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Introduction
New York City has a waste system that is complex, financially expensive, environmentally damaging, and socially unequal. Since 2002, the city has no facility for waste disposal within its boundaries. As a result, most of its waste is transported on trucks to other states, sometimes more than 500 miles away. This system produces great financial and environmental costs, and is based on a waste infrastructure that is unequally distributed and that affects communities unequally. To allow for long-distance waste export, NYC relies on in-city consolidation facilities called waste transfer stations. Most of these facilities are concentrated in a few outer-borough neighborhoods. As a consequence, these neighborhoods share a disproportionate amount the city’s waste and of its impacts. Therefore, the waste system is highly extensive in its disposal outside of the city, and simultaneously highly concentrated within the city. NYC’s waste system is also divided between public and private actors, adding to its logistical complexity. The city government only collects waste from residences and public institutions, while private companies collect waste from businesses. Private companies also dispose of all of NYC’s waste, privately and publicly collected. This split has hampered the city government’s ability to measure and regulate the private waste system, thus affecting its capacity to address many of its issues. In the last two decades, several administrations have attempted to address these issues through different plans and proposals. The most recent is the OneNYC plan of 2015, which set the goal of sending zero waste to landfills by 2030. Also in the past two decades, several non-governmental organizations have published reports analyzing and making recommendations for the same issues. Simultaneously, organizations, communities, and individuals have established parallel initiatives that address some of the issues of NYC’s waste system. These initiatives include community composting and canning, for example. Some of these initiatives have been supported by the city, while others been opposed by it. In spite of considerable positive changes to NYC’s waste system