The Dirty Ethnopolitical Geography of New York's Garbage; or, White Trash
Posted by Alex_Pasternack on Monday, Jul 04, 2011
Tony Ard, president of the Gracie Point Community Council, a group trying to keep trash out of the Upper East Side.
In New York, as everywhere else, one neighborhood’s trash is often another neighborhood’s terror. And that other neighborhood tends be poorer. Garbage from the well-to-do Upper East Side, for instance, now ends up being sent to mostly poor neighborhoods in outer boroughs. At these places, of course, its easier for other trucks, or train cars or barges, to take it even farther away, to points south (In 2001, Mayor Giuliani closed Fresh Kills, once the world’’s largest landfill, on Staten Island, a predominantly white community). And these places also make it easier to build garbage stations without the hassle of the legal battles or political campaigns often wielded by wealthier neighborhoods.
To visualize this phenomenon, the Times made a neat map of the city marked by garbage stations and income:
Slowly, that’s changing. A 2006 plan encourages boroughs to handle their own waste. And on the Upper East Side, that means the reopening of a transfer station perched on the East River. It closed in the late ’90s due to pressure from the neighborhood, where families earn on average $91,000 a year. In the South Bronx, that number is around $22,000.
Now the neighborhood is fighting the idea again, claiming, among other things, that the station would harm the economically underprivileged people who live in the nearby housing projects. A bill has been introduced in the state assembly that calls for a ban of any marine waste transfer station within 800 feet of a public housing project in cities of one million or more residents. Critics call it hypocrisy, pointing out that the bill has been tailored to block the new station, not serve environmental justice.
The complication of the fight over garbage gets more complicated once the larger environmental questions enter the fray. Green groups, which would presumably seek to prevent any new waste transfer station anywhere, must also take justice and fairness into consideration too.
You can see that mixture of priorities – fighting pollution but also promoting justice – in fights over nuclear energy too. The energy is mostly carbon-free, making it a still crucial element in the fight against climate change; but it’s also scary, making it a target of groups like Greenpeace and politicians like Andrew Cuomo. And the most satisfying solution – conservation – can also tend to sound like a cop-out: “the dispute underscored the need for a broader debate about the vast amount of trash churned out in the city and about generating less, recycling more and finding ways to produce energy from local waste,” says Marcia Bystryn, the director of the New York League of Conservation Voters. And there’s also the harsh reality, the reminder, familiar to those who know about the first law of thermodynamics, about no free lunch.
But at the end of the day, she and others said, there will always be trash.
We need to conserve of course, because as long as we make trash or need energy, someone’s going to have to pay.
New York Times / Image: Our TownFiled under:
About the author
Email: alexp at motherboard dot tv. @pasternack,
