249: Garbage
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It's like uncovering a vast secret conspiracy but one that is right there in front of your eyes. 5.30 in the morning, still dark outside, and I'm on my way to record some New York City garbage men on their morning route. And the person I'm with, this anthropologist from New York University named Robin Nagle, who spent years studying how New York City moves its trash, she points to a set of buildings, these huge, corrugated metal barns right on the waterfront at 59th Street. This is where the garbage trucks for the island of Manhattan come to dump paper onto barges to be taken away. I've seen photographs of this as a dumping point, this exact location, back dating to the 1890s. When it was wooden planks and horse-drawn carts, dumping directly into scows where men were waiting with rakes to rake the garbage, which was usually steaming because it often included ashes and things. And men died by falling off the scows or getting kicked in the head by the horses or falling through rotten boards in the planks. There are no signs, nothing to indicate that this is part of city government, except for one city CO that is actually too faded to read, which is not unusual. You'll see a lot of sanitation facilities that are, there's no name over the door, there's nothing telling you it's a sanitation facility. The perception sanitation in the public's eye is generally not great. And so it's easier if they can go below radar. On maps of the city you can see these piers, but it's not labeled what they are, just like fresh kills on Staten Island. The largest landfill on the planet for years has appeared on maps as a public park. People want everything having to do with garbage to be invisible, we want it out of sight, we don't want to think about it, we don't want to be associated with it. One guy who interviewed for today's radio program has a kind of high-up job in the Department of Sanitation, makes tons of money, lots of responsibility, and he got in contact after the interview to ask that I not use his name. His neighbors didn't know that he worked for the sanitation department and he didn't want him to know. One sanitation worker told Robin that one day he was picking up a bag of trash and a lady's walking a poodle and the lady lets the poodle start peeing on the bag as he's grabbing it, like he's not even there. Sanitation workers will tell you that they're invisible. How can a pedestrian let her dog pee on a bag where a man is reaching for that bag and has his face not 18 inches from the dog who then lifts his leg to take a leak? That man must be invisible to that woman that she would let that happen without giving it a second butt. Today on our radio show we take what's invisible and we make it visible. Stories of garbage, yours and mine. We live in a way that produces more waste than any people have in the history of civilization. We come here today not to feel bad about that, not to condemn that. I know this is a public radio show but I make a guarantee to you right now that this is not a radio program today about feeling bad about the immense volume of trash poking around the edges of all of our lives. No, no, no. This is a radio program about understanding the actual fact of it, finally. Our program today in three acts, act one of Mr. Sandman in which we get our hands on your trash, yours with the men who do it every day, act two, except for the smell. I think I have a crush on you. There are squatters who build entire neighborhoods on top of rotting garbage heaps in Mexico. They scavenge in the trash piles for their living. We go there for a little love story. Act three, I am a legitimate businessman, waste management and that act the secret recordings that ended mob control of New York garbage. We got them. Stay with us. Act one, oh Mr. Sandman. The government has this number where they take the amount of waste, residential, commercial, industrial waste created in this country and they divide it by how many of us there are to tell us how much garbage is produced per person by all of us just living our normal lives in this country. That number? 4.8 pounds per person per day. One morning I wanted to see exactly what that means on the ground. We're doing this clock, right? Okay, you sit down, I get on the other side. More than a year, Robin Nagle, who you just heard from, has been riding around with New York City sanitation workers, doing the job alongside them as part of her research. She wears the green uniform, she slings trash. I went out with her in two guys,
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