Wasted Potential: POLITICO’s full series on the failures of New York City’s recycling program
For four months toward the end of 2019, POLITICO reporters Sally Goldenberg and Danielle Muoio conducted an exhaustive investigation into New York City’s recycling practices. They conducted more than 50 interviews and reviewed hundreds of pages of public documents. The resulting, five-part series explored the politics, policies and financial decisions that contribute to the mountains of black bags piling up each night on city streets. They examine the impact of the city’s sluggish progress, which reaches from Newark, N.J., a poor city home to mostly people of color, to Bishopville, S.C., which has a 46 percent poverty rate.
And they explained why progress on recycling remains lower than many other premier American cities, even as Mayor Bill de Blasio and former Mayor Mike Bloomberg vowed to tackle climate change during their presidential bids.
The “Wasted Potential” series includes videos, graphics and an interactive map, all of which can be found below. We’ve also included follow-up stories detailing the city’s reaction to the series and several media appearances by Sally and Danielle discussing the issues examined in the series.
January 6, 2020: The consequences of New York City’s recycling failure.
Dozens of diesel-engine trucks belching exhaust travel 150 miles north of New York City, hauling tons of construction debris as they roll past clapboard houses toward a sprawling landfill that towers over this 3.3-square-mile city. On the other side of the dump on a chilly November morning, a few hundred yards from the stench of rotten eggs, children begin filing into the local school complex. This scene is the consequence of New York City’s failure to contain its trash. Two consecutive mayors of the city launched their presidential bids last year on a promise of combating climate change, yet neither was able to stem the tide of garbage flooding the nation’s largest metropolis and contributing to greenhouse gas emissions. Bill de Blasio, the current mayor whose national campaign lasted four months, and Mike Bloomberg, his predecessor who began his White House bid in November, both fell short of ambitious recycling and waste reduction goals that other major American cities have realized.
January 7, 2020: New York City’s food recycling failures exacerbate climate crisis
Mayor Mike Bloomberg was winding down his final year in office when he gathered residents of a high-rise Manhattan co-op and announced plans to tackle what he called the “final recycling frontier — organic waste.” Six years later, the now presidential candidate’s goal of a robust recycling program for food and yard scraps remains a pipe dream — the victim of municipal budget skeptics who think it’s too costly and a current mayor who has heeded their concerns and suspended the program’s expansion. The unkept promise amounts to Mayor Bill de Blasio’s most profound failure to improve the city’s dismal recycling rate and thereby reduce the amount of trash New Yorkers send to landfills around the region. Food and yard rubbish make up one-third of the residential waste stream and, left to rot in landfills, emit methane — a greenhouse gas considered far more potent than carbon dioxide.
Video: Composting organic waste in NYC
January 8, 2020: Recycling progress in public housing eludes city officials
New York City’s public housing stock is teeming with trash — chutes stuffed beyond capacity, stairwells strewn with litter, bins for regular refuse overflowing with misplaced cans and bottles. With 173,762 apartments whose residents virtually never recycle, the New York City Housing Authority offers one of the single best opportunities for Mayor Bill de Blasio to get a handle on the city’s runaway trash problem. Yet as of last April, public housing residents were separating just 1.5 percent of the cans and bottles that make up about one-third of their trash stream — a function of decades of neglect by city officials who did not bother installing adequate recycling bins until the threat of a lawsuit.
Interactive map: Where New Yorkers’ residential waste ends up
January 9, 2020: Lack of oversight lets commercial carters flout recycling rules
A cavalcade of rear-loaders fan out across the city each night, moving workers from one carefully sorted pile of garbage to another. Under the cover of darkness, many dump the waste into one heap inside their trucks before heading to the next stop. The city’s commercial waste haulers operate while most New Yorkers sleep. It’s that shield of obscurity that allows many carting companies to consistently mix cans, bottles and cardboard with regular refuse and send it on its way to landfills around the region — flouting city recycling laws with few repercussions.
Video: Companies flout NYC recycling regulations.
January 10: The fiscal hazards facing New York City’s recycling program
Storm clouds are gathering over New York City’s lucrative recycling industry. Several thousand New Yorkers living on the margins of poverty have been seizing valuable materials from streetside bags for a decade, looking to capitalize on a redemption system enabled by state law. And China’s refusal to accept most foreign recyclables is now strangling the city’s paper exports, causing prices to plummet. These dual burdens cost the city’s recycling facility an estimated $14.4 million last year — a financial hit that threatens both the municipal government’s revenue-sharing agreement with the Brooklyn-based processor and the overall success of the long-standing curbside pickup program.
Video: The economics of a can
Follow up coverage from POLITICO:
January 6: De Blasio says he can get to ‘zero waste’ despite lack of progress, by Erin Durkin
January 10: De Blasio acknowledges growing waste problem, promises new solutions, by Danielle Muoio
January 16: As city struggles to reduce waste, elected leaders talk trash, by Danielle Muoio
March 12:Johnson calls for mandated organics recycling in climate focused Council agenda, by Sally Goldenberg and Danielle Muoio
Media appearances with Danielle and Sally:
January 6: Sally appears on WNYC Morning Edition
January 9: Sally and Danielle speak to NY1 about the series
January 10: Sally and Danielle speak to iHeart radio’s The Daily Dive podcast
January 10: Sally and Danielle appear on an episode of FAQ Podcast with Harry Siegel
January 10: Sally appears on WNYC Morning Edition
January 13: Danielle appears on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show