-Caveat Lector- From
}}}>Begin New York dispatch A walk on the whiffy side With the closure of the Fresh Kills landfill site, New York City's garbage problem has reared its noisome head once again, writes Oliver Burkeman Oliver Burkeman Friday March 22, 2002 The Guardian Benjamin Miller is talking rubbish. A former policy director for New York City's department of sanitation, he knows the subject more intimately than most would ever choose to, and the book he wrote about it, The Fat of the Land, fairly reeks with tales of disease-ridden slaughterhouses and offal-gobbling pigs wandering through the streets of Manhattan. (This was the 1850s, it should be emphasised: Rudy Giuliani would never have stood for it.) The first incarnation of the mammoth Fresh Kills landfill site on Staten Island, he told me when we spoke this week, "smelt so bad it knocked down golfers several miles downwind". Today, though, the matter is of more than historical interest: New York is in the grip of a garbage crisis. Since the closure of Fresh Kills last year, in fact, there has been no adequate home for a large part of the 24,000 tonnes of household trash the city churns out every day. Currently, much of it is being shipped by barge to sites in Virginia and Kentucky at a cost of several hundred million dollars a year: $200m (£140m) is the nearest anyone can come to agreeing on a figure, which makes it over half as much again as the cost of taking it to Staten Island. This would make little sense anywhere, but it makes especially little sense in a city so financially squeezed that even its hero-worshipped fire and police services are facing deep cuts. "The city just has no negotiating leverage," says Miller. "A tiny number of companies own the landfill sites, so the cost of export has gone up from $50 per ton to $80 per ton in the last few years ... We're going to have to do something." It is just the kind of business inefficiency that has Michael Bloomberg, the city's managing director in mayor's clothing, reaching for his calculator. "We are spending roughly half a billion dollars a year more today than we did four or five years ago," he said recently. "We have to find a way to save that money and to dispose of solid waste." New York has been here before - many times in the nineteenth century, when animal waste and the putrid emissions from bone-boiling companies helped incubate cholera in the streets of Manhattan, and most famously in 1987, when a barge, the Mobro, spent five months trailing around the east coast of America, and the Caribbean, looking for a place to dump 3,000 tonnes of the city's trash. In the end it returned, and its load was incinerated and buried back home - but not before the crisis had made New York's waste disposal problem a topic of international marvel and mockery. And perhaps no other municipal matter in this city comes loaded with so much political symbolism. Fresh Kills - arguably the largest structure ever created by humans, and, Miller notes, "one of very few man-made objects to be visible from outer space" - was never just a landfill site. To Staten Islanders, it was a cosmic expression of contempt on behalf of the rest of the city, particularly Manhattan's Democratic elite, to an outpost of lower-middle-class Republicanism. In the words of New York magazine's political commentator, Michael Tomasky, it embodied "the class-cultural conflict inherent in a bunch of liberals from somewhere else telling [Staten Islanders] that the scraps of our lamb shanks braised in red wine are their problem." It wrought environmental havoc on the island, too, and Mayor Giuliani needed the islanders' votes. So in 2001, following an announcement in 1996, Fresh Kills took its last shipment - just in time, with grim irony, to begin a brief afterlife as a storage site for debris from t he World Trade Centre. Now, though, nobody seems to know what to do next. This week the Bloomberg administration raised the spectre of reintroducing incinerators, abandoned in1990 amid fears that the fumes were causing health problems. The same objections were quickly voiced again - as they were, of course, when pigs and cholera were the issues of contention. Miller has seen it all before. "There will always be some unhappy people," he says. New York should buy its own landfill capacity, he says, pointing out that the state is bigger than all those to which the city has been exporting waste. Curiously, though, few towns upstate seem particularly keen to volunteer. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002 End<{{{~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + "Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe simply because it has been handed down for many generations. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is written in Holy Scriptures. 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