Opinion | Why New York Can’t Pick Up Its Trash

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Why New York Can’t Pick Up Its Trash

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The reforms have broad support.
The sanitation commissioner, Kathryn Garcia, deserves praise for leading the reorganization.
Labor unions and environmental groups have pushed hard for the plan.
It has also received support from unlikelier groups, like the Real Estate Board of New York, a powerful lobbying group, and the Partnership for New York City , a business group akin to a chamber of commerce.

New York’s trash nightmare is a model failure of the free market. Commercial sanitation workers contend with dangerous conditions for low pay, and wage theft is rampant. Many routes on this race to the bottom can take upward of 12 hours and cover more than 100 miles, the city report found. By contrast, the longest route of a city sanitation worker is about nine miles, according to city officials, though it often features more stops per mile.

Those groups back the plan because they see it for the opportunity that it is: a chance to make the city safer and healthier, a chance to renovate an industry that affects the quality of life of all 8.5 million people who live in New York.
“Trash management and disposal is a huge issue in society, and figuring out a smarter way to do it in a growing city like New York is a business priority,” said Kathryn Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City .
“This plan is a smart way to handle the issue.”
The city has been at war with its trash since its founding.
“There are accounts of Peter Stuyvesant being enraged at how sloppy the colonists were, even in the first decades of the 1600s,” said Robin Nagle, a professor at New York University, and the anthropologist-in-residence at the city’s Department of Sanitation.
Modern officials have had their own sanitation battles — some entirely predictable, others not.
Until the mid-1990s, when prosecutors stepped in, the mafia exercised significant influence over the industry, increasing costs by up to 40 percent.
The plan before the Council this week won’t solve all sanitation problems, but it can help.
Daily traffic from private garbage trucks would be reduced by more than half, from more than 28 million miles per year to fewer than 11 million by 2024, when the plan is to be fully in effect, according to city officials.
The plan would also impose new rules to improve safety, labor practices and customer service.
There is still more the city can do to improve its own operations

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