This Is How New York City Takes Out Its Trash

According to Joshua Goodman, trash collection in New York is one of the last services the city offers that is not yet touched by neoliberalism. What he means is that it's the last free and unlimited city service — there is no opt-in; it is not means tested. Goodman — who is the DSNY's deputy commissioner for public affairs and customer experience — tells us that the city deals with 24 million pounds of trash every day, and on today's podcast, he explains the logistical dance required to sort through all that garbage. We also get into why NYC produces less trash than you might think, the DSNY's new containerization program (and the new side-loading trucks they built in less than 18 months), and why recycling is not a scam. Only Bloomberg.com subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox, plus unlimited access to the site and app. bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots https://www.bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots?in_source=oddlotspodcast See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:20Speaker 01

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• 1:36Tracy Alloway?

  Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

• 1:40Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

• 1:41Tracy Alloway?

  Joe, I was talking trash with a guy at a party recently.

• 1:45Joe Weisenthal?

  Go on.

• 1:46Tracy Alloway?

  No, I met this guy at a party and you know, some people are so into their work

• 1:51Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:51Tracy Alloway?

  and area of expertise that they just start talking to you about it. And this guy happened to be an expert in trash.

• 1:59Joe Weisenthal?

  That's really cool. I don't know much about trash. I'm impressed at like, what in a complex logistical operation it must be to collect trash in a city like New York City.

• 2:09Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 2:09Joe Weisenthal?

  I also understand that, you know, it's sort of one of those classic things where, isn't there a cliche like there's no Democrat or Republican way to pick up trash? That's like a lot, some famous politician once said that. And they were talking about city management and what makes city management different than other sort of political things. It's like the trash isn't picked up, it's not picked up and it's not an ideological thing.

• 2:31Tracy Alloway?

  Well, it's interesting you say that because the person I was talking to at this party, who we're about to have on the show as a guest, described trash collection in New York City as one of the, the last services untouched by neoliberalism. And that's when I knew, I knew we had to have him on Odd Lots. And then he introduced his wife as his garbage queen. And then I was doubly sure that we needed to have him on Odd Lots. But trash collection is such a fascinating thing. I wasn't planning on doing an episode on it, but I've been converted, I guess, after this conversation, because you think about in a city like New York, just how much trash has to be dealt with on a daily basis. And obviously in New York specifically, it's not like we're putting it, you know, in the city.

• 3:15Tracy Alloway?

  We have to find other places to store our trash. And at the same time, New York City is not well known for being the cleanest place in the world. In fact, we famously stick our garbage out in bags on the curb and wait for collection. And we are in a giant process of trying to change that. So there's a lot to discuss here.

• 3:34Joe Weisenthal?

  There's a lot to discuss. By the way, that quote, according to Google Gemini, there's no Republican or Democratic way to pick up the garbage. Former Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia was the one who said that. And so he was running as a Republican on a fusion nonparti. Anyway, that's not the point, but it is a, you know, it's just a thing. Either you do it or you don't, and people get really upset. And if you don't, New York is tricky for multiple reasons. But you know, you think in a suburb, right? You put the trash out, but there aren't cars in the way between the trash bins and the garbage truck, et cetera, because they're in the driveway or the garage or something like that. New York has all kinds of things in between the road and the bins. I know there's, you know, there's this big effort to do containerization.

• 4:17Joe Weisenthal?

  I think at one point or headlines about some, you know, outside study from like McKinsey, et cetera. But there's a lot of interesting logistical questions about trash collection. And so it's a quartile, even though we haven't done it, it sits firmly in our wheelhouse.

• 4:33Tracy Alloway?

  Absolutely. All right. So without further ado, we have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with Joshua Goodman. He is of course Deputy Commissioner at New York City's Department of Sanitation. So Josh, thanks so much for coming on Odd Lots.

• 4:43Speaker 05

  Thank you both for having me.

• 4:45Tracy Alloway?

  Is trash collection apolitical?

• 4:47Speaker 05

  So obviously we all admire and respect Mayor LaGuardia. It's a famous quote, you hear it all the time, you hear paraphrases it all the time. It's patently untrue, right? The moment you start to dissect it, you realize that of course, an enormous public space logistical initiative is going to be colored by ideology. Partisanship, maybe not, but the sort of implication behind the quote that it's a binary, yes, it's picked up, no, it's not picked up, really undersells substantially the amount of planning that needs to go into this, both in the short term and in the long term. In New York City, we at the Department of Sanitation, pick up, process and export 24 million pounds of trash recycling and compostal material every single day.

• 5:29Speaker 05

  One of the things I like to tell people is that there's a word that you'll hear a lot, Sisyphean, right? And you hear it used imprecisely, in my opinion. It's often used as just a synonym for hard. Oh, I, you know, school was a Sisyphean task or this home improvement project, whatever.

• 5:44Tracy Alloway?

  But it ended.

• 5:45Speaker 05

  Right. And we have the definitional Sisyphean task. Just as Sisyphus faced the boulder again each day. We pick up 24 million pounds today. We pick up 24 million pounds tomorrow. We pick up 24 million pounds the next day. There will never be a time when D S N Y says, great news, everyone. You know, we got it all. Right, exactly. And this is, as Tracy mentioned, we think of it as the last free unlimited service. There's no signup, there's no opt in, there's no means test. You put it out, we come and get it. It's basically us in the public library at this point. And that means, and that's specific to New York, of course, but it means that as we think about changes in global best practices, we need to keep that commitment to full universal service.

• 6:31Joe Weisenthal?

  I don't want to like, um, get too bogged down in this question of Sisyphean and the philosophy of what they were, the Greeks were trying to teach with the lesson of Sisyphus and the philosophers like Camus and so forth, who studied Sisyphus over the years. But one element of that lesson is the boulder. Yes, it was endless and it never ended, much like trash collection. But there was no purpose to it. There was no internal satisfaction that one could perceive from the outside. Whereas helping the public, that could in theory be satisfactory. So had Sisyphus pushed up the boulder every day and then something great happened to the land? Oh, it was clean. Maybe that would have been satisfying internally.

• 7:14Joe Weisenthal?

  And what's tortuous about the Sisyphean metaphor is that there does not seem to be any reward for it.

• 7:20Speaker 05

  Well, it is true that most New Yorkers think of cleanliness as the natural state, right? It's not, wow, you did a great job.

• 7:26Joe Weisenthal?

  Are you sure about that?

• 7:27Speaker 05

  Well, that's the goal, right? The idea is that a street is supposed to be clean. And you know, you mentioned Camus, our guy at sanitation is actually Sartre because many people notice black bags of trash. They notice piles of trash. They rarely have ever noticed the absence of piles of trash. You know, and so there, there is a philosophical element to this, but obviously I know we're going to spend a lot more time on the details today.

• 7:48Joe Weisenthal?

  We could just talk about Camus and Sartre the whole time.

• 7:50Speaker 05

  When we, what it really came down to was about four or five years ago, we had spent decades of people coming to New York from Barcelona, from Buenos Aires, from Paris, from London, even from Chicago and LA and saying, why do you live like this? You know, and for many decades, our answer had basically been like, well, you know, have you tried a bagel? You know, we have much better pizza than you do. We had not gotten serious about addressing these challenges in a meaningful, long-term way. And that, that's what's begun to change over the last few years through a process that we call the trash revolution, which is a complete reimagining of the relationship that eight and a half million New Yorkers have with 24 million pounds of trash a day. What they expect from us, what we expect from them.

• 8:30Speaker 05

  And it's required an enormous amount of data analysis, of streetscape redesign, of work across agencies, of breaking down silos. And fortunately it's getting results. There's a lot we can talk about that really shows that this is working.

• 8:44Tracy Alloway?

  Before we get into all the ins and outs of the trash revolution, which I love as a, as a designation, how did black bags of garbage become a thing in New York in the first place? Cause I remember this was one of the big culture shocks when I first moved to New York for college and then I dropped out. So I was only here for two or three weeks. Maybe all the trash bags had something to do with it. But walking down the street, coming from places like London and Tokyo and seeing these bags of trash laid out, it was kind of weird.

• 9:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, there are really two key events that led to New York's unique status here. One is the 1811 street grid. In New York City, the only non-renewable resource is public space, right? There is a finite amount of room. And so when the streets were laid out in the 1811 master plan, the city was built without alleyways. You go to Chicago, which has similar density, there are alleys behind almost all buildings to store the trash. So if you're watching a, a movie and it's set in New York and someone jumps out of a dark alley, it's almost certainly shot in Chicago or an LA soundstage because we don't really have them. So that meant there was no storage space behind the buildings, which other cities have. And then throughout much of the 20th, 19th and 20th century, the city used sort of the old Oscar the Grouch metal garbage can.

• 9:57Speaker 05

  Following the 1968 sanitation strike, which is the last major New York City sanitation labor action, there was an overflowing amount more than those metal cans can handle. And when the strike was resolved, Mayor Lindsay put together a group to study a number of after effects of the issues the city had faced during that time. One of which was a task force called the Committee on the Black Bag. It studied plastic trash bags, which were basically new at that time. And the plastics industry. Pushed them as rodent resistant, which obviously we know they're not. And you can easily find New York Times coverage from that time of people proudly stating that the transition from metal garbage cans to black bags will reduce rats while freeing up public space.

• 10:41Tracy Alloway?

  Wow.

• 10:41Speaker 05

  Obviously, it became clear almost immediately that that was not the case, but it took another five decades or so to get serious about promoting a new solution.

• 10:49Joe Weisenthal?

  So I understand, and we're going to get into this, that there are different approaches, et cetera, to picking up the trash, et cetera. But why is the LaGuardia quote, "wrong"? Like, I understand different views, but that still doesn't necessarily mean to me, it still seems like it could be right in the sense that different views don't necessarily map to politics.

• 11:09Speaker 05

  But it's true that it's not a neat left-right split necessarily, but it's not true that there, that who you put into office has no bearing on what happens to the trash, right? I think his point was that it transcends ideology, and it doesn't, or else this would have been done a long time ago.

• 11:23Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay, then what are the different ideological frameworks from which we can view the question of optimal trash collection?

• 11:30Speaker 05

  So, one of the things to think about is that cleanliness is not just a, an abstract concept. It has a tremendous impact on a person's quality of life. Every morning, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers get up, they go out, they go to work, they go to school. If they walk down a dirty street, the first thing they think is, "No one cares about me." And I can't necessarily blame people for feeling that way. Often, thoughts about cleanliness in public space are, you have to think about who you're prioritizing, right? So, is it someone who spends the bulk of their time in public in a car versus someone who spends the bulk of their time in public walking? Is it someone for whom a rat is a curiosity versus a reality that they have to live with?

• 12:15Tracy Alloway?

  I kind of like the rats. I got, I get, I get really bored walking down the street and seeing some wildlife, which in New York City is just pigeons and rats, is somewhat entertaining.

• 12:24Speaker 05

  I, I, I, look, I love all animals, I'm a longtime vegan, but the fact is that there is a Jungian reaction to a rat for most people. You walk down a street in New York and a rat runs across your foot, you remember it every time you're on that block for the rest of your life.

• 12:37Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 12:37Speaker 05

  And the same goes for public space trash, which I know certain New Yorkers have sort of romanticized. I think that you can only do that if it's not your reality, you know? That living around trash and rats is not a good thing, and we would like it to, you know, people sometimes assume that anyone at the Department of Sanitation loves the trash, and I always tell them, "No, no, our job is to get rid of it. We hate the trash. The trash is our enemy, as fascinating as it is to study." And so, you know, when we thought about putting global best practices into place just the last few years, this is actually a very data-driven agency, probably not surprising, but we had about a century of data about the weight of the trash, which had long been our primary metric for efficiency.

• 13:19Speaker 05

  And what we needed was data about the volume of the trash. That's what you need for containerization programs. And so, we had to do a 70,000-block volumetric analysis. We went block by block and converted those weights into volumes and developed the programs that are coming out now. And there were a lot of different, both left and right, thoughts about what approach we should take, if any. And, you know, we've developed a strategy that we think will work for the unique streetscape of New York. You know, one of the, when I first got involved in this work, I would often hear from people, "Well, you know, there's no place as dense as New York that does this." Which is not true. "There's no place with as much weather flexibility as New York." Not true. You know, "There's no place that produces as much volume of trash." Not true.

• 14:02Speaker 05

  "We actually produce per person less trash than most other Western cities." There's no reason that they can have this everywhere else in the world, other than a political inertia, right? And that's what's begun to change based on the data that we've produced.

• 14:17Tracy Alloway?

  Well, to me, one of the obvious political choices that's been made in New York is also, we don't have a pay-as-you-go service, or you're not paying per pound of trash that you produce, right? I can produce a lot of trash, and it's sort of incumbent on the city to collect it versus someone who's trying their best to recycle and compost and things like that. Why don't we talk about logistics for a second, just to better understand the current state, so that we can figure out where we're trying to get to? I take out a bag of trash from my apartment building, and it's a Wednesday in SoHo, and I place it on the curb. What happens to it from there?

• 14:52Speaker 05

  So, a collection truck, we don't call them garbage trucks because they also pick up recycling and compost, comes by sometime generally between midnight and 8:30 in the morning, try to get as much of it done before peak rush hour. The trucks are on routes that are optimized for a few things. They are, hold about 12 to 13 tons of trash each. You want it to get full on its route, and you want the route to be completed in a single shift. So they're optimized around those factors. And then, once the truck is full, or loaded out is the jargon, it's taken to a network of transfer stations. So, prior to 2000, it was all taken to the Staten Island landfill.

• 15:35Speaker 05

  When the landfill closed, the city moved to a waste export model. It was a multi-billion dollar, 15-year infrastructure project to build five transfer stations around the city. These are places where the truck comes, it dumps out onto a big, the tipping floor, a big floor, where a large front-end loader pushes it down holes in the floor into like a shipping container that's underneath. Robotic arms seal up the shipping container, a giant crane puts it on either a barge or a railcar, and it's taken to its final destination outside the city. This is obviously far more environmentally sustainable than an in-city landfill, and also than the old trucking model, right? Barges and railcars, much, much better for the environment.

• 16:18Speaker 05

  When you see these barges with 50 or 75 packed storage containers on them, you think, "Wow, that would have been 75 trucks driving to a landfill." That's for your regular trash refuse, is the term that appears in our materials. For your metal, glass, and plastic, they're taken to a facility in Sunset Park where they're pelletized and prepared to be sold on the recycling market. New York City is a great opportunity for me to mention something really important, which is lots of people in sort of the demographic that listens to Odd Lots, educated, smart people, the cocktail party set, think that it makes them sound really smart to say, "I heard recycling is a scam. Didn't someone once tell me..." I have to tell you, I can't speak for other municipalities.

• 17:02Speaker 05

  New York City's recycling system is protected by long-term contracts that guarantee beneficial reuse of those materials. If you properly sort a can or bottle in New York City, it will become a new can or bottle or other reusable item.

• 17:13Tracy Alloway?

  Wait, slight tangent, what about a Styrofoam cup?

• 17:16Speaker 05

  So Styrofoams are banned in the city, right? So you shouldn't see them too often. But Styrofoam actually hits on the great issue with this. Styrofoam is often used as the archetypical example of a non-recyclable item. Oh, can't be recycled, can't be recycled. On a pure molecular level, of course it can be recycled, it's just plastic. The issue is that it's so light that no plastics manufacturer would ever feel that they had enough in one space to make money off of it. It's a good example of how this is actually a market-based system for recycling specifically, because many more things are recyclable from a chemical standpoint than are actually accepted as recycling. In New York City, you probably know that in 2017, 2018, there were domestic policy changes in China that collapsed a lot of cities' recycling markets.

• 18:01Speaker 05

  New York was protected from those changes by a long-term strategic planning before that. We also had resisted an urge that a lot of cities gave into in a few years before that to combine their paper and their metal, glass, and plastic. "Oh, it's easier for residents." It turned out to be a huge money loser for, for cities that did it, and also for the environment when this market change happened in 1718.

• 18:25Tracy Alloway?

  What was the argument for doing that? Because when I think about it in my head, it's like, well, of course, it's going to cost more to sort it out.

• 18:31Speaker 05

  The idea was more people will participate because it's easier, which is a good motivating principle in general, but on this specific topic, the technology's not there yet, or at least, we don't feel the technology's there yet. Your paper, just to get back to where it all goes, it goes to Staten Island, where it is actually one of the fastest processes in the waste stream. Cardboard and paper that you recycle today might become a new pizza box tomorrow. Pizza boxes are one of the primary things made at that facility. And then your compost, which is, is sort of our biggest, best, and newest, and most exciting stream. Your food waste goes to a few places, but primarily to our Staten Island compost facility. It's a 33-acre site where, over a period of three or four months, we turn and aerate

• 19:14Speaker 05

  your material until it's broken down into finished compost, which we give away to parks and gardens, to residents directly. We just finished our summer compost giveback season. We gave away about 15 million pounds of finished compost to New Yorkers.

• 19:25Tracy Alloway?

  Ah, I didn't know you could get New York City compost.

• 19:28Speaker 05

  NYC.gov/getcompost, you can find events near you to get 40-pound bags. And some of it goes to the Department of Environmental Protections, Newtown Creek Digestor Eggs. If you've been on the BQE, right as you go over the Koschusko and come between Brooklyn and Queens, you'll see the big eggs. Those are large facilities where your food waste will be mixed with wastewater, so it gets mixed there with everything that you put down the sink or that you flush down the toilet, where it's digested into bio solids for fertilizer and usable biogas that heats homes in Brooklyn. So your waste goes to a lot of different places, but the idea is to divert as much of it as possible to beneficial use, and hopefully to reduce the total amount over time.

• 20:25Speaker 00

  What's next for virtual assets? I'm Jacob Rees, host of Economy Scale, a series exploring growth in key global sectors. And in this episode, we're diving into the digital forces shaping finance. Sean McQ from Dubai-based Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority has this to say. We're seeing a lot of insocial players come in, digital asset, dedicated hedge funds, high-frequency traders, and that sort of thing, and folks who service insocial clients. As more capital enters the market, adaptive regulation is likely to become increasingly key. Reese Merrick of Ripple says, "A lot of regulators globally would like to keep the industry at arm's length. That's the opposite here. I think also what you'll find is that regulation and frameworks can come out, but some of

• 21:08Speaker 00

  them are maybe a slight iteration on some 80-year-old policy and not actually in line with what the technology can do and offer. And again, that's very different in Dubai." Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts. This series is brought to you by Bloomberg Media Studios and the Dubai Department of Economy and Tourism.

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• 23:34Joe Weisenthal?

  I'm thinking about that guy, and it's a guy at the cocktail parties. And it was like, you know, it's like the classic, like I heard two minute segment on the radio was, I hate that guy. I think Odd Lots listeners are better than that. They only say things if they've researched the topic for at least 30 minutes.

• 23:48Speaker 05

  Right. They certainly, I'm sure Odd Lots listeners know that person at least.

• 23:51Joe Weisenthal?

  They do. Only now they're prepared to take it on. I can't stand that person. On the other hand, and I don't want to get into it. It might, the fact that like New York has guaranteed contracts. Anyway, does not necessarily vindicate recycling. I might vindicate it from the New York City perspective, but let's move on. All right. That's the old, that's a rough overview of, let's say, the old regime. Why don't you give us the equivalent sort of like rough overview of the new regime of like what, what we're going for?

• 24:19Speaker 05

  So the big changes in what I just described were, that were conducted between 2000 and 2015 to move from a landfill model to a waste export model. Those were huge back of house changes, right? On our operations.

• 24:32Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, I see.

• 24:33Speaker 05

  And what we're doing now is making sort of front of house changes for how New Yorkers interact with the trash. It's actually, I don't mean to use it as an excuse, but it's one of the reasons why, as other cities moved to on-street containerization, New York didn't. We had this big project going on of building the transfer stations. Obviously, we should be able to do both. But so now what we're doing is, after we completed this 70,000 block volumetric analysis.

• 24:56Tracy Alloway?

  Can you say a little bit more about the analysis? Because I don't even know how you would start such a project. Because if you look at an apartment building, it's like, okay, maybe they produce like X pounds of waste on a certain day, but then the day after Christmas, that suddenly explodes and becomes five times as much.

• 25:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, absolutely. So when you look at, one thing that I think is important to remember as we talk about this is that even though New York has a reputation for being behind the curve, there's actually no city in North America that does on-street containerization, right? It's a purely European, South American and Asian thing. And when this program is implemented, New York will have gone, I would never say worse, but have gone from the back of the pack to first. And that means that we had to develop a system that would work for us specifically, right? As we first started to confront this, I heard from, a lot from sort of two groups. Urbanists who would say, this is a solved problem. Copy paste Barcelona, copy paste Amsterdam. And also, community leaders in the city who said this would never work here, right? And when we did this study, what we really found was that both of those groups were wrong.

• 25:57Speaker 05

  It is of course achievable and it is of course difficult. So when we had all this data about the weight of the trash, what we wanted to do was, again, as I mentioned, that you, there's a finite amount of street space. You want to establish a containerization model that can hold all the waste, but that is not oversized, because then you're wasting that space. So we planned for one extra day. You mentioned Christmas and we planned for basically one extra day above their collection. And we went out and measured piles of trash. We eventually were able to come up with conversion formula to use, but it was a lot of on-the-street work measuring both the trash itself and also the streetscape, because you might know the length of a block,

• 26:41Speaker 05

  but you know that you can't put the bin in front of a curb cut. You know, it can't go in front of a fire hydrant. There are even, we had determined that we were going to go with a side loading model. There are different ways the trucks can be serviced. That meant that we had to think about tree canopy height. The bin can't go up into the tree.

• 26:57Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, yeah.

• 26:57Speaker 05

  There are so many factors in really four dimensions on this to consider. And in Europe in particular, what you see are open, shared bins. And this is what had kind of been contemplated in earlier pilots that we had done, going back to 2021. Okay, just a European style, basically a dumpster on the street that everybody on the block is to use. We always had a lot of issues with that as an at-scale solution because, a few reasons. First of all, in New York City, we provide this free unlimited service for residents. Businesses have to pay for trash collection and through a network of private carters. And so there was a concern about, well, if it's a free, open bin, why wouldn't a business just steal space in that bin?

• 27:42Speaker 05

  Put their trash in there. So we didn't want to go forward with that model. We also knew that there are many neighborhoods in the city where an on-street container was not going to improve the situation. If you think about a low-density neighborhood, making everybody all of a sudden walk down to the middle of the block, that doesn't help just in the name of saying, well, we've done the whole city. So the model we eventually came up with after we had this volumetric data was a containerization system for low-density buildings, one to nine residential units, so a single-family home up through a small apartment, using a wheeled trash bin and then eventually a specific wheeled trash bin. The largest buildings, 31 or more units is the point we came up with where they can certainly support at least one of what we call empire bins, the on-street containers.

• 28:26Speaker 05

  And then the 10 to 30s, the mid-sized buildings, was where we found there's a lot of variety. It might be 11 studios, there's 11 people in the building versus, you know, 29 two-bedrooms. They have to use one or the other, but they choose. And that program with that model was implemented in, the city's divided into 59 community districts. We began in one community district, Manhattan nine, which is West Harlem, Amsterdam to the river, 111 to 155 in June of last year, 2025. And now, fall 2026, this is coming to a second district. Brooklyn, Community District two, downtown Brooklyn, through Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Brooklyn Heights.

• 29:10Speaker 05

  That is the point that this really moves beyond a pilot and becomes a real program that New Yorkers can expect to see in their neighborhood. And the mayor has actually committed to funding this program for a full rollout by the end of 2031.

• 29:23Joe Weisenthal?

  I'm kind of curious, like, I actually don't know which, what I have right now. So what I have right now in my.

• 29:29Tracy Alloway?

  It's a damning indictment of how often you take out the trash.

• 29:31Joe Weisenthal?

  No, I take out the trash every day. But like, so the way, like.

• 29:34Speaker 05

  You take it to a central location, right?

• 29:36Joe Weisenthal?

  No, no, I, we have like this sort of like, I live in a building that's like four units. It's like fairly small in the East Village. And I don't just like put my trash out on the street. We have like this closed container and then I lift it up and then et cetera. Walk me through, from the perspective of the sanitation worker. So what are they doing now to get that trash out of it? And then how will their day be different onto the container? Like, walk me through that. When they're going down my block, what does it look like today? And what does it look like when this is implemented?

• 30:08Speaker 05

  East Village is a great example because you'll have every kind of building within a single round there. So a sanitation worker is not servicing the container that you're describing. It's like up against the building wall.

• 30:21Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, it's up against the building.

• 30:22Speaker 05

  Someone that your landlord is paying is coming and moving the material out to the curb. And that's actually one of the things that we were able to build it. Well, someone is coming and moving it out.

• 30:32Joe Weisenthal?

  Our building hires this person.

• 30:33Speaker 05

  In New York City, most buildings are required to have a professional waste manager, someone who takes the trash out. And we wanted to maintain that system because it, they do a lot of things and because it builds cleanliness in the neighborhood in general, right? So right now, those bags are coming out of your sealed container. They're going to the curb. Sanitation workers taking them out and putting them in the back.

• 30:55Speaker 05

  They should be going out because you have fewer than nine units in an official NYC bin. And if they are not, you are subject to a summons as of September of this year.

• 31:05Joe Weisenthal?

  Let's slow down here.

• 31:06Speaker 05

  But the trash is not supposed, the trash is essentially not supposed to, from a building of your size, not supposed to sit on the ground directly anymore.

• 31:14Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, it never does, actually.

• 31:16Speaker 05

  So it goes out in a bin. Sanitation workers can either tip the bin manually, or soon the trucks will have a rear tipper for the small buildings.

• 31:24Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, we have the, we have the real bins.

• 31:26Speaker 05

  So they, they have the bar on them. The bar hooks up to the rear tipper and it goes in the back. For the Empire bin, for larger buildings, we had to design an all-new truck for this. I mentioned that New York City is the first place in North America to do on-street containerization. Once we studied rear-loading versus side-loading, container model, we came up with what we wanted to do. And we discovered that one of the long poles in the tent was going to be that there was no, what's called an automated side loader, ASL truck, that was appropriate for residential use in New York City. Like, they have one that they use at the Port of Philadelphia. I saw this thing operate. It was so loud. Like, the idea that it was going to come down your street was ludicrous. So we talked to some truck industry experts and heard that it would probably take about

• 32:08Speaker 05

  five years to design a truck from scratch. You can't just import the ones from Europe. There's different emission standards. We were not going to wait five years for that. So we actually got involved in the Department of Sanitation in the truck design business, something I knew nothing about going into this. And we learned how to do it. And we got a prototype truck built in about 10 months. And that's the truck that is now rolling off the line. It's operating in West Harlem. We're getting them in for the other districts going forward. So it's a combination of vendors. This is actually how we were able to do it so quickly. It's the European body, the side-loading body. And Mack makes the chassis exactly the same as they do for many of our current collection trucks. And then we work with

• 32:53Speaker 05

  a firm that specializes in getting the two sets of electronics to talk to each other. And we've got about, probably about 20 of them operating now, out of our full fleet of 2,300 or so. But they'll continue to come in as this program rolls out over the next five or six years.

• 33:09Tracy Alloway?

  I want to go back to something you touched on earlier, which is deciding where the bins actually go. Because this is a meaningful way in which the Department of Sanitation might actually change the look and feel of New York. So when you're choosing where to put a bin, I mean, as you said, space is at a premium in New York. And there's a bunch of other stuff that could go in that bin space. You know, you could have a parking space being the obvious one, or, I don't know, space for deliveries, or people to get in and out of taxicabs, whatever. Talk a little bit more about, like, the decision-making process for doing that, and how you're judging the value of collecting trash versus other things.

• 33:47Speaker 05

  Absolutely. So, one of the reasons that we were not interested in the European model of shared containers, for the most part, is because you then face this challenge of like, well, why is it in front of my house and not your house, if it's for both of us? Under the model we came up with, where larger buildings support their own bin, it's in front of your building because it's for your building. So that eliminates a lot of the concerns about spatial jockeying. Okay, I live in a 50-unit building. We get an Empire bin, and it goes right in front of the building. And it's important to remember that while this is taking up curb space, it's freeing up sidewalk space, where the bags are currently kept for collection. So you get that space back for pedestrians. We've also heard, especially

• 34:31Speaker 05

  in West Harlem, from quite a few supers and waste managers, who say, I love that I don't have to keep it in the building anymore. I just got 30 to 50 square feet of building space back without any new additional construction, because where I used to put the trash can now go straight into the bin outside. That said, the street layout issues are huge. And we work very closely with the City Department of Transportation on coordinating around some of the things that I mentioned, you know, hydrants, curb cuts. We don't take designated handicap spaces. We've also, in BK2, the second district that's coming online, we

• 35:11Speaker 05

  were interested in piloting shared containers within our locked model by buildings that opt-in to share. So we said, you know, if two small buildings decide they don't qualify on their own, but they want to share one. And that actually really exposed some of the street limitations. There were a handful of buildings that were interested, and they were on streets with full no parking, no air, no place to put them. So it's something we'll continue to explore in future zones. But absolutely, you know, we think that the initial, what we called the Future of Trash Report, back in spring of '22, where we sort of first began to look at the feasibility of this in a meaningful way, said that on-street containerization could take up to 150,000 parking spaces. Now, that was before we had gotten into, and that's out of 3 million total in the city. That was before we had

• 35:55Speaker 05

  gotten into some of the details. Once we had analyzed it much further and gone down the road on implementation, we're now looking at about a fifth of that. When we went back into the Back to the Future of Trash Report, we found that it was more like 30,000 spaces at full rollout. And it could be, it could be fewer based on the opt-ins.

• 36:15Joe Weisenthal?

  Can we just talk a little bit more about the perspective of the sanitation workers?

• 36:20Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 36:21Joe Weisenthal?

  So, first of all, how many are on a truck right now?

• 36:23Speaker 05

  Two. There's two people.

• 36:24Joe Weisenthal?

  Currently?

• 36:25Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 36:26Joe Weisenthal?

  And it will still be two under the new?

• 36:27Speaker 05

  That's correct, yes.

• 36:28Joe Weisenthal?

  And how does their, like, walk me through literally what they physically do? They go and collect it, et cetera. How does it look different now, or future versus now?

• 36:36Speaker 05

  Yeah. So sanitation workers have an incredibly difficult job, right? They're out there collecting 12 to 13 tons of trash in all weather, in all conditions. They can't say, you know, I couldn't get to it today. So, right, there's an expectation that it'll be gone. And about 50% of their line-of-duty injuries are sprains and strains from throwing bags. So we're excited to see that go away. There are about 6,500 people with the title of sanitation worker out of 10,000 people total at the department. So those are the people who are actually collecting and processing your trash. They are subject to a number of hazards on the job. One thing we've seen a big increase is being poked by needles.

• 37:15Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 37:16Speaker 05

  We assume it's from an increase in GLP-1 usage with people, you know, buying them online. And it comes with an instruction booklet, but they don't necessarily read it because it came from an online pharmacy, and whatever. And then they think, this is trash. I put it in the bag, and it goes away.

• 37:27Joe Weisenthal?

  Right.

• 37:28Speaker 05

  Right? And so a big thing that we want people to remember, of course, is a human being handles your garbage. But the move to mechanized collection, the side-loading truck in high-density areas, will make a huge difference for the backs and knees of sanitation workers. They go out, they begin their day with a roll call at their garage. I mentioned the city's divided into 59 districts. They start at one of their assigned districts. They do a roll call. They get their assignment for the day. There's a big electronic board where they find out where they're working that day. They go out with their partner, and they collect the trash. And then, in many, but not all districts, they get to dump it at the transfer station on the same shift. Some districts where the routes are optimized differently, it's another shift comes in and empties the truck, so that it's empty

• 38:13Speaker 05

  when people come back in the morning. These are people who deal with every possible situation you can imagine. And if we can get it so that they are not lifting your garbage as much, it will make a huge difference.

• 38:24Tracy Alloway?

  Wait, what happens to bulky waste under the new system? Because one of the nice things about New York City right now is, you know, you can put a couch on a curb, and sometimes people will just take it and use it on their own. But if they don't, then the trash collectors will come and they'll throw it away, and you don't have to pay extra to do that.

• 38:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, no change. If there's an item that doesn't fit in your bin, you know, a couch is a great example, just leave it next to it. A truck will still be coming down. We hope to find efficiencies at full rollout and have to run fewer of the trucks, the rear loader, the sort of traditional collection truck that can get bulky items. But that was actually one of the things we learned from Barcelona. Barcelona's often held up as the gold standard of waste management in urban environment. We talked to them at the beginning of this process and asked them quite a few questions about what worked, and also what they would have done differently. And it was interesting, because American urbanists will tell you that they're, that Barcelona's perfect, we should just do Barcelona. And the Barcelona people were like, we still have a lot of issues. One of which was that they had converted their fleet too heavily to side loaders. And then learned, well,

• 39:26Speaker 05

  actually, people still put a loose bag next to it once in a while. They still need the couch. And they had to go back and get a different truck. So we're making sure to keep that as part of the program.

• 39:35Joe Weisenthal?

  Just out of curiosity, in this international exploration, did you ever look into Mexico City? Because I've never been to a city that's, A, more clean, and, B, you can't find a trash can for the life of you. And I'm like, where do people, like, put their, like, you buy something from a street food vendor, you have this wrapper. And I'm like, I don't know where to throw it away. There's no trash cans anywhere. And yet, the streets are spotless. I don't get it. I'm curious if you've ever investigated.

• 40:00Speaker 05

  You know, public space litter baskets and public space maintenance are different across the world. And we have talked to them. And, you know, we have responsibility here for the property owner to maintain the sidewalk. In Mexico City and in Tokyo, which is the other sort of famously clean streetscape city, there are community groups who are paid or tasked with maintenance. And we have that as well through the Business Improvement Districts system. We did, in 2018, conduct a one-district pilot where we tried going with the Tokyo-Mexico City model and removed every litter basket.

• 40:32Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 40:33Speaker 05

  Because people sometimes say, like, oh, the litter baskets, they attract the trash, you know, when people...

• 40:36Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 40:37Speaker 05

  Didn't. People littered everywhere. So, that said, I don't want to preclude for your future study. It is true that piles of trash attract additional trash. And when you're in a neighborhood that is not containerized, and you see a pile of black bags, it is natural to think, I can put my garbage on top of this.

• 40:56Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 40:57Speaker 05

  So my hope is that after full containerization, we can reevaluate some of that further and say, okay, now that the city broadly doesn't have trash everywhere, what can we do to limit littering and public space cleanliness issues?

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• 43:32Tracy Alloway?

  This is a slightly random question, but what happened to the anti-littering campaigns of like the 80s and 90s? I guess as far back as the 70s? Because I feel like you just don't see them as much anymore. And it's not like, I don't think you can look at New York and say, "Mission accomplished. There's no more littering."

• 43:47Speaker 05

  Totally agree. I will say that I do think that there's some confirmation bias and selective memory about these because we ran a multimillion-dollar one last year. The We Hard NYC Anti-Littering Campaign. We ran one that was well into the six figures recently that had a picture of a finger pointing up into an NYC litter basket and said, "If you see someone littering, tell them where to stick it." We ran a few of these. And the issue is, I think, probably the same one that you find across the media landscape, right? Of, you know, the monoculture is long over. And we try to do a tremendous amount of littering outreach. But, you know, this came up a lot in January, February this year when there was a sort of persistent dog waste issue.

• 44:29Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, yeah.

• 44:30Speaker 05

  And I would often remind people that as frustrating as it is and as much as we do want to and are planning to do more, there is no one in the city who doesn't clean up after their dog because they don't know the rules, right? Of course, you know, outreach and education is great, but it's not like they go, "Oh, yeah, you know, I didn't know you had to clean up after your dog, and now I saw the ad." So, you know, we do them. Every sanitation truck comes with a poster space on the side. We put anti-littering messages on those posters frequently. You know, we love to do sort of, we've had longstanding relationships with the arts community. You've probably seen the early 90s David Lynch anti-littering ad that he did with the SNY. It's something that we're interested in, but also I do think that we're at the point

• 45:13Speaker 05

  where we see the built environment as the bigger issue here. And I'll bring it back to some of the philosophy behind this. One of the thinkers who informed a lot of the work of the trash revolution that really gets at what you're talking about is a 70s urban planner named Oscar Newman, who wrote a book called Defensible Space that was, basically what he did in the book was he said that controlling, even for income, for age, for all demographics, he found that public housing still had, at that time, a higher rate of crime than market rate housing. And so what was the cause? And he proposed that there were elements of the design of the space that caused this issue. Specifically, that there were significant parts of many urban public housing developments

• 45:58Speaker 05

  that didn't feel like they belonged to anyone. They were everyone's.

• 46:01Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, yeah.

• 46:02Speaker 05

  And so he proposed a design model that would be did. So the most famous example of his design is the Yonkers row houses that were the subject of Lisa Belkin's Bookshop Me Hero, that won her the Pulitzer a few, I guess in the late 90s. A big part of what we were thinking with this was how do we apply that same finding about crime to cleanliness? What do we do that makes it so that every part of the city belongs to someone? So that cleanliness is not just about trash removal, but about real care for public spaces? That's one of the reasons why the Empire bins are assigned to a specific building rather than shared. It's one of the reasons

• 46:44Speaker 05

  that we have done a lot of sort of continued expansion of the property owners are required to clean 18 inches into the street. You know, that we've done a lot of work on that, that we have been so focused on expanding the ways in which we enforce alternate side parking, street sweeping regulations, because there should be no part of the city where someone can litter or someone can observe someone else litter and think, "That is not my fault." You know, and the design that Newman put into place has been broadly seen as effective. And we're hopeful that over the next five or so years, we'll see those same design elements work on the cleanliness space.

• 47:17Joe Weisenthal?

  Tracy, is it well-known that "don't mess with Texas", that phrase you hear a lot? Was it an anti-littering thing?

• 47:23Tracy Alloway?

  I know about it because my dad's Texan. I lived in Dallas.

• 47:26Joe Weisenthal?

  You know, now everyone, "Don't mess with Texas", and people think it's some sort of like political thing. But it literally is just, and it still is.

• 47:32Tracy Alloway?

  No, I mean, some of the anti-littering campaigns.

• 47:34Joe Weisenthal?

  Psychonic.

• 47:35Tracy Alloway?

  Exactly. But to your point, I mean, this is also the, this is also the problem with public shaming, by the way. If you see someone littering, they probably know what they're doing is bad. And so pointing out to someone who's doing a bad thing that what they're doing is bad is a little bit risky in New York sometimes.

• 47:53Joe Weisenthal?

  It could be, yeah. I'm still, I'm pro. I think I'm pro shaming.

• 47:56Tracy Alloway?

  I'm pro public shaming, but that's different from saying that like, "I'm comfortable doing it constantly."

• 48:02Speaker 05

  We don't think of anything we do as shaming. We just want people to know, if you are someone who cares about your neighborhood, you are not alone. You are actually in the majority, not the person littering.

• 48:10Joe Weisenthal?

  Can you talk a little bit about, you mentioned, okay, this containerization, it's in West Harlem, it's about to be in Brooklyn. So that's 2 of 59?

• 48:19Speaker 05

  Yes. And it will start going much faster.

• 48:20Joe Weisenthal?

  What is the roadmap? And like you said, like, the mayor is committed to funding it through. Does that mean it's not guaranteed currently that it will be rolled out to the entire city?

• 48:31Speaker 05

  No, it's guaranteed. It's, I mean, we do annual budget cycles here, so the money's not literally there. But the commitment is as good as it gets to roll this out. And we've got strong support from the city council on this, too. You know, it's funny. When we first started this, we heard a lot of concerns about pushback, and those concerns were mostly conceptual. "I bet people will be mad about parking."

• 48:52Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, yeah.

• 48:52Speaker 05

  We heard that a lot. Very few people are actually mad about parking, but we heard a lot, "I bet people are going to push back." So as far as the rollout, it took, you know, 50 years to do the first district, another year to do the second, but we're going to do the remaining 57 in about five years as trucks start rolling off the line.

• 49:07Joe Weisenthal?

  Can you talk a little bit more about, you know, as you concede it to one fact, which is that you can't just copy and paste any other city's model into New York City? So it's not, you know, even if containerization, et cetera, works, it's a little different. We don't have, we might not have alleys. That's a difference. We might, whatever. Every city is a little bit different. But then, as you mentioned, people can take a little bit too far and convince themselves that New York is just different. Yes, it looks like you can have, and then people really get dug in and they come up with stories. What is the, where does this impulse come from? That all around, you look at trash and you have like, there was an article in The New Yorker about like a trash anthropologist and do a sub quote. It's like, "Oh, you don't understand New York. Is it really a city?

• 49:50Joe Weisenthal?

  It's a series of sub-societies and blah, blah, blah. And it's just not like other cities, and that's why it doesn't work." Where does this impulse come from? This sort of, I would call it like an anti-New York exceptionalism? We just can't, there's something fundamental. We just can't have cleanliness.

• 50:06Speaker 05

  I don't even think it's anti-New York exceptionalism. I think it's just a different manifestation of the same New York exceptionalism. Our trash is special in some ways.

• 50:12Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 50:13Speaker 05

  You know, our bags are a beautiful part of our landscape. And of course, they're not. And the waste stream has changed many times before. You know, one of the impetus, impetuses, impati? For the creation of the Department of Sanitation in the first place was that in the mid to late 19th century, there were dead horses all over the city and nobody whose job it was to pick them up, you know? And then throughout the early 20th century, many buildings had in-building incinerators. The primary waste stream that we picked up was piles of ash. And then that moved to solid waste. And we had the landfill model. This stuff has changed many times before. And I think it's the same nostalgic impulse that you see like, you know, why every movie is a sequel, you know? Because people want what they grew up with. And I think we're, one of the big things we're trying to do is remind people

• 50:58Speaker 05

  that what you should be proud of is what's under the trash, right? It's not, and you know, we've done this a lot of different ways over the years.

• 51:04Tracy Alloway?

  I'm sorry, did you say what's under the trash?

• 51:06Speaker 05

  Sure, the streets, the people, you know? We have an artist that we've worked with for many decades. Merrill Lederman Ukeleas did in the early 80s, designed a collection truck that's fully mirrored on the side. And the idea, it's called The Social Mirror. It's a great piece. And it was intended to remind people, "I make the trash, right? When I see the trash, that's me." And unfortunately, you know, we bring it out to parades now and people go, "Oh, it's the selfie truck." It's not the selfie truck. It's the truck with a deeper meaning behind it. But to your point about reproducibility and differences.

• 51:42Speaker 05

  The trash in New York takes on sort of a unique logistical space. We don't have the alleyways. We produce certain volumes. We're our density. But many cities face different challenges in the trash space and in other infrastructural areas. And I know a lot of them are looking at that now. You know, voters in Los Angeles have a ballot measure this year that would substantially rethink their structure of their public works agencies. I know Portland, Oregon just reorganized its city fleet asset management. DC eliminated the deputy mayor for operations two years ago and is now rethinking that decision. So, you know, these are the questions, right? It's not so much necessarily about what do you do with the trash? But what do you do to say the way I've lived for 50 years is not the only way to live, right?

• 52:27Speaker 05

  That, you know, just as activists in this country look and say, you know, well, you know, they have this here. I want that, you know? Oh, you know, we can have what every place has. Everyone can have a standard of living that they deserve. Even as you make the trash and even as you expect someone else to just make it go away, there is more that you can do as a resident to sort of encourage responsible design around this stuff.

• 52:51Tracy Alloway?

  Setting the New York exceptionalism argument aside for one second and setting all of New York aside, do you have a favorite trash collection system internationally? Like, what's your platonic ideal of a trash collection system?

• 53:04Speaker 05

  So there are a couple of places that had the opportunity to build them sort of from scratch.

• 53:12Speaker 05

  I wouldn't call them the platonic ideal because I'm very aware that these are not replicable models. But Singapore, which did a tremendous amount of greenfield development and was able to sort of put best practices in place from the beginning. And also Amsterdam, which was in a similar situation in the post-war era of being able to kind of restart a lot of their public space design. They use underground trash containers, had some advantages that I wish we would have had. You know, one of the things we learned in this process, it really surprised me, was that there's actually no map of what's underneath the streets in New York. There's no one, you know, Con Ed knows where their stuff is and the subway knows where their stuff is, but there is not one master, what we started calling the underground spaghetti.

• 53:50Tracy Alloway?

  All the guys who've been caught on camera coming out of the subway or out of the sewer system, they're just, they're trying to map it, right?

• 53:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly.

• 53:56Tracy Alloway?

  They're trying to figure out what's there.

• 53:57Speaker 05

  And, you know, and my hope is that that will change. And, you know, and I love the fact that in Tokyo, they have seven waste streams, whereas we've just gone from three to four. They separate so many more types of material. There are things that we could take from, from all over the world. But I think that the biggest thing that I hope that we continue to take is just a willingness to change.

• 54:19Joe Weisenthal?

  By the way, if anyone's listening to this episode, you should watch it on YouTube because our guest here has a really cool jacket that I'm very jealous of. And I'm always, I'm always jealous of Zoran's jackets, too. It just seems like-

• 54:31Speaker 05

  He's got one of these.

• 54:32Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, I'm sure he does. And every time I see one of these press conferences, oh, that's a-

• 54:38Speaker 05

  You know, you know, it's autumn in New York. No matter how cool you think your jacket is-

• 54:42Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, someone has a cooler jacket.

• 54:43Speaker 05

  Somebody has a cooler jacket. So it's just part of the, part of the job.

• 54:46Tracy Alloway?

  Josh Goodman, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots. Really appreciate it.

• 54:49Speaker 05

  It was my pleasure. Thank you both so much. And don't let her.

• 54:51Tracy Alloway?

  Yes.

• 55:05Tracy Alloway?

  Joe, that was a really interesting conversation.

• 55:08Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, super fun.

• 55:09Tracy Alloway?

  Something that I don't think about that much, even though I'm in New York City all the time, how our trash actually gets collected. I do think there is an underlying political architecture that is like, there, there's a major political choice in having residential garbage not be pay as you go.

• 55:25Joe Weisenthal?

  True, true.

• 55:26Tracy Alloway?

  Right? And so the big question is if, do heavy wasters basically get subsidized by people who aren't throwing out that much?

• 55:33Joe Weisenthal?

  No, you're right. There's a lot, and, you know, we could have gotten into that question of like, should it be completely, I guess, socialized? One thing I appreciate, you know, people always want to like, oh, New York City paid a million and a half dollars to McKinsey to do a study on trash and they produced a, like, it's complicated. And there's two things. One is collecting the data, et cetera. These are complicated things.

• 55:57Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 55:58Joe Weisenthal?

  And two, it would be kind of weird for a city to already have had that expertise in-house because you're not doing major studies of the trash system every year. You hopefully maybe do this once every couple of decades or something like that.

• 56:13Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 56:13Joe Weisenthal?

  So I don't know. I'm very like, I think people have this knee jerk response, like, why did, why did you pay another company and tell you that this is how they do it in Barcelona? Well, it's like, well, there's a lot of very interesting data, you know, this whole question of, you asked the question, how do you switch from measuring weight of trash to volume of trash?

• 56:34Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 56:34Joe Weisenthal?

  How do you do that? Does it seem like a trivial question?

• 56:36Tracy Alloway?

  I have no idea.

• 56:37Joe Weisenthal?

  Bring in, do a bunch of measurements, et cetera. So I have an appreciation for like, just the amount of sort of planning work that would have to go into this.

• 56:46Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah. The other, the volumetric analysis seems really difficult to me. And despite that, they seem to have done it and, you know, they're getting a handle on what's needed. But the other thing that's really difficult or strikes me as very difficult is the placement of the bins.

• 57:01Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 57:01Tracy Alloway?

  Right? And this idea that you are actually changing New York's landscape.

• 57:06Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 57:06Tracy Alloway?

  Hopefully for the better, but in the meantime, you are taking up previously public space.

• 57:12Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 57:13Tracy Alloway?

  And having to figure out like the cost benefit analysis of doing that for literally every single building in New York.

• 57:19Joe Weisenthal?

  Entire city, yeah, that's pretty wild.

• 57:21Tracy Alloway?

  It's a lot.

• 57:22Joe Weisenthal?

  To think about just like how many blocks there are. But you know what, like, I mean, I understand people park on the street and stuff like that, but that's socialized, too. Why do, why do, you know, that's really valuable real estate that some lucky people get to like park for free, et cetera. So.

• 57:40Tracy Alloway?

  The only thing I'm going to miss is seeing the occasional rat eating pizza or something.

• 57:45Joe Weisenthal?

  You know, I'm really interested in the war on rats. You know, that was, I thought, something very, very inspiring during the Adams administration is seeing those numbers of rat sightings.

• 57:56Tracy Alloway?

  I remember you were a single issue voter in the war on rats.

• 57:59Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, I was.

• 58:00Tracy Alloway?

  All right. Shall we leave it there?

• 58:01Joe Weisenthal?

  Let's leave it there.

• 58:02Tracy Alloway?

  This has been another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alockway. You can follow me at Tracy Alockway.

• 58:08Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart. Follow our guest, Josh Goodman. He's at J S H G D M N. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armin, Dashell Bennett at Dashbot, Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks, and Kevin Lozano at Kevin Lloyd Lozano. And you can chat about all of these topics 24/7 in our Discord, discord.gg/oddlots. And for more Odd Lots content, check out our daily newsletter, which you can find at Bloomberg.com/oddlots.

• 58:35Tracy Alloway?

  And if you enjoyed this conversation, if you like it when we talk about how New York takes out its trash, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. If you're watching on video, then please like or leave a comment or better yet, subscribe.

• 58:49Joe Weisenthal?

  And remember, if you're a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there.

• 58:59Tracy Alloway?

  Thanks for joining.

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