How Trash Goes From Garbage Cans to Landfills

[Narrator] New York creates a lot of trash.

Every day NYC picks up 12,000 tons of refuse and recycling

through 2,000 miles of city per day.

So how does all this trash go from garbage bag

to its final destination?

I'm Ed Grayson, commissioner of New York City's

Department of Sanitation.

Now trash doesn't just walk onto a garbage truck

and today we're gonna take you step by step

on how that happens.

This is the journey of how one piece of trash

goes from here to here.

I just went to the guy on the corner, got my coffee cup,

I'm done with it.

90% of the time on that, if you don't have some place

that's going to take it as paper,

if you didn't have a way to find that wax paper,

that's just gonna be garbage.

We want you to source separate in your house.

So you're gonna have your regular garbage.

You're going to have your paper

and you're gonna have your metal glass and plastics.

[Narrator] Next, our coffee cup goes from bag to truck.

We have a pretty large fleet.

We host over 6,500 total pieces of fleet.

About half of that is heavy fleet used

for refuse and recycling and debris removal.

We're talking about the iconic large white 25 yard

collection truck that people see driving around.

Our reloading collecting trucks

are what's called a pusher packer.

There's a piston inside the truck

and it's pushing back the whole time.

That clam sweeper comes down

and it sweeps what's inside the hopper

up into the body of the truck.

That piston inside the truck is compacting

the garbage the entire time

and most of the trucks in New York City are gonna easily

hold between 10 and 12 tons of garbage

without even batting an eye.

[Narrator] And every day, those trucks

carrying those trash bags are maintaining

a unique route throughout the city.

Our coverage area is about 6,300 linear miles.

So at any given day of the week

we're trying to cover about 2,000 of those miles

and to do that we're going to dispatch

about 7,100 routes per week.

So a little over 1,200 a day.

We run a six day collection cycle.

The City of New York is five boroughs,

but it's 59 community boards inside the five boroughs

and DSNY has a garage for each of the 59 community boards.

Our main goal is to get the refuse and recycling route

scheduled between midnight,

so we'll start on the overnight and 4:00 PM.

This gives us 4:00 PM to the next midnight

to find out any places that for whatever reason

we had a service gap in.

Whether it was a blocked street, police activity,

you name it, that was blocking our ability to service

that area or service those block segments

and then what we use on the 4:00 PM to midnight shift

is going out there to totally mop up

what we didn't get on the first two watches.

What we're definitely trying to do is make sure

that we're routing efficiently.

That's the main goal because we wanna make sure

that we're always getting the latest set of GIS data.

Seeing how the overlays of our GPS performance is doing

to make sure that we number one, have every street routed,

routed effectively, routed efficiently

so we can complete our routes on time.

[Narrator] Next step, transfer station.

For the New York City Department of Sanitation,

we have five transfer stations.

For our marine transfer stations

where we bring it to the station

and then the final disposition's gonna go on a barge

that takes it to either a landfill operation

and or a waste energy facility and then lastly,

our fifth operation is in the Borough of Staten Island

and that is a rail transfer station.

A lot of people don't realize

none of the landfills are here.

Some of it goes up north to northern parts of New York.

Some of it goes down the I-95 corridor.

So we're going to Jersey, we're going to Ohio,

we're going to Virginia.

[Narrator] And so what does that mean

for our bodega coffee cup?

Our bodega coffee cup is probably gonna end up

in a landfill.

[Narrator] In NYC anywhere from 60% to 70% of trash

is still going to landfills.

So what exactly is the future of sanitation?

How can we prevent more waste from going into landfills?

One way is through anaerobic digestion.

This is using basically a giant stomach

and you're gonna put your organic material in there.

They're taking this wet waste and this wet organic waste

and some food scraps and some food organics

and other compostable organic material

and they're gonna add it into basically a giant digester

which is full of microbes and those microbes

are gonna break down.

Some of the other new emerging technologies

that are coming down the pipe are waste de-volumizers

and waste hydrators and what they'll do

is they'll ring all the water out of it.

Does a couple things.

Number one, speeds up the digestion of that

to make it more nutrient dense compost

and or takes up some of the weight in some of the room.

So you're getting a twofold bang for that.

You're getting less greenhouse gases that could be emitted

because it's just not as much material

and more importantly better chance to turn it

into reusable compost depending on what your next step is.

[jazzy music]

And there'll always be a role for the Sanitation Department.

We're gonna come, we're gonna keep your streets clean

and we're gonna come and get you all those recyclables

that are at the curb.

We don't want to come pick up your garbage.

We want to pick up all the things you did right

at the curb every day.