, but it's part of gases that are, at least in this part of the world, sold back to the national grid and then are used to help heat homes in the area.

• 1:14:51Alie Ward?

  Okay. Just a side note on this. So, natural gas and landfill gas, or LFG, aren't the same thing. Just because when microbes are chomping and burping and doing their thing, they're also making CO2. So LFG, or landfill gas, straight out of the pipe, raw, might be 50/50 methane and CO2 with some other volatile compounds mixed in, give or take. So, vertical and horizontal pipes are buried in the landfill and they collect the gas and then it gets cooled and processed before being sold for other purposes as natural

• 1:15:32Alie Ward?

  gas. But landfills are farting, and we capture it, we cherish it, and then we burn it for money. Speaking of gross, Shelby Reardon asked, "How dirty is trash?" and Evelyn Sanchez requested info on the worst thing Robin has ever found in the garbage. She wasn't the only one. Amy Nirmatzu wants to know, "What's the nastiest thing you've ever seen?"

• 1:16:00Speaker 01

  I find

• 1:16:03Speaker 01

  a large conglomeration of maggots at the bottom, let's say, of a plastic or metal garbage can to be really, like, it absolutely wigs me out. And that's not fair to the maggots. And it's like, they're just, they're just little beings in the world. Then we create the conditions for them to exist. And in fact, if you have a, this is really gross, but if you have a wound, like a deep flesh wound, and it's not healing, but you drop a maggot in there, that maggot will eat all the dead infected flesh, and you will have a very, very healthy wound that then will heal. So maggots actually could have a role in healthcare and have had in the past. But yeah, so I, maggots are for me.

• 1:16:44Alie Ward?

  They're just babies.

• 1:16:46Speaker 01

  They're just little beings trying to exist in the world. I very, I feel that very strongly.

• 1:16:50Alie Ward?

  Just infants. They're just fly infants.

• 1:16:52Speaker 01

  Even if they were grown up flies, I'm less wigged out by them, but don't they have a right to live? And hell, we made the conditions that make them prosper, right?

• 1:17:02Alie Ward?

  We invited them to the party.

• 1:17:04Speaker 01

  We did. We threw the party. We're like, perfect for you maggots. Come on over. Same with rats. New York City, among other cities. But because we use plastic garbage bags, we have created what a colleague of mine calls ratopia.

• 1:17:17Alie Ward?

  Okay. Why? How?

• 1:17:20Speaker 01

  Because we have food waste in those bags all over the city, especially at night, because rats tend to be nocturnal. And then, so we put the, from restaurants especially, but food waste from houses as well. We put them out, the bags, bags. I don't care how minty the flavoring of the bag is. It just means the rat will have breath that smelled like he just brushed his teeth. It will not dissuade them from eating into and getting food from those bags. So as long as we are reliant on plastic bags at the curb at night, we are feeding rats.

• 1:17:57Alie Ward?

  Two things about that. Number one, there's an episode I did with Dr. Bobby Corrigan.

• 1:18:01Speaker 01

  He's my man.

• 1:18:02Alie Ward?

  I love him.

• 1:18:04Speaker 01

  Bobby is the best. He's the one who has the term ratopia. I didn't know you did one with Bobby.

• 1:18:08Alie Ward?

  Yes.

• 1:18:08Speaker 01

  I missed that. Oh, fantastic.

• 1:18:09Alie Ward?

  Urban rodentology.

• 1:18:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:11Alie Ward?

  Oh, I love him.

• 1:18:12Speaker 01

  Bobby's the best.

• 1:18:13Alie Ward?

  I love him.

• 1:18:14Speaker 01

  Bobby, yeah, no, Bobby's the best.

• 1:18:16Alie Ward?

  Oh, absolute best in the world at what he does. And there are a ton of people, Grace Robb Show, C of the K, Alison Babbel, Ally Brown, Super Sarah, Nico Peruzzi, and Diana M. All had questions about trash bags. And Grace wants to know, are there biodegradable garbage bags? C of the K wants to know, are you team-scented bags? C of the K says, I am not into tropical garbage. Are there better ways to collect our trash?

• 1:18:48Speaker 01

  Collect or leave on the curb?

• 1:18:50Alie Ward?

  We, I guess either.

• 1:18:51Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:18:52Alie Ward?

  Let's get into it.

• 1:18:55Speaker 01

  Those are two really big questions.

• 1:18:58Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 1:18:58Speaker 01

  So in terms of better ways to collect it.

• 1:19:00Alie Ward?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:19:02Speaker 01

  Certainly.

• 1:19:04Speaker 01

  If we are reliant on individual trucks, which at maximum capacity in New York, the standard truck is specced for about 12.5 tons. You, in certain conditions, you can squeeze as much as 14, 15 tons on that truck. But if you think about that we generate about 10,000 tons a day.

• 1:19:30Alie Ward?

  Woo.

• 1:19:31Speaker 01

  So, but then, then how do we, like, you don't want 8.8 million people driving somewhere with their garbage to drop off their little household waste, you know, that the infrastructure and air quality stress from that would be absurd.

• 1:19:45Alie Ward?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:19:46Speaker 01

  There are a couple of pilot programs right now that are containerizing garbage in the middle of a block, like they do in many cities in Europe, where I, a householder, can carry my bag, put it in the right container, it locks behind me, rats can't get it, and then the truck comes, I don't know at what intervals, to get that material. You're still dealing with a truck. We have designed the system sort of by default and, but because we designed it, we can redesign it. Like, we could decide to do it differently. In terms of... Better ways to leave it for collection if we want to use that collection system still and instead of leaving it on the curb. First of all, plastic bags are a disaster.

• 1:20:27Alie Ward?

  I thought so.

• 1:20:28Speaker 01

  If we did compost more rigorously, if we separated our food waste and put them into what New York used as what they called the brown bin system, those brown bins are almost completely impermeable to pests. I think a rat, really, really, really stubborn rat that came back to the same one for night after night after night, might be able to get through. But they were designed to be super sturdy. So if you take your, people say, oh, I don't want to compost because I'll get rats because of my food waste all in one place. No, you're putting your food waste in a far more secure container and leaving the rest of your garbage that the rats don't want. You will have fewer pests if you compost. The public has yet to understand that on a broad scale.

• 1:21:11Speaker 01

  Plastic bags were introduced for good reasons between 1969 and 1971 in New York. And they do, they're easier in many ways for the householder. I want to say they cause fewer injuries for the worker, but that's not necessarily true. It's a different type of injury than what metal cans created. But the convenience of it, you don't have to store the bags when they're empty. There's all kinds of ways that they're convenient, but they create a host of problems like rats.

• 1:21:42Alie Ward?

  What did people use before plastic bags?

• 1:21:46Speaker 01

  Metal garbage cans.

• 1:21:47Alie Ward?

  That was it, like just Oscar the Grouch, straight up?

• 1:21:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:49Alie Ward?

  Right?

• 1:21:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:50Alie Ward?

  I mean, I guess I remember my dad dragging that to the curb and those were everywhere in New York before then?

• 1:21:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. And if the lid was off a little bit and it rained, it filled with rainwater. And this was also when a lot of buildings heated with coal. So you often had coal ash in these bin, in the cans. The cans get rusted, the cans get dented, the cans create, like that, those rusty edges then cut workers and then they get gangrene from their...

• 1:22:20Alie Ward?

  Tetanus?

• 1:22:20Speaker 01

  No, lockjaw and tetanus. Yeah, so the cans were not great either. They're also heavy as hell, you know, as the plastic cans, we call them, plastic containers can be, receptacles. And then you have the weight issue of how do you lift it? The cans were not great, but bags are not great either.

• 1:22:40Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:46Alie Ward?

  Kassakis, Connie E. Carringer, Nicole Kleinman, Samuel Harvey, Barb Chang, Ira Gray, and Maren Prophet wanted to know about hazardous items and the dangers lurking on curbs. How often do those cuts or sticks with sharp things like?

• 1:23:05Speaker 01

  So needles, I don't know how often needle sticks happen, but they happen.

• 1:23:12Speaker 01

  Sanitation and refuse work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is far, far, far more dangerous than being a cop or a firefighter. And it's always in the top 10 most dangerous jobs list, which comes out every two years. That category, sanitation and refuse work, is always somewhere in the top 10. It moves maybe from four to seven or from seven to five, but it's always there. The three sources of harm are the trash itself, because, especially with plastic bags, it punctures the bags, it punctures the workers. The truck, the mechanics of the truck, when you put a bag in the back of the truck, there's a, it's called the blade, the hopper comes down and scoops it up to compress it into the body of the truck.

• 1:23:54Speaker 01

  But that exerts immense pressure, and often what is caught by the blade of the hopper catapults back out at you. So you never want to be behind a truck when the hopper is cycling. So that's another source of harm, the truck. Also, mechanics of the truck fail sometimes and hurt people. And then traffic. Motorists are impatient to get around a truck, understandably, but often without remembering there are human beings who are working with that vehicle, and they're somewhere nearby. And if you go around them, take care that you're not gonna hurt them, hit them, kill them. So those are the sources of the harm, and it's ubiquitous. You will not get through a 22-year career without injury. You just won't.

• 1:24:38Speaker 01

  Even if it's something seemingly mundane, like your discs erupt or your rotator cuffs in your shoulder, like, and I say seemingly mundane, those are crippling.

• 1:24:48Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:50Speaker 01

  So even if it's that, you wear the work on your body for the rest of your life.

• 1:24:54Alie Ward?

  And I'm going to guess that sanitation workers don't get free Starbucks like cops and firefighters.

• 1:25:01Speaker 01

  There's all kinds of like, there's sporting goods stores that if you're a cop or firefighter, you automatically get 10% off. There are, yes, free donuts, the famous donuts for cops. You don't get that as a sanitation. It's, yeah, it's definitely the stepchild agency of those three.

• 1:25:18Alie Ward?

  Is there something that you feel like sanitation workers should get at the holidays? Like, should you be baking cookies and leaving them somewhere? This is not garbage, this is for you.

• 1:25:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, go to your local garage with holiday cookies. Have enough for everybody and understand there's more than one shift. But, yeah, or talk to the garage superintendent and find out what deli the guys like most and order a big old, one of those, you know, six-foot-long sandwiches. They, you can't give them beer because of rule changes, but, you know, sodas and anything, especially if you do it through the garage. If a sanitation worker's on the route and you offer him even a cup of coffee, technically it's illegal and technically they could get in really big trouble for it, even if it's something humble like that. So if they don't know you and you offer them a cup of coffee, they're probably going to say no.

• 1:26:08Speaker 01

  But if you go through the garage and you're like, my second-grade class wants to adopt your garage, or my community organization, or my family, we just want to acknowledge you somehow. Yeah, heck yeah.

• 1:26:23Alie Ward?

  Oh, that's so good to know. So cookies, sandwiches, do it. Now, some patrons, Isabel Slaymaker, Margot Rosenbaum, Kylie M. Smith, Eric Johnson, and Susie Kroger, wanted to know, how smelly? A lot of people, final, final question from listeners, want to know, like Deli Dames wants to know, do people who work directly with garbage and sanitation, does it change their sense of smell? I know that you said that when you were working with it, you stopped noticing it. But is there anything that sanitation workers do for themselves to kind of end the day and, and get back to home? Or anything that the municipalities are doing about, about smell? Because it's something that it's a stigma.

• 1:27:08Speaker 01

  I have never asked them if it has changed their sense of smell. It's a lovely question, and I don't know the answer. I will say, many sanitation workers would never, ever wear their uniform home. They will shower and change back into the street clothes. And some garages actually pitched in to buy washer dryer for the garage. So they never take their uniform home. They wash it on site. So they're never bringing it into the family laundry system. I know some workers, that's their, that's their choice. I know others who are completely nonchalant about like, yeah, whatever. I washed this last week, what's the big deal? You know?

• 1:27:45Alie Ward?

  I mean, I guess, you know, a lot of people wear shoes all over the city and then wear the shoes inside their house without taking them off. So, you know, who knows?

• 1:27:55Speaker 01

  That, that has come to wig me out as much as somebody picking their nose and eating the boogers. Like, just when I see shoes inside, I just, I'm like, no, you don't have to do that.

• 1:28:07Alie Ward?

  And take it from someone who literally is a sanitation anthropologist. That closes you out. You know, take the shoes off at the door.

• 1:28:15Speaker 01

  Apparently also, if you want to cut your risk of getting sick from anything, COVID, the flu, anything, there are two things you should do as soon as you walk in the door of your home. One is wash your hands. The other is take off your shoes. Those two things together, apparently, are absolutely excellent protections. There's, it's not a failsafe, but you are far less likely to get sick if you do those two things.

• 1:28:39Alie Ward?

  I remember hearing that hemlines got shorter because of tuberculosis because people were just dragging long skirts through lookies and bringing them back into their house. And so like, I just think about that when I think about taking my shoes off.

• 1:28:53Speaker 01

  That is a cool factoid.

• 1:28:54Alie Ward?

  Blah, blah, blah. Now, there's got to be something that sucks about studying garbage, other than the term garbageology. Is, what's the thing that is the hardest about the job? Or just the toughest thing about the field in general?

• 1:29:10Speaker 01

  This is a consistent source of dismay for me.

• 1:29:16Speaker 01

  When acknowledging essential workers, city uniform forces, people whose work is fundamental to our daily well-being, the people who collect our garbage and who sweep our streets are almost never mentioned, and it breaks my heart. And I include here not just municipal workers, but people working for the private companies as well, whose jobs are often far, far more difficult than what the municipal workers have to face. And yet, we don't acknowledge them. So even just saying "thank you", when you see somebody working the truck, it's a small gesture, but what if everybody did it? What if that was understood like, "Oh, there's a sanitation guy. I'm gonna say a thank you."

• 1:29:58Speaker 01

  What if that was just expected and normal and common? That would be fantastic, because that would then also trickle up, as it were, to helping, when there are more formal acknowledgements, making sure that those folks get the recognition they deserve. One recent example, September 11th just passed, the 21st anniversary. Sanitation was absolutely pivotal in the city's response, but rarely gets mentioned when there are formal acknowledgements. No one on the job died on the job because of that tragedy. But since that tragedy, 112 people have died of very weird cancers, almost all of which are directly attributable

• 1:30:41Speaker 01

  to the exposures they got through working ground zero. There's a young woman who works for sanitation, who's doing, she has a background in film, who's doing a documentary to try and get that story more attention. But it's still generally not well-known at all. And so, my source of dismay, and I realize I'm kind of going on and on about this, but they deserve more public awareness and praise, and thanks, and gratitude. They need to be front and center in our attention.

• 1:31:12Alie Ward?

  And I'm also gonna guess the moniker of garbage man, which is not what you use anymore.

• 1:31:19Speaker 01

  Sanitation worker.

• 1:31:20Alie Ward?

  Yeah, and I imagine that must be a label that they hear a lot.

• 1:31:24Speaker 01

  There was a headline in the Staten Island advance about something about a garbage man, and I wrote to them immediately. And I didn't say, I didn't say it in language as strong as I felt. You know, you wanna be polite, but they changed the headline.

• 1:31:38Alie Ward?

  Good.

• 1:31:38Speaker 01

  It's one small thing.

• 1:31:40Alie Ward?

  And I love that you're an advocate for that, and that you've been in the actual job, and in the uniform, and in the truck.

• 1:31:46Speaker 01

  I'm very proud of that.

• 1:31:47Alie Ward?

  Yeah, you should be. What is your favorite thing about what you do in general? About studying this, about being an anthropologist, about working in sanitation, about the friends you've made, anything?

• 1:31:58Speaker 01

  Sometimes I look around at the university where I work, and I wonder if my job in NYU matters.

• 1:32:10Speaker 01

  Yes, I teach, and maybe I have influence on my students. And yeah, I write some, although not as much as I should. And, like, that's good. But when I'm working with sanitation people, their work absolutely matters to the well-being of this city every single day, profoundly so. So, it's so important, it's like the oxygen in the air. We get to completely overlook it and take it for granted, and just assume it's gonna be there. But if it weren't, we would be in deep shit. That connecting to people whose jobs are so profoundly essential in the deepest possible way, that is deeply satisfying. Also, that they've let me in, you know? Because who the hell am I, right?

• 1:32:52Speaker 01

  And, but over time, they have let me in, and that's an honor. I also really enjoy watching their friendships. They form bonds of camaraderie that often last far longer than the job itself, and that I don't see, I don't see counterparts of that within NYU. And maybe that's because I'm sort of an introvert in this world, and maybe that's on me. But I really enjoy watching the bonds that they form in the trenches on the war on grime.

• 1:33:20Speaker 01

  I still have trouble telling that story without choking up. In fact, in that moment in the TED Talk, I had a moment of like, I can't just, I can't cry at TED Talk.

• 1:33:28Alie Ward?

  Mm-hmm. So, thank your sanitation workers.

• 1:33:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:32Alie Ward?

  Thank you so much for doing this.

• 1:33:33Speaker 01

  Thanks for your interest.

• 1:33:34Alie Ward?

  Oh, this is the best.

• 1:33:35Speaker 01

  And thank all your readers for their great questions.

• 1:33:37Alie Ward?

  Oh, such good questions. I literally could talk about garbage forever.

• 1:33:41Speaker 01

  Indeed, as one could.

• 1:33:44Alie Ward?

  So, ask smart people garbage questions because we're here to find out. And look, they love answering them. Go watch Robyn's TED Talk. Go Google composting if you feel inspired. Clean out a closet. Get a reusable water bottle if you don't have one. And vote. And for more on Dr. Robyn Nagle, you can see the links in the show notes and enjoy her book, Picking Up on the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City, which we'll also link in the show notes. There will be links to so much that we discussed on my website. 2025, me again. Okay, so we are at Ologies now on Blue Sky and on Instagram, and I'm Ally Ward with one L on both.

• 1:34:27Alie Ward?

  We also now have a spinoff show called Smologies, which are episodes in their own feed, wherever you get podcasts, again, called Smologies. They're shorter, kid-friendly episodes, G-rated. There's a link in the show notes. Tell all your friends. Ologies merch is available at ologiesmerch.com. Erin Talbert admins our Ologies Podcast Facebook group. Emily White made the transcripts, but pass the torch to Aveline Malik. Kelly Ardwire does the website. Susan Hale is our amazing managing director. Noelle Dilworth is scheduling producer and, like, a second brain for me. Jake Chaffee has since joined our edit team. And huge, exciting credit for this one goes to our lead editor, the very not trash, but in fact treasure Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio, who was once simply a listener and

• 1:35:09Alie Ward?

  then reached out multiple times, became an intern, and then an assistant editor, and has now been for many years at the helm of piecing the show together every week. So, many ups to her. This was actually a very first episode that she lead edited, so it's a favorite for that reason, too. And Nick Thorburn did the theme music. And if you stick around to the very end of the episode, I tell you a secret. And this one is updated for 2025. It is April 8th, 2025, and it's that while I'm recording this to go up tonight, there have been helicopters over our neighborhood for like an hour or two. And according to the news, on the freeway right near our house, there was a three-car accident that turned into a hit-and-run, with a few people on the lam, running from the cops.

• 1:35:50Alie Ward?

  And one of them was a woman who exchanged gunfire with the police before hiding in the park that we go take the dog to. And then there was a second person fleeing the crash, I guess. And to quote the local news station, "The shirtless suspect was seen running out of the car and into a backyard while carrying a guitar." And then that person was hanging around someone's pool, watering the plants and talking on the phone. But then the last reports I've heard is that the person who's still at large, shooting at the CHP officers, may be totally unrelated to the crash itself and just another person having kind of a wild day, happenstance on the same block. Anyway, having a very LA day here, a little hard to record with helicopters overhead,

• 1:36:35Alie Ward?

  but I'm just, I'm hoping it works out well for everyone and no one gets hurt. And maybe in a few years, someone gets a book deal out of it. I don't know. Just another Tuesday. Okay, goodbye.

• 1:37:04Alie Ward?

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