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Ologies with Alie Ward
Discard Anthropology (GARBAGE) Encore with Robin Nagle
01:30:27
Landfills! Treasures in the trash! Corporate conspiracies! Composting! An instantly classic conversation with the incredibly knowledgeable, frank and wonderful Dr. Robin Nagle of New York University’s Liberal Studies! She is a clinical professor, author, TED speaker and former New York City sanitation worker and truly the best person on Earth to trash talk with. We cover what you can and can’t actually recycle, sticky mustard bottles, drugs in the trash, Swedish Death Cleaning, mobsters and landfills, Bitcoin in the dump, the future of garbage and exactly how screwed we are. Enjoy.
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- [00:00]
Alie Ward
Oh, hi, it's the french fry under your seat you won't find for another four months. Alie Ward. And here we are. The trashiest episode of Ologies ever made. This is another one of those years in the making interviews. You're going to talk about it forever. So I came across this person's name in relation to garbage, and I thought, I must meet this garbage person. They seem great. They are a clinical professor at New York University's liberal studies department. They teach on the topic of garbage. They have worked intimately with garbage. They did a TED talk about garbage. They have three anthropology degrees from Columbia University and an undergrad in anthropology from New York University, and even authored the book Picking up on the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the sanitation workers of New York City. The perfect fit. Rubbish research is their life's work. So on a crisp fall day in Manhattan, I navigated the cobblestones to a conference room on the NYU City campus.
- [01:02]
Unknown
And as a side note, this episode was recorded in 2022, but I'm sharing it with you again for Earth Day month because it's a favorite among the entire Ology staff and listeners say that it has impacted them for years. They think about it all the time. I love it. So yes, it was an Autumn afternoon in 2022, and I routinely test for.
- [01:22]
Alie Ward
Covid for shoots and stuff. I had tested negative the day before, but I had been in an indoor gallery event that week, so I wanted to keep my mask on for our interview just in case, because Covid is awful. But masks are easy. Oh, one other easy thing to do, if you don't mind, is maybe tell a friend about this podcast, Ologies. Or you can support by becoming a patron for a dollar a month at patreon.com ologies also, rating subscribing and leaving reviews helps the show so much and I read every single one, such as this very recent one left by Sjcmudhud who said, ally is my new best friend and and I really can't help believing she makes this podcast for me and me alone. SJC Mudhut. It is all for you. Don't tell everyone else. Okay, onto the episode. Your brain is about to become a dumpster of facts about what people throw away, where garbage goes, who takes it there, finding treasure in landfills when an item becomes garbage, what plastic you can actually recycle, what burning trash, building on trash, cherishing trash, and more with professor, scholar, author, garbologist, discard anthropologist, one of the two Dr. Robin Nagle.
- [02:59]
Dr. Robin Nagle
My Name is Robin Nagel. And my pronouns are any.
- [03:02]
Alie Ward
All her most commonly used are she, her. So we'll go with that. The title of this episode, that's more ambiguous.
- [03:10]
Unknown
But garbage. Ology, not your favorite word, which I'm like, let's hear it. Because it is one of those words that sounds like a company that makes garbage cans.
- [03:24]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Okay, I'll accept that. But as a description of what we could call a field of concern, of study, of crisis, of environmental, profound environmental relevance, it's too narrow because garbage is only one way of thinking about waste. Right.
- [03:43]
Unknown
But is there a particular way that you describe your niche in anthropology?
- [03:48]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Yeah. So it's kind of under the umbrella of what would be called applied anthropology. My goal in working with New York City Department of Sanitation is twofold. One is to help the public understand what it is to be a sanitation worker in the city, for the city, and why should you care to know that? And the other is to help the workforce recognize ways in which they are valuable on this meta level that sometimes they don't even necessarily acknowledge. I have said many times the sanitation department is the most important workforce in the city of New York. And I get pushback even from people on the job. And I like it when I get pushback from them in particular, because then I launch into my whole rap about public health and the diseases that would make Covid look like a sneeze if garbage were not managed more or less very well. And I'm not saying it's perfect. We certainly had huge problems during the pandemic because of budget and how the operational side of the job was thrown into not chaos. But how do you prevent it from being thrown into chaos? Right. So those realities are always out there. But if sanitation isn't on the street every day, this is not the New York is not the glittering global capital we imagine it to be.
- [05:13]
Unknown
And, you know, I was thinking about it on the way over here, too. The difference between focusing on the garbage, which is dirty, which is something we all fear, versus the sanitation, which is the solution. So do you find that the way that we talk about garbage versus sanitation really depends on if we're focusing on, like, the good or the bad?
- [05:37]
Dr. Robin Nagle
I didn't. I never thought of it that way. I like that distinction. And I think you've pinpointed a key element here, which is garbage equates with fear for fascinating reasons. But sanitation, one of the challenges with the word is that we could use sanitation to only be talking about things like sewage. Right. So when we say sanitation, do we mean garbage? Do we mean other forms of waste? Do we mean the kinds of protocols that are in place in medical facilities and health care? All of that has a sanitation connotation or context. So same with the word garbage, though. Like, what exactly do we mean by that word? Because it's a multifaceted category of material, and depending on how it's defined, that dictates I'll say what happens next and where it goes, and what workforce is responsible for it, and what harms does it cause or do we prevent it from causing? All by the definition.
- [06:37]
Alie Ward
So to say something is discarded implies that it's useless to the person discarding it. But not inherently valueless. But garbage can mean food waste or useless stuff. But does even waste have an inherent value? We shall discuss.
- [06:55]
Dr. Robin Nagle
It also allows for thinking about forms of land, categories of people, ways of using time. Do we waste time? Do we save time? Are we discarding time? Like, it's just far more. It's a far broader and thus perhaps more exciting way to think about both the problem, the analysis, and then some of the potential solutions.
- [07:19]
Unknown
How long have you been in this field? And why, of all the fields of anthropology, did you beeline for this one or did you ping pong around a bit?
- [07:27]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Well, my earlier work in anthropology was about religion, but I've always been intrigued by the problem of garbage in particular and waste in general. And when I had a chance to teach about it, I came up with a syllabus that became a class called Garbage in the Anthropology of Trash.
- [07:45]
Unknown
That's amazing.
- [07:46]
Dr. Robin Nagle
And one of the speakers was a sanitation worker I had met just on the street who took great care when recycling rolled out in New York City to customize the chrome on his truck and make it look like such a clean vehicle that you could not imagine putting garbage in the back, because people were still throwing garbage in the back of his truck when it was supposed to be just recyclables. And it really pissed him off, so he decided to address this himself. And it got him a lot of really good media. So he was a guest speaker in my class, which was wonderful. But the more I learned about the job, the more I realized, especially as an anthropologist, you can't just hear stories and then draw conclusions about what is essentially a subculture. Right. It is its own world. So then I realized I had to do fieldwork in person. Participant observation, the classic anthropology methodology. And then I realized no matter how detailed that work was, I was not responsible for or even legally allowed to drive a truck. I wasn't on the job, right? If I said I'd be at a given garage on a given morning and I woke up that morning, I'm like, yeah, I don't feel like it. Which I will admit, once in a while that happens. My bad. But once in a while, it happens. Well, no consequence to me, except that I now have a reputation as being flaky. But there's no hammer falls. But if I'm on the job, I have a legal obligation to be in that garage for roll call. The city has a legal obligation to make sure I am qualified to drive the truck, to operate the broom. Those kinds of far more detailed trainings and relationships, that's what I needed to do. So I went through the whole process. I took the test, I got hired. It took about a year from taking the test to actually getting hired because it's a very long, slow, tedious process, in part because the city of New York must make sure by its own metrics that you, the individual, are qualified and capable to do the job they're hiring you to do.
- [09:55]
Alie Ward
As we recorded this in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, trucks of all kinds, garbage and delivery, rumbled outside. So just enjoy the New York ambiance.
- [10:04]
Dr. Robin Nagle
It's been a puzzle and a kind of an obsession of mine for as long as I can remember.
- [10:10]
Alie Ward
Have you.
- [10:12]
Unknown
Before you got the job to do the research, had you ever driven anything bigger than like a U haul before?
- [10:18]
Dr. Robin Nagle
So my high school sweetheart, his dad owned a moving company, and so he taught me how to drive a double clutch mech.
- [10:25]
Unknown
Oh, my God.
- [10:26]
Dr. Robin Nagle
But this was only in the cab. I never had a trailer behind, but it was a blast. And he also taught me how to. The beginnings of how to operate a bulldozer, which is not the same as an fel. A front end loader. Each of these pieces of equipment requires specific skill and time and forms of knowledge that we don't acknowledge the expertise that is required to do those particular kinds of jobs really well. You can use a bulldozer to gouge the out of a landscape when you meant to have a nice smooth surface, right? And same with driving a Mack truck, which is why I'm glad we didn't have a trailer when he's teaching me how to do the double clutch thing. So cool, that Mack truck. So I was. That was. And then most of the cabs for sanitation trucks are also Mack, but they're all automatic transmission. Now there are no more standard transmission trucks, which is probably just as well, but not great for fuel efficiency. But that's a Whole other thing.
- [11:23]
Unknown
But before you are able to drive a garbage truck, do they let you do donuts in, like, a church parking lot? Like when you're 16 and you gotta figure out how to book and drive a car?
- [11:37]
Dr. Robin Nagle
So, no. Short answer, longer answer. When I took the test for the permit for my commercial driver's license, I already had a regular driver's license because I didn't grow up in New York City. So we actually did donuts on frozen parking lots in high school in the wee hours of the morning with no grownups around, being little, bad, misbehaving children. So when I took the CDL and went through the training that sanitation offers, which is very thorough and meticulous, and then the road test and all of that, I was very nervous. But when I arrived for that first day of class, I'm sitting next to a young man half my age, and he never drove anything before he got his cdl because he was born and raised in New York City, where you don't really need a car the way a suburban high schooler or a teenager may need a car. In fact, I don't know if this is true, but I have read that the rates of teenage mortality are lowest in New York City around the country, because they're not driving cars.
- [12:49]
Unknown
Yeah, right.
- [12:50]
Alie Ward
I checked into this, and the state with the highest teen death rate, not New York. The top three were Louisiana, Alaska, and Arkansas. So be careful on those roads, kiddo. You gotta slow down, pay attention. You know what? Just so a tip for me, Designate a driver. My sister was the victim of a drunk driving accident when she was 16, and she was airlifted to a hospital. The windshield was shattered by her face, and luckily for us, she made it out, and she is fine. But she was picking glass out of her forehead. Years later, the guy driving broke a bunch of his legs. So designate a driver or volunteer to be one for one of your friends who will love you all the more knowing that they have a safe ride home, during which they will not get killed or arrested. Just saying. And buckle up. Thank you.
- [13:46]
Dr. Robin Nagle
So I knew how to do donuts in a parking lot. Right? But that doesn't mean you know how to do it with a garbage truck, with a collection truck that's its own. I will say you do own the road in a collection truck, because nobody wants to be near you. They don't know if you're empty or full. They just don't want to be anywhere near you. So you kind of are the king, your majesty. Which was fun.
- [14:10]
Alie Ward
Robyn's 2013 TED talk is titled what I discovered in New York City Trash. And she explains that a childhood camping trip left a really deep impression. And by that I think I mean it scarred her. But thankfully so for us.
- [14:24]
Dr. Robin Nagle
We got to our campsite. It was a lean to on a bluff looking over a crystal beautiful lake, when I discovered a horror. Behind the lean to was a dump, maybe 40ft square, with rotting apple cores and balled up aluminum foil and a dead sneaker. And I was astonished. I was very angry, and I was deeply confused. The campers who were too lazy to take out what they had brought in, who did they think would clean up after them? That question stayed with me, and it simplified a little. Who cleans up after us?
- [15:03]
Unknown
Now, you mentioned that this was an early obsession for you. But talking about the history of garbage, if we could go back, when does garbage start in humanity? I mean, we have probably piles of charred bones and things from dating back to the beginning of humans gathering. There have been garbage piles, right?
- [15:24]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Depends again on your definition of garbage. So one of the fun challenges is to decide when is it garbage? Quotes around the word, and when is it evidence? Archaeological treasure, some kind of tidbit of a story of our own past? I did a lot of work before, just as part of the bigger project with what's called the human relations area files hrefs. So the human relations area files are a compendium of ethnographic data cross referenced around, you name the category, kinship, child rearing, economic, and to say, economy. That's a huge subject. So underneath that, inheritance rules, ways of organizing what we might call religious belief and ceremony and ritual. And so I spent quite a while looking at how cultures have dealt with waste. How do they define it, and what do they do about it? And one of the intriguing findings, I think, is that we've kind of never come up with a particularly great way of dealing with it. Some small scale cultures, when it just got to be too much, they just upped and moved to a different location. Others have buried it over time to the point where they raise their elevation. In fact, some of the older cities of the world, this is true in Rome and some of the other great cities in Europe and parts of Asia. Some have specific scavenger species they rely on to take care of what we would call waste. Putting it in a nearby waterway has been very fashionable for millennia.
- [17:01]
Alie Ward
Wow.
- [17:02]
Dr. Robin Nagle
And not a problem until, of course, we. Well, until many things came to pass. But when we were all smaller scale, it didn't decimate that waterway. We've burned it, we've used it for fuel, we've ignored it, we have mapped it onto different classes so that if you are closer to a given form of waste, through no fault of your own, you are considered sort of there's a contagion kind of belief that goes with that. And then your status within that culture is diminish. In other words, we kind of only ever burn, bury, or dump in the water or give to scavengers. Recycling, we call it recycling. But before that word, it was just reusing something until it fell apart. Right. Which we used to do more commonly. And now it's coming back almost through this. And I don't mean this in a derogatory way, but this almost boutique y DIY like, look, I unraveled this old sweater and now I'm reknitting with that yarn, which I think is really, really cool. It doesn't scale up necessarily. And that's a problem if we want to solve the challenge, the problem that is solid waste, broadly defined sweater unraveling by itself. Let's put it this way. It's a good first step. You're doing great.
- [18:18]
Unknown
And was there a really big difference in terms of how sanitation was handled pre and post plastic era?
- [18:27]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Plastics have changed the whole game.
- [18:29]
Unknown
Mm.
- [18:30]
Dr. Robin Nagle
We would like to believe that plastics are recyclable, but that's not really true. They degrade each time they go through a recycling process. So after a few times through, you really only have a slurry that you can't build or do anything with and it ends up in an incinerator or landfill anyway. Plastics also off gas always. So there's always some kind of chemical component that's inside the water of the plastic water bottle, inside the food, in the plastic packaging, inside the baby's mouth when they're suckling on some plastic. So that's another waste product that is invisible to us, but that is that we now carry in our bodies, especially in our fat cells. There is almost no species of being on the planet that does not have some of these so called forever chemicals inside of ourselves. Name the animal, name the insect, those chemicals are present.
- [19:34]
Alie Ward
These chemicals, I looked into IT, are called PER and polyfluorinated alkyl substances, or PFAS. And there are close to 5,000 different types of PFAS. But one thing they have in common is that they don't occur in nature and bacteria can't break them down and neither can fire or water. Fun. Why don't you want such a hearty toxic compound in your system? Oh, just things like changes in liver enzymes, increased risk of high blood pressure or preeclampsia in pregnant people, small decreases in infant birth weights, increased risk of kidney or testicular cancer, increased cholesterol levels, and decreased vaccine response in children, according to the CDC's agency for toxic Substances and Disease Registry. But wait, maybe we have a solution here. In August of 2020, a study was published called Low temperature mineralization of perfluorocarboxylic acids by some environmental chemists at Northwestern University who found that a few types of PFAS can indeed decompose using some inexpensive and easy to obtain reagents. Sodium hydroxide and dimethyl sulfoxide, in case you're taking notes, at about 248 degrees Fahrenheit, which is a relatively low temperature that won't even bake a cookie. But the end product is non toxic and benign. This is amazing. This just came out a few months ago. Did we fix forever chemicals? Not at all. Not at all. This only works on certain types of pfas. And environmental scientists still say to stop making and dumping them. Like we learned in the Oceanology episode, the first task in cleaning up the ocean is to stop letting so much trash into the ocean in the first place. Otherwise you're just chasing your toxic tail.
- [21:23]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Oh, speaking of plastics, Plastics also connects to a kind of industrial process and complex of planned obsolescence and trying to convince a larger public that each of us as an individual is responsible for making sure that plastic object goes into the right bin to be recycled, even though the recyclability of it is mostly a myth. But there was a deliberate campaign that started in the 1950s to teach us that we are the individuals responsible. And by extension, municipalities are responsible.
- [22:02]
Alie Ward
The responsibility for sanitary refuse disposal falls.
- [22:06]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Upon every citizen, not the manufacturers of those products. That changes everything. And the other problem with plastics, of course, among many others, is their longevity. They don't biodegrade, or if they do, it's very, very, very slow. And meanwhile, they are contributing their chemical composition to these larger environments and animals. I just want to say one word to you.
- [22:35]
Alie Ward
Just one word. Yes, sir?
- [22:39]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Are you listening?
- [22:40]
Unknown
Yes, I am.
- [22:41]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Plastics. So, yeah, plastics. Plastics has changed everything.
- [22:48]
Unknown
Does it change the way that you live your life or what you use? I think we're all so anxious about it, we don't know what to do.
- [22:57]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Yeah, no, that's a real problem. And especially this complete contradiction. I have been taught that I, as an individual, am responsible for saving the planet by making sure to Recycle my plastics and glass and paper and metal. But I know partly because I study it and then other people know this sort of in their gut, like, yeah, this doesn't. I'm not sure. We've had recycling for a while now. I don't see the earth getting better. So what's going on? So it creates this cognitive dissonance. It erodes trust in the systems that are telling us to please recycle. I think that learning the practice of recycling, being religious about it, no pun intended, I think that's important because it can create a push from the ground up from those of us as individuals together to press for. Are there plastic polymers that could actually be recycled? Are there compostable plastics that could work in municipal compost systems? Because if something says it's compostable, okay, that's great. But compostable in what context? Through what specific mechanisms of heat and time. And those are built very carefully to account for whatever is the primary material. You know, you're going to be dealing with like yard waste and food scraps. But if you add compostable plastic, that doesn't necessarily come out the other side as compost, but as still breaking down pieces of plastic that need a different system. So if enough of us are frustrated enough, but we also practice this, we do recycle. That's a great raw material for what could become an effective political agitation to make plastic recycling real, if that's chemically possible.
- [24:43]
Alie Ward
So it's time to get mad as hell if you're not already about a lot of stuff.
- [24:47]
Unknown
And there are so many triangles with a number in the middle.
- [24:51]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Those don't mean anything. What? Well, let me back up. They mean they tell you the primary polymer component of that kind of plastic, but it does not mean it's recyclable. And in fact, the only ones that can go through the system a few times are numbers 1 and 2, the PET and HDPE. High density polyethylene. And I forget what PET stands for. Polyethylene phthalate, something.
- [25:18]
Alie Ward
PET side note stands for polyethylene terephthalate. And it's the most common thermoplastic polymer resin of the polyester family, if it does say so itself. It's very common. PET is in so much. It's in your clothes, it's in fiberglass, it's in a bunch of manufacturing items. But where you know it best is probably food containers while squinting at the bottom of them.
- [25:43]
Dr. Robin Nagle
So the chasing arrows symbol was a college student won an award when there was a design competition in the 70s to come up with some way of indicating recycling matters. But then it got co opted. And most people believe, like if the chasing era symbol is on the bottom of a plastic container, well, it's recyclable.
- [26:05]
Unknown
Yeah.
- [26:05]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Nuh.
- [26:06]
Unknown
Wow. I've been lied to.
- [26:09]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Yes, you have. Oh, you have. We all have. That's what I talk about, propaganda. That's what I mean. And it is a deliberate strategy of a conglomeration of corporations who go under the umbrella of Keep America Beautiful.
- [26:20]
Unknown
Mm.
- [26:21]
Alie Ward
Ah. My internal monologue here was like, what? And yes, I looked it up. Keep America Beautiful is a nonprofit. It was founded in 1953 by the Beverage and packaging industry and Philip Morris and other tobacco giants. So by campaigning to have volunteers picking up cigarette butts on their weekends, they could sway legislation away from smoking bans on beaches and in parks. So Pepsi, Coke, Nestle, McDonald's, Dow Chemical and other places with deep pockets and high stakes fund Keep America Beautiful to make sure that the focus stays on litter and recycling and your personal responsibility instead of the responsibility of the manufacturers and the distributors of plastics in the first place. And there's this one infamous 1970 Keep America Beautiful ad. And in it, an indigenous man wearing a fringed buckskin pantsuit rows his birch bark canoe down a river that's thick with trash. And in the shadow of these billowing factories, so ominous. And he hauls his canoe onto a littered beach. And in a close up, we see a single tear streaming down his face with the message, people start pollution, People can stop it. That native actor, Iron Eyes Cody, side note, was actually not at all indigenous. He was Italian. His birth name was Espera Oscar de Corti. He lied his whole life about it. But the message, people start pollution, people can stop it. Does that include companies? The PSA seems to skirt over the American notion of corporate personhood. But if you don't own a multi billion dollar company that sells sugar water in plastic bottles, how much responsibility can a person bear? We can make a difference though, right?
- [28:19]
Unknown
And so when you see, you know, three different trash cans, one says recyclables, one says composting, and one says landfill. Which is a good way to make you think, like, am I gonna be lazy and put it all in the landfill thing? You're like, no, that makes me a shitty person. I'm gonna sit here and figure out which of these napkins is compostable. Do those things really make it to those destinations?
- [28:45]
Dr. Robin Nagle
It depends. Where are we talking about? We mean New York City. They're called psrr, Public Space Recycling Receptacles. They are collected by different trucks with different destinations.
- [28:55]
Unknown
Oh, okay.
- [28:56]
Dr. Robin Nagle
The problem becomes, as you touch on, are those different bins contaminated? So for compost, does someone throw out the plastic water bottles or the plastic bag? Well, if it's contaminated beyond a certain point, you cannot take it to the recycling facility or the compost yard because it really now is just garbage. Same with recyclables. If you put too much food waste in the recycle bin, you gum up the works at the recycling facility. So yes, it's going to go to the right place if we put it in the right bin. But then it's often very confusing. If you have a single use coffee cup from, you know, name the major barista source of coffee. It's a paper exterior. It's often a plastic lined interior. And then you have the plastic of a different polymer that is the lid. Where does that go?
- [29:48]
Unknown
I don't know.
- [29:49]
Dr. Robin Nagle
It depends on the system that a given collection process is using. Does the municipality take that plastic lined paper and they do it through paper recycling or does that go through plastic recycling? So there is no national standard, should there be? Maybe. If there isn't, that partly means that manufacturers can keep making it up as they go along. And then you have this plethora of materials that have no clear next step and also are very complex to break down into components that can be recycled.
- [30:21]
Alie Ward
So you can check with your local regulations, but I just checked, I'm in California and plastics with a one or two on them. It's called an SPI code for Society of the Plastics Industry, which sounds very fake, but the SPI codes one or two check in the recycling bin. And I guess plastic bottles with codes 3 through 7 can be returned to recycling centers and you may get a deposit back for them. But recycling cans and clean aluminum foil is definitely possible. Electronic waste should never go into landfills, but recycling centers will take it. Batteries, same thing. And of course, recycling organic waste by composting is a great idea. Apparently 20% of the US food supply is tossed away. It's about 96 billion pounds of food waste a year. That plus yard waste is a third of what gets thrown into landfills. And I was like, well, at least that's biodegradable, right? Not as much as you think. When it gets tossed in a landfill, it makes way more methane gas, which is 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide in terms of greenhouse gases and global warming. But when you're composting It. It's broken down aerobically because it's interfacing with oxygen more, and it produces way less methane than when it gets tossed in a landfill. And you got a lawn to mow. Suburban dwellers leave those lawn clippings right on the lawn. You don't have to rake them up. You don't have to go put them in a bin. Apparently, it'll act as fertilizer. Your lawn's gonna love it. So now you don't have to get a bunch of cut grass up your nose throwing it in the green bin. So you're welks. But back to Manhattan.
- [31:59]
Unknown
Now, getting back to you, just going over cobblestone, driving a garbage truck.
- [32:07]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Is it called a garbage truck or collection truck?
- [32:10]
Alie Ward
A collection truck.
- [32:11]
Dr. Robin Nagle
And which, let me just add. Yeah, I find that the coolest euphemistic. It's quite real. And a euphemism. I'm on collection. What do you collect? Old clocks, you know, like Barbie dolls? Cabbage Patch dolls? Yeah, I'm on collection today. I do collection, but I'm collecting. I am collecting garbage. So a collection truck, it's a very accurate label. It is accurate, but it's also. It could mean so much else. Right. I love that it's called that.
- [32:38]
Unknown
And when you are collecting, how were you collecting? Just the garbage bags on the side of the sidewalk, which, by the way, as a Californian, as a West Coaster, I'm like, oh, you just put the Hefty bag on the sidewalk. It just goes on the sidewalk. There's no, like, cans to drag in necessarily.
- [32:57]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Depends on the neighborhood.
- [32:58]
Unknown
Okay. Oh, okay. I didn't know that.
- [33:00]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Yeah.
- [33:01]
Unknown
Do those get flung on the truck and sorted later, or where does that go?
- [33:05]
Dr. Robin Nagle
So when you say sorted, what do you mean?
- [33:07]
Unknown
Like, let's say that you've got a black plastic bag full of garbage. Does that get opened and cans go one way?
- [33:16]
Alie Ward
Robyn was shaking her head. No. Like I had just landed from a distant utopian galaxy.
- [33:23]
Unknown
No, that just goes landfill or incinerator.
- [33:26]
Dr. Robin Nagle
I'm sorry. Waste to energy facility.
- [33:28]
Unknown
Waste to energy facility. Is that so? Yeah. Walk me through a little bit. What happens when you're a plastic bag on the sidewalk? And where does it go when someone like you says, I'm here to make the city cleaner?
- [33:43]
Dr. Robin Nagle
It goes in the back of the truck. And then depending on what part of the city that truck is in, it will go to a transfer facility, meaning I'm now emptying the truck into a different point of its journey. And then in some cases, that next step is the last step. So, in several different Manhattan districts, all of the household garbage goes to that waste to energy facility in Essex, New Jersey. It's a fascinating plant. I was lucky enough to have a tour last spring. And incineration is always the big bad guy in the room. However. And I'm going to get killed for saying this, but in terms of what gets off gassed and the kinds of pollutants that are released and the kinds of hazards that are created, incineration, by some arguments, is a far better choice than a landfill. Wow. So if someone says to you, all right, we have to put a land you're going to live downstream, downwind from a landfill or an incinerator. Pick one. I would pick the incinerator.
- [34:52]
Alie Ward
Wow.
- [34:53]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Okay. And it's partly just what I've learned doing research on this for years, but then also seeing the kinds of standards that those facilities are held to and the oversight that is imposed on them to make sure those standards are met. It's not perfect, of course. I'm not saying that. But there is no perfect solution yet. And, yeah, I would choose. Oh, man, I'm going to get absolutely slammed.
- [35:19]
Alie Ward
But that's also.
- [35:20]
Unknown
That's. That's an informed opinion, though. You know, it's informed. That's an opinion.
- [35:25]
Dr. Robin Nagle
But you write an opinion. Quite. So it's my opinion.
- [35:28]
Unknown
Mm.
- [35:29]
Dr. Robin Nagle
But. So, all right, so from some districts, it goes straight to that facility. Other districts, it goes to a transfer station where it goes out by barge or by rail, and then it ends up in upstate New York or Virginia. There is no longer a location within New York City where we dispose of our own garbage. The last landfill closed in 2015. 2001. It's Fresh Kills on the west central coast of Staten Island. Yeah. So we send it far away. Last I knew, the recyclables, once they are sorted at facilities in Brooklyn and Queens and New Jersey, they go to nine different states for the next step of their processing.
- [36:14]
Unknown
And with plastics, I understand that we sell our recycling overseas sometimes.
- [36:20]
Dr. Robin Nagle
We sent a lot of our plastics to China, and China said to us, okay, look, we have an agreement about rates of contamination. That can only be a very, very small percentage. And you all are blowing that percentage over and over and over. And our side of the Pacific, we're like, yeah, okay, sorry, my bad. And we kept doing it. So China in 2018, finally said, enough. No more. We don't take it.
- [36:53]
Alie Ward
Wow.
- [36:53]
Dr. Robin Nagle
And so it created a ripple across the world of recycling that is still. Those ripples are still being felt because they were our primary buyer of plastics, plastic waste recyclables. And so now where do they go? It could have sent that ripple back up the manufacturing process to be like, ah, maybe this is a good time to take a look at why we create so much plastic waste and figure out how to stop doing that. Hasn't yet had that impact.
- [37:26]
Unknown
Was this from people who don't fully rinse the mayonnaise jar before tossing it in the.
- [37:32]
Dr. Robin Nagle
I think it was more than that. I think it was actually mixing plastics with like really gross shitty trash in big enough quantities that when you break open the bale of what's supposed to just be plastic and now you find stuff that not only can you not reprocess, that you're now putting those workers in harm's way. And like, it just from what I understand, it was more than just Mrs. McGillicuddy did not rinse her yogurt container.
- [38:01]
Unknown
Okay. Because every time I've like got a peanut butter container, I'm like, those are the worst, right? I know. I'm like, I gotta get some hot water in this. You know what I mean?
- [38:08]
Dr. Robin Nagle
And then how much energy are you using to clean it versus how much energy is going to be used to recycle it? But really not, you're going to downsize. So I feel you, you are not.
- [38:16]
Alie Ward
The only person to wonder how clean is clean. And according to the employee owned San Francisco waste management company, Recology, well done. They say, please empty all food residue and liquids from your food containers, from your cans, bottles, jars, before tossing them in the recycling container. And they say, for example, if there's a small amount of ketchup remaining in the bottle, give it a quick rinse to ensure you don't contaminate other recycled paper or plastic products. And they suggest conserve water. You can rinse the containers with sink water after you wash dishes. Just kind of like sploogy, sploogy in there. So if you have ever thrown away a squeeze bottle with two fingers of stubborn mustard at the bottom and then created a narrative that they probably like boil off the mustard, we have something in common. We were both wrong. Now what about recycling in a less melt it down and reform it kind of way?
- [39:11]
Unknown
What about you on the collection route? Did you ever see like an antique hutch that you were like, well, holy shit, I'm gonna come back here with a truck later and get that myself all the time.
- [39:20]
Alie Ward
Really?
- [39:21]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Oh, yeah. And so that's a category of garbage called mongo. And mongo is either the thing itself or the act of deciding to retrieve that thing. My best ever was after a big snowstorm when the whole workforce of the department of sanitation was put on snow removal, Meaning they're not picking up the garbage, but we're still making the garbage. We never stop making the garbage. And it piles up and piles up and piles up. So finally, the streets are clear enough to put people back on. Then it's called chasing garbage. And I'm on a block behind the Dakota, the fancy apartment building on the upper west side, and. And the garbage is as. The pile is as high as my shoulder, and it's from one end of this long block to the other. And it's raining and it's cold, and it's late in the day, and the truck is so full, it's almost bulging. And we're done. We just. We can't fit anymore in the truck. And one of my partners, there's one bag. He just tosses one last bag. But he has a sense of, like, where there might be something cool inside of a given bag. So he opens it up, which you're not supposed to do, but he opens it up. And inside, folded, as if on someone's closet shelf, are a set of really beautiful clothing. Not fancy, but, like, high end brands of jeans and shirts. And they all happen to be my size. And so he says, do you want this? I'm like, hell, yes. So I take those home. I did take them to the cleaners, you know, but then for years, I had this really great wardrobe addendum that all came from somewhere in the. I mean, famous people live in the Dakota. I don't know, maybe it was somebody's famous lucky brand jeans.
- [41:07]
Unknown
I don't know. Anyway, that's a good find.
- [41:10]
Dr. Robin Nagle
It was a great find. I found some great stuff. But then there are people who. There's a fellow named Nelson Molina, who was on the job for almost 35 years, and he worked for the vast majority of those years in east Harlem and the upper east side. So his route, that district splits some of the wealthiest zip codes on the planet with housing projects and people who are not wealthy. And he has a very finely tuned sense of when there's something being thrown out that really does not deserve to be thrown out. And over his years on the job, he assembled this astonishing collection of tens of thousands of objects that he has on display. It's not open to the public yet. We hope to fold it into what will eventually be the museum for sanitation. But between his genius for recognizing when there's something special in the trash. And then his curatorial genius of how it's arranged. It's dazzling. My sensors go off, look in the bag, and boom, there it is.
- [42:16]
Alie Ward
That was a clip from the 2015 film One Man's Trash, which was directed and produced by Kelly Adams, and I'll include a Vimeo link on my website. But it's delightful and charming and, dare I say, inspiring.
- [42:27]
Dr. Robin Nagle
So that's like Mongo madness, Mongo majesty, Mongo beauty. And the stuff that people threw out. Baptismal certificates and wedding photos and really beautifully framed diplomas from high, like Columbia Law and Harvard. You know, like. Like things you think, whoa, these are for life. In fact, one of the diplomas some journalists were through and they contacted the woman whose name was on one of these fancy diplomas who's now living somewhere in Europe. And they're like, you want it back? She's like, hell no, I threw it. I don't want it. I don't want it. Yeah. Nelson's collection is cool for many reasons, but one of them is it really asks you to think about how these things that are treasures were defined as trash by somebody. And why is it so easy to do that? And shouldn't there be other ways of ridding yourself of something you don't want anymore besides putting it on the curb for a garbage truck? And then what might those systems be? The challenge is time. If Aunt Gladys dies and I'm her last living relative and I've got to clear out her apartment and it's 50 years of whatever were her treasures, but I don't want them, am I going to spend the weeks and weeks and weeks of finding those new homes? Or I'm just going to put it on the curb, right? Yeah, I'm going to put it on the curb. So I mean, I. Generically speaking, so it just points to the need for different systems, the question about our relationship to time in general, and then gratitude for Nelson's stubbornness in deciding this treadle singer sewing machine with all its parts should not be in the trash. Or this film projector that can only show really, really, really old films. And look, there are the really, really old silent movies. Right? Right. And he has a whole wall of just Furbies and a whole other wall just of PEZ dispensers. So some of it is sort of lovely, silly things, but he has a whole thing of photographs. You can spend a long time looking at the table of photographs. Who are. Were those thrown out and who let go of them? And are any of them still alive and Most of them have no identifying information. They're just pictures.
- [44:50]
Alie Ward
If you want to feel sad and scared and oddly invigorated, look up Swedish Death Cleaning, which is like Marie Kondo ing your life. But while asking the question, do I want my bereaved loved ones sobbing into this casserole dish I never used, unsure if they should give it to Goodwill. So clean out your stuff so that other people don't have to make decisions for you after you die. It's pretty simple, and the stakes seem very high, which is what I need to get motivated to clean out a cabinet. On that note, a dear friend of mine recently went to an estate sale in LA and left with a box of items that they were going to throw in the trash. They were like, go ahead and take it. Seemed like it had some cool stuff in it. Turns out the house belonged to a local archaeology professor, and inside the box were some colorful pottery shards. And she asked me if I could find out anything about these pottery shards. And via social media, you all connected me to an expert in this type of ceramics. And the box that my friend acquired from the late professor contained irreplaceable Artifacts from a 1986 Central American archaeological dig. And as my friend looked deeper in the box, she texted me in horror that there was a Ziploc of human bones from a burial ground in Guatemala. So this friend tried to save some pottery from a landfill, and now we're literally working with the State Department and the consulate to repair, repatriate human remains to Central America that should have never been in a box in a closet. So, spring cleaning once a year, let's go through all of our shit as if we were about to die. Return your desecrated human remains back to their country of origin before a stranger accidentally buys them at your estate sale. Sell some sweaters on ebay. Put a lamp on Mercari Marketplace, Craigslist. I don't care. Use the buy nothing groups on Facebook in your area. Do not accidentally hoard archaeological artifacts ever.
- [46:52]
Unknown
Has anyone ever teamed up with an economist to try to figure out how much wealth and resource is in the trash? What's the value of the trash?
- [47:05]
Dr. Robin Nagle
So, value defined by whom? In what context? If I am running a private waste company, that trash is worth a lot of money to me. And if I am doing separation of its components and I can find ways to monetize what is otherwise just this clump of something smelly that we call garbage, there's a lot of wealth in that. The disconnect is the individual person is letting go of that wealth and then. And somewhere in its next step, somebody else is deciding, no, no, there's gold in them there bags, but what is.
- [47:42]
Unknown
The value and who owns it once it's discarded?
- [47:45]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Right? And who says, who decides what that value is in terms of who owns it? And we're talking a lot about New York because it's the situation I know best. But once it's on the curb, if it's municipal waste, it belongs to the city of New York. You don't own it anymore. New York City owns it. And there have been legal tug of wars about that very issue. New York also has two other primary categories of waste, though, which is commercial business waste, which is collected only by private companies. Private waste companies. And then construction and demolition debris, or C and D, which is a third category. The bureaucracy behind these different categories is pretty thick, which is partly about preventing corruption and partly about health and safety.
- [48:29]
Unknown
And what about parts of cities that are built on garbage?
- [48:34]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Well, I do a talk. In fact, almost every talk I do about garbage starts with a map of Lower Manhattan, the original shoreline, with this web on top, which is the contemporary street grid. And I have a pin on the five places where Peter Stuyvesant told New Amsterdam colonists in 1657, here's where you are allowed to throw out your trash. And it's all on the water's edge. And if you look at that, the last pin I show is at a place called Coentes Slip and Pearl Street. And then I show a slide of that exact place with the same pin, and it's three blocks in from the water's edge. And all of that is various forms of fill, much of which is garbage. While Robert Moses was sort of the informal dictator of New York City and New York State, he determined where every ton of garbage was deposited so that he would make land.
- [49:31]
Alie Ward
Robert Moses, what a character. Wow. So he deposited garbage in areas where poor people lived and even designed low underpasses so that people without cars, meaning folks who ride the bus, couldn't access public beaches. He was like, no car, no beach. And one place where the land was built up is on a place called Barren island, part of Brooklyn. Exact beach is called Dead Horse Bay, which, like, can't be called Dead Horse Bay because the dead horse is in it. Right. That's got to be metaphorical. Nope. There was a glue factory where all the pre automobile dead horses were sent to. And the waters of Dead Horse Bay were littered with chopped up dead horse bones. Dead Horse Bay also smelled a lot like dead horses. But the land was filled up with the city's trash and covered with just a dusting of topsoil that washed away. And to this day, you can walk along Glass Bottle beach, kind of like a watery time capsule of trash deposited in early 1953. There are rusted cash registers, tires, warped crusty leather shoes, soda bottles of all kinds, and yes, the occasional horse bones. And I should say you can't actually walk along the shore as it was closed two years ago after radioactive waste was found in 31 different spots. So they're working on it. But you can Google pictures. So many bottles. People say it sounds like gently clinking champagne flutes or shimmering wind chimes as the bay laps at the glass.
- [51:07]
Dr. Robin Nagle
And so we are literally walking on our own history, our own archaeology all the time. But that's not unique to New York at all. Cities all over the world have done this since time immemorial.
- [51:19]
Unknown
How does the garbage not just float out to sea?
- [51:22]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Well, sometimes it does. Oops. Sometimes it does. It depends on how well built the landfill is, what kind of what innovative construction was put in place for it. There are parts of the city where it is just eroding back out into the sea. Not many, but there's some.
- [51:42]
Unknown
I have so many questions from listeners. Can I ask you some?
- [51:44]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Of course.
- [51:45]
Unknown
Oh, my gosh.
- [51:46]
Alie Ward
But as always, before your questions, we have some money to discard toward a worthy cause chosen by the ologist. And Robin pointed us toward the Sanitation foundation, which is the official nonprofit partner of the New York City Department of Sanitation. And their mission is to keep the city clean while celebrating and supporting the essential sanitation workforce and advancing the city's ambitious zero waste agenda. They're also making the first ever New York City Sanitation Museum, featuring the treasures in the trash collected and curated by Nelson Molina, who we talked about earlier. So find out more or donate yourself@sanitationfoundation.org and that donation was made possible by sponsors of the show. Okay, let's dig through your inquiries. They have so much value, so many good questions.
- [52:36]
Unknown
I'm just going to start straight out with Kyla Kelly's question. Who asks, how fucked are we? Alia Meyer says, okay, seriously, how much garbage is there? Kelly Shaver wants to know how much trash is on Earth, just how fucked.
- [52:55]
Dr. Robin Nagle
So I think because of plastics, we're seriously fucked.
- [52:58]
Unknown
Okay, that's what I thought.
- [52:59]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Yeah. In terms of a metric of how precisely fucked are we? I wouldn't have. I don't know. I have a child and I am often lying awake at night, seriously worried about the future. That that child. That child is 23. That child is no longer tiny, but that child is young enough. Maybe they will have a child of their own someday. What. What crisis are we guaranteed to leave them? And I can't answer it, but the possibilities are numberless. So, yeah, very fucked.
- [53:37]
Unknown
Yeah.
- [53:37]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Thank you for that question.
- [53:38]
Unknown
Yeah, thank. I mean, that's a. That was the answer, I thought. Good to hear from an expert.
- [53:43]
Dr. Robin Nagle
An expert. That's my expert. Yes.
- [53:46]
Alie Ward
Robyn later emailed me to say that, though she came off as rather emphatic about it, she wanted to add that being fucked is not the same as being hopeless. And where we're at if things don't change is really bad, but that hoping and striving for change and improvement is still the right move, as always. So don't throw your good intentions in the garbage. Besides, is there even room for them?
- [54:13]
Unknown
Christina Weaver wants to know, is there a real possibility of running out of places to put our garbage? And the movie Wall E comes to mind when they think of this. They say, have you seen wall e?
- [54:22]
Dr. Robin Nagle
5 times. I love Wally. It's one of my favorite movies. No, we are not running out of places, in part because more current landfill technology uses a cellular system whereby you are encouraging the decomposition of what's in there. So it happens faster than if you just bury it and walk away. So there's like a quadrangle of cells. And when the last cell is as decomposed as it can be, it much less quantity. And so you can reuse it. Also, there are vast stretches of. I mean, if we wanted to, we could fill all those lovely the plains of the Midwest and the rural area like we can if we want to keep landfilling. We will not run out of space for a very, very, very long time. It's going to cost arms and legs and heads and toes to get it where we want it to go, right, by whatever transportation we choose. But if we want to do that, we're not going to run out of space anytime soon.
- [55:28]
Unknown
Is it more about not producing so.
- [55:33]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Much municipal solid waste in the United States? And that's the technical term for what most people think of when they hear the word garbage, like what's in your kitchen waste basket or on the curb in the litter basket. That accounts for, at the very, very most, 3% of the nation's waste stream. So I talked earlier about propaganda. There is a lot of attention to what's at the curb and where it goes and the harms it causes, all of which are real. But off stage, with far less public attention, are the far more harmful, much larger quantities of waste from a host of industrial and agricultural and mining and medical systems, among other big categories. So. So yes, we should make less. But again, this question of scale, it has to scale up beyond us as people, individuals and individual cities. Again, I'm not therefore saying we shouldn't recycle, we shouldn't generate less waste in our own lives, because that is the start. We don't smoke in almost any public venue anymore. That happened because of a confluence of influence from scientists, health experts, and just plain old people who were tired of getting their air polluted everywhere they went, as well as the devastating health consequences of smoking cigarettes. Right. So it wasn't because the government woke up one day and said, oh my, we should stop people from smoking because it would be good for them. That's not what happened. It happened from the ground up. One of my dreams is that plastic water bottles will be similarly scarce in the world from a similar kind of push. Because if we really believe that, then the change is within our power, together with each other. It has to be a coalition. It can't just be me, myself and I.
- [57:29]
Alie Ward
And for anyone wondering when plastic water bottles started choking the planet, you can look no further than the marketing success of Perrier water in the 1970s, because reports linking diet sodas to health started rising. And so this franch mineral water became very popular through marketing to the yuppie community. And then Nestle bought Perrier in 1992. Pepsi entered the arena, launching Aquafina in 1995. And then Coke hopped in the bottled water waters in 1999 when they launched Dasani. Did you know that Awkwafina and Dasani are Pepsi and Coke? Did you know that? Did you also know the huge secret? Most of that water, even if it purports to be from like Yosemite Springs or whatnot, it's actually just tap water. It's just municipal water, filtered, bottled, and it costs more than gasoline per gallon. We've been had. But patrons Susie Shipman and Ella Grace both asked if we'll ever go back to a less wasteful and maybe plastic free existence.
- [58:38]
Dr. Robin Nagle
There's a brilliant book called Waste and Want by a historian named Susan Strasser. And she delves deep into how disposability became our preferred choice over reuse. For example, you're on a train, you go to the restroom. It used to be a towel that rolled, which I remember.
- [58:59]
Unknown
I remember those too.
- [59:00]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Right now, I think people might be horrified to go into the Amtrak restroom and not have a paper towel to use. Same with, there used to be public drinking options around the city with cups on chains attached to the fountain. So you could just dip the cup and drink from the cup. I don't think we would do that anymore. And there are good reasons why we would hesitate to do it. But the alternative of a discardable single use, that creates a host of nightmares that are sort of on the other side of it. So the other thing about the rise of single use plastics, you're selling more, right? Plastics, they are manufactured and sold and the more single use utensils we use with our take out food or the more wrap we have around our throwaway Dixie cup, whatever it is, somebody's making money on that. So partly it's follow the dollar.
- [59:53]
Unknown
That's a really interesting point.
- [59:54]
Dr. Robin Nagle
There are still city water fountains all over the place and I drink from them without any hesitation. And New York City water is famously wonderful and healthy and pure, etc.
- [60:01]
Unknown
So yeah, I at least love seeing more places in airports where you can refill a water bottle. Especially since, you know, in an airport, the consumerism there comes with a $9 price tag to get a glass of water. So you're like, well, Kelly Brockinson and Ella had great questions. Ella wants to know what's the difference between garbage and rubbish? And Kelly asks, garbage versus trash versus litter. Please define, are those different definitions?
- [60:32]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Not really anymore, I would say. But there used to be, there used to be distinctions. I think now they're just the thesaurus would give you rubbish or garbage or trash as synonymous. Litter is different. Litter is sort of waste out of place. Like, you know, it's not supposed to be at the curb or on the street. It's supposed to be in a litter basket or a garbage bag or a truck or a landfill. It's not supposed to be literally. There's a fantastic novel by one of my all time favorite authors, China Mieville. And the author's called Un London. And one of the key characters is feral trash. And I think of litter as feral trash.
- [61:14]
Unknown
It is funny because once you put it in a litter basket, it's no longer litter.
- [61:19]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Correct. But trash in general. And litter in particular has a way of escaping its confinements.
- [61:26]
Alie Ward
And Robin says that in the 1890s, New York had more clear distinctions between garbage, which usually denoted food, waste, rubbish, or trash, which was other items, and Excelsior, which sounds like a model of suv, like the Lincoln Excelsior, but it really just means Wood shavings and sawdust. And of course, American English favors garbage or trash. Brits call it rubbish and their garbage cans or dust bins after the coal ashes that they collected. But anyway, yes, nice names. Gross stuff.
- [62:01]
Unknown
Rubbish sounds cuter.
- [62:03]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Rubbish sounds more sophisticated.
- [62:04]
Unknown
It does. It sounds less smelly than garbage.
- [62:07]
Dr. Robin Nagle
It certainly does. Yeah. Garbage. Garbage sounds gross, but rubbish.
- [62:11]
Unknown
Yeah.
- [62:14]
Alie Ward
A lot of folks.
- [62:15]
Unknown
I'll list them in an aside.
- [62:16]
Alie Ward
Jo Mueller, Brie Brie Stewart, Maria Danae dejarney, Justin Sacito and Pauline depierre want.
- [62:24]
Unknown
To know about people.
- [62:28]
Alie Ward
Are people going to the dump? Is that a disposition method?
- [62:33]
Unknown
How often do people turn up in dumps?
- [62:39]
Dr. Robin Nagle
What people? In what dumps? And what do you mean by dumps?
- [62:42]
Unknown
Like how often are there dead bodies or body parts?
- [62:45]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Oh, you mean. Oh, that. I thought you meant how often do people just go into the dump because, you know, it's Friday night, got nothing to do, let's go to the dump. Which in fact people do. We have fun. I took you to the dump. I let you shoot my gun at some rats. Yeah, because some smaller towns, some smaller dumps, they put aside things that might be useful and you can do. Like there's a fantastic one I go to sometimes in Vermont that has a whole little building full of stuff that people don't want anymore, but somebody else might want it. And it's always fun to rummage around through that. Non rubbish. In terms of bodies going to dumps, of course, I mean, that happens. There have been sort of myth level stories about human bodies who have been buried at Fresh Kills landfill in New York City. Of course, there are cartoonish stories about mobsters getting rid of their enemies in the landfills of the Meadowlands and other parts and landfills in this part of the world. Almost certainly there are, but I don't have firm stories about it.
- [63:56]
Unknown
But that's not why Fresh Kills is called Fresh Kills.
- [63:58]
Dr. Robin Nagle
No, Fresh Kills, the name comes from. The roots are in Dutch Kills, like Catskill, Peekskill. It means near a creek or stream. So it has nothing to do with death.
- [64:09]
Unknown
Okay, but I mean, you've never seen like a hand sticking out of. Of something, have you?
- [64:15]
Dr. Robin Nagle
I have not. But, Sarah, sanitation workers I've worked with who have.
- [64:18]
Unknown
What's the protocol?
- [64:21]
Dr. Robin Nagle
All kinds of city agencies, police, county court, the medical examiner's office, Department of Health. There's a whole. I don't know what the protocols are, but there's this. It activates a whole lot of response.
- [64:34]
Unknown
Yeah. Are rugs. Do rugs get a bad rep for a Reason?
- [64:41]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Yeah, sometimes. Yes. Also, there was a story from a few years ago. That crew was working a block and someone had discarded a couch, and as they put it into the back of the truck, thousands of dollars worth of cocaine fell out of it. Oopsie. Oh, yeah, big oopsie.
- [65:01]
Unknown
Is there a protocol for that or is it just like, put that on ebay, see what you can get?
- [65:06]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Yeah, no, they would have been fired and jailed if they had done.
- [65:09]
Unknown
That's a good point, I guess. Not worth that. Did you hear the story about the guy who threw away a disk drive full of bitcoin?
- [65:18]
Dr. Robin Nagle
I did hear that.
- [65:19]
Alie Ward
Has he reached out to you to.
- [65:20]
Unknown
Be like, can you help me out here?
- [65:22]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Was he even in New York?
- [65:23]
Unknown
No, I think he was in Essex or something. I think he was British.
- [65:26]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Yeah.
- [65:27]
Alie Ward
So James Howells, a Welsh computer engineer, accidentally tossed some bitcoin into a landfill in 2013 and has spent nearly a decade and potentially millions of dollars developing AI, TR scanning schemes and robot dogs to help him locate this disk drive with his bitcoins. How many bitcoins? 8,000. Which are worth about $145 million. Even with bitcoin dropping to less than a third of its top price this year, has he got a chance?
- [66:02]
Unknown
No. It's gone, isn't it?
- [66:04]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Well, probably. I mean, it exists in the world. If it's in a landfill. It exists in the world. If he could convince somebody to go back and if the records were kept well enough to go back and have a pretty good guess of exactly where it was buried, and he was willing to probably pay a hefty amount of money to get them to excavate. Here's the other thing, though. How far down is it and what infrastructure has been put in place on top of it? Because if it's a landfill built today, there are leachate and methane and other volatile organic compound retrieval and treatment methods. So it's not just a hump of earth with garbage inside. It's a very complex, very carefully engineered geography. And if his bitcoin thing is down many layers and they would have to disrupt the system, that then is part of the entire complex. I don't know that there's enough money in the world to convince anybody to do that.
- [67:07]
Unknown
Right, right. The sad thing is, I think it was like half a billion dollars on a disk drive of bitcoin. But the sad thing is just bitcoin's tanked in the last six months. So it's like every day that he's not getting it is just. I just I want him to do that. Eternal sunshine, and just be able to take that part of his brain that knows he threw away Bitcoin and just take it out of his brain and just let him live. You know what I mean? But that brings up a good question, though. Bradley, first time question asker, longtime listener, says that I've heard that new landfills are using enzymes to speed up decomposition and using methane capture to generate electricity. Are those methods being widely utilized yet.
- [67:49]
Dr. Robin Nagle
In a contemporary landfill? Yes.
- [67:51]
Alie Ward
Oh, okay, that's great.
- [67:54]
Unknown
The methane capture, does that go right back into the natural gas pipeline?
- [68:00]
Dr. Robin Nagle
So I don't. I don't know the physics or the chemistry of this, but it's part of gases that are, at least in this part of the world, sold back to the national grid, and then are used to help heat homes in the area.
- [68:13]
Alie Ward
Okay, just a side note on this. So natural gas and landfill gas, or lfg, aren't the same thing, Just because when microbes are chomping and burping and doing their thing, they're also making CO2. So LFG, or landfill gas, straight out of the pipe, raw, might be 50, 50, methane and CO2 with some other volatile compounds mixed in, give or take. So vertical and horizontal pipes are buried in the landfill, and they collect the gas, and then it gets cooled and processed before being sold for other purposes as natural gas. But landfills are farting, and we capture it, we cherish it, and then we burn it for money. Speaking of gross, Shelby Reardon asked, how dirty is trash? And Evely Sanchez requested info on the worst thing Robin has ever found in the garbage. She wasn't the only one.
- [69:15]
Unknown
Amy Narmatsu wants to know, what's the nastiest thing you've ever seen?
- [69:22]
Dr. Robin Nagle
I find a large conglomeration of maggots at the bottom, let's say, of a plastic or metal garbage can. To be really like, it absolutely wigs me out. And that's not fair to the maggots. And it's like they're just little beings in the world, and we create the conditions for them to exist. And, in fact, if you have a. This is really gross. But if you have a wound, like a deep flesh wound, and it's not healing, but you drop a maggot in there, that maggot will eat all the dead, infected flesh, and you will have a very, very healthy wound that then will heal. So maggots actually could have a role in healthcare and have had in the past. But, yeah, so I. Maggots are, for.
- [70:06]
Unknown
Me, they're just babies.
- [70:07]
Dr. Robin Nagle
They're just little beings trying to exist in the world. I feel that very strongly.
- [70:11]
Unknown
Just infants. They're just fly infants.
- [70:14]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Even if they were grown up flies, I. I'm less wigged out by them. But don't they have a right to live? And hell, we made the conditions that make them prosper.
- [70:24]
Unknown
We invited them to the party.
- [70:25]
Dr. Robin Nagle
We did. We threw the party. And we're like, perfect for you maggots. Come on over. Same with rats. New York City, among other cities. But because we use plastic garbage bags, we have created what a colleague of mine calls ratopia.
- [70:38]
Unknown
Okay, why?
- [70:41]
Alie Ward
How?
- [70:42]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Because we have food waste in those bags all over the city, especially at night, because rats tend to be nocturnal. And then so we put the. From restaurants, especially put food waste from houses as well. We put them out the bags. Bags. I don't care how minty the flavoring of the bag is. It just means the rat will have breath that smelled like he just brushed his teeth. It will not dissuade them from eating into and getting food from those bags. So as long as we are reliant on plastic bags at the curb at night, we are feeding rats.
- [71:17]
Unknown
Oh, well, two things about that. Number one, there's an episode I did with Dr. Bobby Corrigan.
- [71:23]
Dr. Robin Nagle
He's my man.
- [71:24]
Unknown
I love him.
- [71:25]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Bobby is the best. He's the one who has the term ratopia. I didn't know you did one with Bobby. I miss that. Oh, fantastic.
- [71:31]
Unknown
It's urban rodentology.
- [71:32]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Yeah.
- [71:32]
Unknown
Yeah. Oh, I love him.
- [71:34]
Alie Ward
Bobby's the best.
- [71:35]
Unknown
I love him.
- [71:36]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Bobby Turner. Yeah. No, Bobby's the best.
- [71:37]
Unknown
Oh, absolute best in the world at what he does. And there are a ton of people. Grace Robichaux, C to the K. Allison Baberl, Ally Brown, Super Sarah, Nico Peruzzi, and Diana M. All had questions about trash bags. And Grace wants to know, are there biodegradable garbage bags? C to the K wants to know, are you team scented bags? C to the K says, I am not into tropical garbage. Are there better ways to collect our trash?
- [72:10]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Collect or leave? On the curb?
- [72:12]
Unknown
I guess either.
- [72:13]
Alie Ward
Okay, let's get into it.
- [72:17]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Those are two really big questions. Okay, so in terms of better ways to collect it, certainly if we are reliant on individual trucks, which, at maximum capacity in New York, the standard truck is spec'd for about 12.5 tons. In certain conditions, you can squeeze as much as 14, 15 tons on that truck. But if you think about that, we generate about 10,000 tons a day. But then how do we like, you don't want 8.8 million people driving somewhere with their garbage to drop off their little household waste. You know, that the infrastructure and air quality stress from that would be absurd. There are a couple of pilot programs right now that are containerizing garbage in the middle of a block, like they do in many cities in Europe where I. A householder can carry my bag, put it in the right container, it locks behind me, Rats can't get it. And then the truck comes. I don't know at what intervals to get that material. You're still dealing with a truck. We have designed the system sort of by default, but because we designed it, we can redesign it. Like, we could decide to do it differently in terms of better ways to leave it for collection if we want to use that collection system still and instead of leaving it on the curb. First of all, plastic bags are a disaster.
- [73:48]
Alie Ward
I thought so.
- [73:50]
Dr. Robin Nagle
If we did compost more rigorously, if we separated our food waste and put them into what New York used as what they called the brown bin system. Those brown bins are almost completely impermeable to pests. I think a rat, really, really, really stubborn rat that came back to the same one for night after night after night might be able to get through. But they were designed to be super sturdy. So if you take your. People say, oh, I don't want to compost because I'll get rats because of my food waste all in one place. No, you're putting your food waste in a far more secure container and leaving the rest of your garbage that the rats don't want. You will have fewer pests if you compost. The public has yet to understand that on a broad scale, plastic bags were introduced for good reasons between 1969 and 1971 in New York. And they do. They're easier in many ways for the householder. I want to say they cause fewer injuries for the worker, but that's not necessarily true. It's a different type of injury than what metal cans created, but the convenience of it. You don't have to store the bags when they're empty. There's all kinds of ways that they're convenient, but they create a host of problems, like rats.
- [75:04]
Unknown
What did people use before?
- [75:06]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Plastic bags, metal garbage cans.
- [75:08]
Unknown
That was like just Oster the Grouch straight up, right?
- [75:11]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Yeah.
- [75:12]
Unknown
I mean, I guess I remember my dad dragging that to the curb. And those were everywhere in New York work before then.
- [75:19]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Yeah. And if the lid was off a little bit and it rained, it filled with rainwater. And this was also when A lot of buildings heated with coal, so you often had coal ash in the cans. The cans get rusted, the cans get dented. The cans create like those rusty edges, then cut workers and then they get gangrene from the.
- [75:41]
Unknown
Or tetanus.
- [75:42]
Dr. Robin Nagle
No, lockjaw and tetanus. Yeah, so. So the cans were not great either. They were also heavy as hell as the plastic cans, we call them plastic containers can be receptacles and then you have the weight issue of how do you lift it. The cans were not great, but bags are not great either.
- [76:02]
Alie Ward
Yeah, okay, but patrons KJ first time question asker Stephanie Trout Berman, Christina Kasakis, Connie E. Carringer, Nicole Kleinman, Samuel Harvey, Barb Chang, Ira Gray and Marin Profitt wanted to know about hazardous items and the dangers lurking on curbs.
- [76:21]
Unknown
How often do those cuts or sticks with sharp things like SO needles?
- [76:27]
Dr. Robin Nagle
I don't know how often needle sticks happen, but they happen. Sanitation and refuse work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is far, far, far more dangerous than being a cop or a firefighter. And it's always in the top 10 most dangerous jobs list, which comes out every two years. That category, sanitation and refuse work, is always somewhere in the top 10. It moves maybe from 4 to 7 or from 7 to 5, but it's always there. The three sources of harm are the trash itself, because especially with plastic bags, it punctures the bags, it punctures the workers, the truck, the mechanics of the truck. When you put a bag in the back of the truck, there's a. It's called the blade. The hopper comes down and scoops it up to compress it into the body of the truck. But that exerts immense pressure. And often what is caught by the blade of the hopper catapults back out at you. So you never want to be behind a truck when the hopper is cycling. So that's another source of harm, the truck. Also, mechanics of the truck fail sometimes and hurt people. And then traffic motorists are impatient to get around a truck, understandably, but often without remembering. There are human beings who are working with that vehicle and they're somewhere nearby. And if you go around them, take care that you're not going to hurt them, hit them, kill them. So those are the sources of the harm and it's ubiquitous. You will not get through a 22 year career without injury. You just won't. Even if it's something seemingly mundane, like your discs erupt or your rotator cuffs and your shoulder, and I say seemingly mundane, those are crippling so even if it's that you wear the work on your body for the rest of your life.
- [78:15]
Unknown
And I'm going to guess that sanitation workers don't get free Starbucks. Like cops and firefighters.
- [78:23]
Dr. Robin Nagle
There's all kinds of, like, there's sporting goods stores that if you're a copper or a firefighter, you automatically get 10% off. There are, yes, free donuts, the famous donuts for cotton. You don't get that as a sanitation. Yeah, it's definitely the stepchild agency of those three.
- [78:40]
Unknown
Is there something that you feel like sanitation workers should get at the holidays? Like, should you be baking cookies and leaving them somewhere? This is not garbage, this is for you.
- [78:50]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Yeah. Go to your local garage with holiday cookies, have enough for everybody and understand there's more than one shift, but yeah. Or talk to the garage superintendent and find out what deli the guys like most and order a big old one of those, you know, six foot long sandwiches. You can't give them beer because of rule changes, but you know, sodas and anything, especially if you do it through the garage. If a sanitation worker is on the route and you offer him even a cup of coffee, technically it's illegal and technically they could get in really big trouble for it, even if it's something humble like that. So if they don't know you and you offer them a cup of coffee, they're probably going to say no. But if you go through the garage and you're like, my second grade class wants to adopt your garage, or my community organization or my family, we just want to acknowledge you somehow. Yeah. Heck yeah.
- [79:44]
Unknown
Oh, that's so good to know.
- [79:46]
Alie Ward
So cookies, sandwiches, do it now. Some patrons, Isabel Slaymaker, Margot Rosenbaum, Kylie M. Smith, Eric Johnson and Susie Kroger wanted to knows how smelly a lot of people.
- [80:00]
Unknown
Final, final question from listeners want to know. Like deli dames wants to know, do people who work directly with garbage and sanitation, does it change their sense of smell? Smell? I know that you said that when you were working with it, you stopped noticing it, but is there anything that sanitation workers do for themselves to kind of end the day and get back to home or anything that the municipalities are doing about smell because it's something that it's a stigma.
- [80:30]
Dr. Robin Nagle
I have never asked them if it has changed their sense of smell. It's a lovely question and I don't know the answer. I will say many sanitation workers would never ever wear their uniform home. They will shower and change back into the street clothes. And some garages actually pitched in to Buy washer dryer for the garage so they never take their uniform home. They wash it on site so they're never bringing it into the family laundry system. I know some workers, that's their choice. I know others who are completely nonchalant about like, yeah, whatever, I washed this last week. What's the big deal?
- [81:05]
Alie Ward
You know, I mean, I guess, you.
- [81:07]
Unknown
Know, a lot of people wear shoes all over the city and then wear the shoes inside their house without taking them off. So, you know, who knows that has.
- [81:18]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Come to wig me out as much as somebody picking their nose and eating the boogers. Like, just when I see shoes inside, I just, I'm like, no, you don't have to do that.
- [81:28]
Unknown
Take it from someone who literally is a sanitation anthropologist. If that grosses you out, you know, take the shoes off at the door.
- [81:36]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Apparently also, if you want to cut your risk of getting sick from anything Covid the flu, anything. There are two things you should do as soon as you walk in the door of your home. One is wash your hands. The other is take off your shoes. Those two things together apparently are absolutely excellent protections. It's not a fail safe, but you are far less likely to get sick if you do those two things.
- [82:00]
Unknown
I remember hearing that hemlines got shorter because of tuberculosis because people were just dragging long skirts through lookies and bringing them back into their house. And so, like, I just think about that when I think about taking my shoes off.
- [82:14]
Dr. Robin Nagle
That is a cool factoid.
- [82:17]
Unknown
Now there's gotta be something that sucks about studying garbage other than the term garbageology. What's the thing that is the hardest about the job or just the toughest thing about the field in general?
- [82:32]
Dr. Robin Nagle
This is a consistent source of dismay for me when acknowledging essential workers, city uniformed forces, people whose work is fundamental to our daily well being. The people who collect our garbage and who sweep our streets are almost never mentioned. And it breaks my heart. And I include here not just municipal workers, but people working for the private companies as well, whose jobs are often far, far more difficult than what the municipal workers have to face. And yet we don't acknowledge them. So even just saying thank you when you see somebody working the truck, it's a small gesture. But what if everybody did it? What if that was understood like, oh, there's a sanitation guy, I'm going to say thank you. What if that was just expected and normal and common? That would be fantastic. Because that would then also trickle up, as it were, to helping when there are more formal acknowledgments making sure that Those folks get the recognition they deserve. One recent example, September 11, just passed the 21st anniversary. Sanitation was absolutely pivotal in the city's response, but rarely gets mentioned when there are formal acknowledgments. No one on the job died on the job because of that tragedy. But since that tragedy, 112 people have died of very weird cancers, almost all of which are directly attributable to the exposures they got through working ground zero. There's a young woman who works for sanitation who's doing. She has a background in film, who's doing a documentary to try and get that story more attention, but it's still generally not well known at all. And. And so my source of dismay, and I realize I'm kind of going on and on about this, but they deserve more public awareness and praise and thanks and gratitude. They need to be front and center in our attention.
- [84:34]
Unknown
And I'm also going to guess the moniker of garbage man, which is not what you use anymore.
- [84:41]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Sanitation worker.
- [84:42]
Alie Ward
Yeah.
- [84:42]
Unknown
And I imagine that it must be a label that they hear a lot.
- [84:46]
Dr. Robin Nagle
There was a headline in the Staten Island Advent about something about a garbage man. And I wrote to them immediately. And I didn't say. I didn't say it in language as strong as I felt. You know, you want to be polite. But they changed the headline.
- [84:59]
Alie Ward
Good.
- [85:00]
Dr. Robin Nagle
One small thing.
- [85:02]
Unknown
And I love that you're an advocate for that and that you've been in the actual job and in the uniform and in the truck.
- [85:07]
Dr. Robin Nagle
I'm very proud of that.
- [85:08]
Unknown
Yeah, you should be. What is your favorite thing about what you do in general? About studying this, about being an anthropologist, about working in sanitation, about the friends you've made, anything.
- [85:20]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Sometimes I look around at the university where I work and I wonder if my job in NYU matters. Yes, I teach and maybe I have influence on my students. And yeah, I write some, although not as much as I should. And. And like, that's good. But when I'm working with sanitation people, their work absolutely matters to the well being of this city every single day, profoundly. So. It's so important. It's like the oxygen in the air. We get to completely overlook it and take it for granted and just assume it's going to be there. But if it weren't, we would be in deep shit. That connecting to people whose jobs are so profoundly essential in the deepest possible way, that is deeply satisfying. Also that they've let me in, because who the hell am I, right? But over time, they have let me in. And that's an honor I also really enjoy watching their friendships. They form bonds of camaraderie that often last far longer than the job itself and that I don't see counterparts of that within nyu. And maybe that's because I'm sort of an introvert in this world, and maybe that's on me. But I really enjoy watching the bonds that they form in the trenches, on the war on grime. I still have trouble telling that story without choking up. In fact, in that moment in the TED Talk, I had a moment of like, I can't just, I can't cry at TED Talk.
- [86:50]
Unknown
So thank your sanitation workers. Yeah, thank you so much for doing this.
- [86:55]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Thanks for your interest.
- [86:56]
Unknown
This is.
- [86:56]
Dr. Robin Nagle
And thank all your readers for their great question questions.
- [86:59]
Unknown
Oh, such good questions. I literally could talk about garbage forever.
- [87:03]
Dr. Robin Nagle
Indeed, as one could.
- [87:06]
Alie Ward
So ask smart people garbage questions because we're here to find out. And look, they love answering them. Go watch Robin's TED Talk. Go Google composting if you feel inspired. Clean out a closet, get a reusable water bottle if you don't have one, and vote. And for more on Dr. Robyn Nagle, you can see the links in the show notes and enjoy picking up on the streets and behind the trucks with the sanitation workers of New York City, which we'll also link in the show notes. There will be links to so much that we discussed on my website, 2025 me again.
- [87:42]
Unknown
Okay, so we are at Ologies now on Bluesky and on instagram and I'm A.L.I.E. ward with one L on both. We also now have a spinoff show called Smologies which are episodes in their own feed wherever you get podcasts again called smologies. They're shorter, kid friendly episodes, G rated. There's a link in the show notes. Tell all your friends. Ologies Merch is available at ologiesmerch.com Erin Talbert admins our Ologies podcast Facebook group, Emily White made the transcripts but passed the torch to Avileen Malik. Kelly Ardwyer does the website. Susan Hale is our amazing managing director. Noelle Dilworth is scheduling producer and like a second brain for me. Jake Chaffee has since joined our edit team. And huge exciting credit for this one goes to our lead editor, the very not trash, but in fact treasure. Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio, who was once simply a listener and and then reached out multiple times, became an intern and then an assistant editor and has now been for many years at the helm of piecing the show together every week. So many ups to her. This was actually the very first episode that she lead edited, so it's a favorite for that reason too. And Nick Thorburn did the theme music. And if you stick around till the very end of the episode, I tell you a secret. And this one is updated for 2025. It is April 8, 2025, and it's.
- [88:53]
Alie Ward
That while I'm recording this to go.
- [88:55]
Unknown
Up tonight, there have been helicopters over our neighborhood for like an hour or two. And according to the news on the freeway right near our house, there was a three car accident that turned into.
- [89:05]
Alie Ward
A hit and run with a few.
- [89:08]
Unknown
People on the lam running from the cops. And one of them was a woman who exchanged gunfire with the police before.
- [89:17]
Alie Ward
Hiding in the park that we go.
- [89:19]
Unknown
Take the dog to. And then there was a second person fleeing the crash, I guess. And to quote the local news station, the shirtless suspect was seen running out of the car and into a backyard while carrying a guitar.
- [89:32]
Alie Ward
And then that person was hanging around.
- [89:34]
Unknown
Someone'S pool, watering the plants and talking on the phone. But then the last reports I've heard is that the person who's still at large shooting at the CHP officers may be totally unrelated to the crash itself and just another person having kind of a wild day happenstance on the same block. Anyway, having a very LA day here. A little hard to record with helicopters.
- [89:56]
Alie Ward
Overhead, but I'm just.
- [89:57]
Unknown
I'm hoping it works out well for everyone and no one gets hurt. And maybe in a few years someone gets a book deal out of it.
- [90:04]
Alie Ward
I don't know. Just another Tuesday. Okay, Bye Bye. Pachydermatology Homeology Cryptozoology Lithology Nanotechnology Meteorology Olive Technology Nephology Serology.
- [90:25]
Dr. Robin Nagle
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