In spite of local objections, government officials continue to work hand in hand with waste industry officials to permit massive expansions to landfills, increase waste tonnage in incineration, and develop new facilities-like trash transfer stations-to increase their profits.
Governments are so pressured to find places to dispose waste that they devote very few resources to developing functional programs for recycling, and instead rely on short-sighted, quick-fix solutions.
As a result, we have become reliant upon dying technologies to deal with waste; we are less creative and committed to developing new technologies to reduce waste and devoting resources to these programs.
According to the New York City Mayor’s Office of Sustainability, in December 2013, the City, in partnership with Sims Municipal Recycling, opened the state-of-the-art Materials Recovery Facility at the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal, a primary barge-fed facility which will optically sort metal, glass, and plastic received from the City. With the opening of the Sims facility, The Department of Sanitation (DSNY) expanded the curbside recycling program to include all rigid plastics, the first expansion of the program in more than 20 years.
To increase the diversion of organic material in the City’s waste stream, DSNY launched a voluntary residential organics recycling program in parts of all five boroughs. The program serves over 100,000 households and approximately 40% of Department of Education schools.
A very recent plan to reduce the amount of garbage produced by New Yorkers was recently introduced by Mayor De Blasio (April 2015):
The plan, called “OneNYC”, includes an overhaul of the city’s recycling program, incentives to reduce waste and tacit support for the City Council’s plan to dramatically reduce the use of plastic shopping bags. This is an effort effort to limit its impact on the environment, and reduce the city’s waste output by 90 percent by 2030.
New York, with about 8.5 million residents, would be the largest city in the Western Hemisphere to adopt such a plan, which aims to reduce the amount of its waste by more than 3 million tons from its 2005 level of about 3.6 million tons.
Fore more information about this massive plan, go to: http://www1.nyc.gov/html/onenyc/index.html
wastednyc 