-Caveat Lector-
From
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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
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