Wretched Refuse

Where does it go? That's all I wanted to find out.

Earlier this year, Mayor Bloomberg and I embarked on a mutual odyssey of sorts. While he went looking for a new place to put the city's garbage, I went chasing after mine.

On any given day, I throw out candy wrappers, coffee filters, old pasta sauce, light bulbs, old batteries, toenail clippings, ant traps, dust. A few times a week, I cinch up the kitchen trash bag and put it out on my Brooklyn curb. Like most everyone else, I do this without giving it a second thought. The latest federal statistics say I generate 4.46 pounds of household trash every day. Added to every other New Yorker's residential garbage, that comes to 13,000 tons. Figuring out whether to burn it, bury it or recycle it has been New York's most toxic political debate since the days when farmers threw dead horses in the rivers to rot.

So when Bloomberg unveiled his plan for the city's garbage in late July, environmentalists and community activists across the city cheered. After briefly considering incineration, he proposed exactly what they had been advocating for years: Retrofit eight dormant waterfront stations around the city--once used to barge trash to Fresh Kills--to containerize New York City's residential garbage and ship it to out-of state landfills via land or water. "We won!" exulted Brooklyn environmental activist Tina Filiato to fellow organizer Sal Cantelmi shortly after the mayor's announcement. Eddie Bautista, co-founder of the Organization of Waterfront Neighborhoods, hailed the Mayor's plan as "the biggest victory in environmental justice in the history of New York City."

But was it? The plan, which will take at least two years to implement, solves two urban environmental problems. By exchanging trucks for barges, it will get many diesel-spewing trucks off the city's streets. It will also distribute the city's garbage burden more equitably, with each borough becoming responsible for its own trash.

Beyond New York's borders, however, the mayor's plan hardly looks like a victory for anyone--except, perhaps, garbage hauling companies. Outside the city limits, the new plan is essentially the same as the old plan: ship it, by train or by truck, to out-of-state landfills. "Is it our right to dump trash from eight million people into our next door neighbor's backyards in West Virginia or Pennsylvania--to put it in landfills that will eventually leach into the surrounding groundwater?" asks Steven Cohen, an environmental policy analyst who favors incineration.

"Landfilling is not an ideal technology, but compared to incineration in densely populated places, it's preferable in the short term," says Bautista, adding, "I'm not saying it's right, but a lot of these communities accept it to receive extra benefits." Bautista is referring to "host community" agreements, in which garbage companies pay fees to local governments in exchange for the right to operate a dump.

And the towns that host the landfills? "With all due respect, they're reaping the consequences of what they sowed," says Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist and solid waste expert for the Natural Resources Defense Council. "They allowed that to happen. Maybe they bought into the host community benefits. They got a new school. They got a new library. They got lower taxes. So now they're reaping what they sowed."

Because their Greenpoint-Williamsburg neighborhood takes in more garbage than any other area of the city, I asked Filiato and Cantelmi, a few weeks before the plan was released, where they thought it ended up after leaving Brooklyn. Filiato said she thought it was going to "rural landfills" in Pennsylvania, what Cantelmi referred to as the "outskirts," where not many people lived. But neither knew for sure. None of the activists awaiting the mayor's decision had been to any of these landfills. That's when I realized I had to find out for myself, and there was only one way: Follow the garbage.