What Happens To NYC’s 3.2 Million Tons Of Trash | Big Business

this is just three days worth of trash most coming from new york city and that claw is taking it to be burned into electricity but we're not actually in new york city we're in jersey once the garbage man comes and picks it up you don't think any more about it but it has a long way to go after that none of new yorkers waste is processed in the city instead it ends up as far away as ohio pennsylvania and even south carolina so getting trash from here to here takes thousands of workers trucks trains cranes and even barges operating non-stop to ship waste across the east coast rain snow hail storm there's no stopping us and it all cost the city hundreds of millions here's what actually happens to new york city's 3.2 million tons of trash a year new york city's department of sanitation sends its fleet of 2 000 garbage trucks to start picking up at 5 a.m you have to keep active some guys like to work out some guys don't basically it depends on you what do you do me i don't work out this is my workout this is my daily workout that's frank a 23-year veteran sanitation worker well you get immune to the smell you don't smell garbage you smell money checking to see how solid it is you can tell when the truck is full frank heads to the dump station in the upper east side by then the sun's coming up we are currently at 91st street mts doors will open as the truck comes in and there's radiation detectors that will read the truck trucks pause at the weigh station to help the city keep track of how much trash new yorkers produce then handles tilt the hopper then she'll push the blade and the blade will push the material all the way out to clear the whole truck it's roughly 450 to 600 tons a day tractors move the trash into the containers beneath the ground it's sort of a dance one fdl will clear the wall and one fpl will below containers getting the material containerized as quickly as possible and sealed keeps that smell down a stamper then packs in the garbage mattresses are used like a sponge to stop up anything left over when we have garbage on the floor it'll take anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes to load a container once the department of sanitation seals a container and slides it out to the dock responsibility then goes to covanta the waste to energy company handles two marine transfer stations in the city containers are picked up by the crane and put on the barge 48 containers go on the barge every one of these containers represents a truckload that we've taken off of the city streets and out of the tunnels reducing carbon emissions and reducing congestion and wear and tear on the city's infrastructure a tug attaches to the loaded trash barge tug captain jason harris is now in charge he gets a go-ahead for a 9 30 a.m departure what you see here is is called hell's gate this is the upper end of the east river tides play a major factor in the times that we can transfer barges you can't go against the tide when it's max tied it's too strong we would actually come to a dead stop on this boat and barge you wait until you can go with it quite often a barge gets gets filled up and we will have to wait two three maybe four hours before the tide is it is in the favor he navigates this heavy load safely along one of the busiest waterways in the world down the east river through new york harbor to staten island three hours later the tug and barge back up into the global transfer station it is an inherently dangerous operation to move heavy equipment overhead then a train takes it to one of covanta's waste to energy facilities it can also get there via truck all of manhattan's residential trash goes to waste energy facilities like this one to be burned and turned into electricity this facility processes up to a million tons of waste annually once the trucks scale in and come up to the tipping floor they dump in front of one of these bays tractors push the trash into a massive storage pit 93 feet deep and 270 feet long between eight and nine thousand tons are in the refuse pit it's about three to four days worth of trash a giant grapple claw descends over the trash in one swoop it can pick up as much as one trash truck carries [Music] the claw builds a wall of trash to prevent it from avalanching onto the tipping floor it also helps to make more space for incoming refuse do you look at garbage a very different way since i've been working here we create a lot of garbage as as a population two claws work together in tandem dumping trash into hoppers leading to the incinerator romeo's an expert giant claw operator 21 years of flying the crane there is no shortage of fuel for our boilers toy story is the first thing everyone thinks of disney actually got inspiration for the toy story 3 incinerator sequence from a covanta plant the incinerators burn the trash at thousand degrees fahrenheit it takes one to two hours to burn an entire hopper load we've now entered the control room area of the plant so this is the brain of the operation yes it is and here's your brain he's got camera views of the combustion zone how important are you for this place running correctly how important am i i am the guy i am the guy he's in the hot seat russell monitors as the furnace heats up steam turning this turbine and generating enough energy to power this plant and 46 000 homes in the region after everything's burned all that's left over is ash and metal this magnet pulls off enough metal to make 21 000 cars the leftover ash goes to cover landfills next the plant tackles those nasty fumes but burning trash causes first leftover gases go through a scrubber reactor a lime slurry cleans any acid gases and activated carbon absorbs pollutants then it goes through a bag house basically a bunch of filters so what's left coming out of that smokestack constituents of the flue gas is what's in normal air like nitrogen carbon dioxide moisture the alternative to this would be going to a landfill waste to energy does produce co2 emissions but in a year this process eliminates a million tons of co2 emissions a landfill would have produced we generate a very small amount of methane the methane we offset from a landfill results in an actual decrease of co2 emissions the city hopes to keep moving trash on waterways to facilities like this one it's all part of its goal of becoming zero waste to landfill by 2030 but that is becoming harder and harder to reach only about 30 percent of new york city's waste turns into energy the rest ends up in harmful methane producing landfills as far away as south carolina and ohio and it takes a significant investment to move it every year exporting trash costs the city about 400 million dollars so why does new york city send its trash so far away in 1881 new york city streets were notoriously filthy so dirty people were getting sick so the department of sanitation was established to clean up the streets and the department did help mop up the city but the city quickly ran out of room to put all of its trash in the early 1900s the city turned to dumping trash into the ocean even though it was illegal as much as 80 percent of the city's trash ended up in the sea this continued until 1934 when a supreme court case forced the city to stop ocean dumping in the 70s incinerators used for much of the 1900s were closed down because they didn't meet the epa's clean air standards so the city opened up landfills across the five boroughs including at one point the world's largest in 1973 new york even built out lower manhattan using trash mounds but even that wasn't enough with nowhere else to put it the city began sending its waste to other states most of the landfills in this area have been closed down so the available landfills are getting further and further away exporting trash is a costly practice with a big environmental footprint and it puts the burden on communities far from these shiny skyscrapers for now new york city's only choice is to keep exporting the trash but ultimately the department says the best solution would be getting new yorkers to waste less altogether trash is like one of those things that you put it outside and forget about it i think everybody should know what happens to what they get rid of if you know where it's going and you don't like where it's going maybe you'll find ways to recycle things i would never take anything home because my wife wouldn't allow it but there'll be a butt there if i see something that's star wars i'm gonna look for it and make if it's good i'm gonna take it home

Channel: Business Insider

Views: 4,756,425

Rating: 4.8953009 out of 5

Keywords: Business Insider, Business News, trash, garbage, landfill, nyc, staten island, sanitation, energy, big business

Id: S758wEniU0c

Length: 8min 51sec (531 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 21 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/radient]

Super well produced piece. It's really cool that they actually did the work to get in touch with and get cameras over to every step of this process. Animations were a nice touch too!

[u/MrsRomeo]

It really bothers me to hear that 'New Yorkers', or insert people from any other city, need to stop producing so much waste when everything we buy today is so over-packaged. From Amazon delivering in over-sized boxes with so much packing material, to grocery stores selling individually wrapped fruit, or anything from the dollar stores, in that stiff plastic, it is nearly impossible to avoid excess trash. Even if you are on top of your recycling efforts, or composting programs, there is still a lot of waste that is unavoidable and I think manufacturers need to be held accountable too.

[u/zushini]

Question : What happens to the activated carbon which absorbs pollutants?

[u/sschueller]

For that amount of money you could build a trash burning plant in the city itself.

[u/howardbrandon11]

John Oliver just did a bit on plastics for Last Week Tonight.

https://youtu.be/Fiu9GSOmt8E

[u/keeper420]

Isn't this why New Jersey was created?

[u/aether28]

We should launch it into space in a big garbage ball

[u/lightingj]

Fresh Kills Dump, closed 20 years ago, today

[u/mancho98]

Make it ilegal to export garbage to out of state. Boom new York and any other large city will find a solution or drawn in garbage.