The Migratory Journey of NYC’s Municipal Recyclables:
Ten Years In
The Scale of My Focus
The reality is, of that 34% of potentially recyclable materials, about 50% is actually diverted from landfills (Garcia). That means the capture rate for recyclables, of the aggregate residential curbside discards, is 17%. That amounts to about 500,000 tons of materials migrating the approximately 6,000 miles of streets in NYC per year. While I am only investigating a fraction of the total waste stream in NYC, it is by no means an insignificant amount.
The Sims Municipal Recycling Facility, now SMR/Balcones, sorts all of New York City’s municipal recyclables at its sites in Jersey City and Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The SMR Sunset Park location officially opened for multi-material municipal sorting exactly 10 years ago this December. The facility receives and sorts about 200,000 tons of materials per year from Brooklyn, The Bronx, and Queens, making it the largest material recovery facility (MRF) in North America and potentially the world. My research surrounds SMR’s Sunset Park site, based on my integrated experience as an unpaid, but educationally reimbursed, intern for the on-site Recycling Education Center. It is essential to acknowledge that SMR’s Sunset Park location is the gold-standard MRF, indicated by its $100 million price tag, high-tech equipment, and willingness to host public tours of the site (Workman). It is by no means an average site but rather is the highest possible expectation for MRF’s, and still they are only half-way to their capture goal. One journalist who visited the site says NYC recycling is “extremely grim” (Pinto).
By Em Ingram
It is important to acknowledge the current scale of daily waste movement in New York City. The most recent Waste Categorization by the Department of Sanitation (DSNY) was conducted in 2017. In their report, DSNY noted that waste production was on the decline, although it stood around “less than 3.1 million tons” collected per year. Of that aggregate 3.1 million tons of residential curbside discards, that is, all things thrown away for DSNY collection from New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) buildings, public schools, and other residential buildings, 34% is potentially recyclable in a perfect scenario, where every single recyclable was dealt with correctly.
My Role In My Research
For the duration of the fall 2023 semester, I was employed as an intern for the Education and Community Outreach Center for New York City’s Municipal Recycling Facility (MRF) Sims also known as Balcones/SMR.
I only wore personal protection equipment (PPE) at SMR twice throughout the semester working there. Not out of a lack of safety precautions but rather because, in my role as an intern, I spent the majority of my time in the Education Center and its office. I worked directly for the manager and coordinator of the Recycling Education Center, Kara Napolitano, an experienced arts educator and fellow environmentalist from California. Kara operated the Education Center on her own, minus the 10-12 hours per week of my assistance. While I wasn’t necessarily anticipating a level of integration similar to that of Professor Robin Nagle, the former anthropologist-in-resident at DSNY, who conducted fieldwork on DSNY trucks alongside waste workers, I was nonetheless a little disappointed in my disconnect from the workers at SMR. Outside of my interviews with Equipment Operator Santosh Timilsina, and his sister-in-law Bindika, the first woman traffic control officer, as well as an exclusive walk-through tour guided by another employee, Colbert, who has been employed at SMR the beginning of their contract, my interactions with employees were confined to cordial greetings in passing, or waving to one another from the sorting room and its observation deck. During my orientation in late August, I sat alongside two recruit engineers as we watched videos detailing the 15 fatal reasons why a large “Safety is Job #1” banner hangs from the machinery in the sorting room. Waste work of all kinds is one of the most dangerous and fatal careers in the world (Post). As I sat next to the wide-eyed engineers, I, maybe naively, envisioned a semester of comradery with the employees of SMR: banter in the lunchroom, storing my lunches in the shared coolers, learning people's names. Comradery was never actualized between me and the recruit engineers, nor any SMR employees other than Kara, as I ended up eating my lunch at my desk each day. My separation from the employees at SMR was not just superficial, but rather representative of the divide between my reasons for being there, and theirs; my non-intensive, bi-weekly internship and their daily, dangerous work. While I certainly had an embedded experience at the facility over the semester, it was still in many ways disconnected from the realities of SMR workers. With that being said, this project must be taken with a grain of salt, as I am working within a limited field of ethnographic research that ended up a lot more formal than I expected – rather than slow progressive interviews throughout the semester, the interviews were confined to two, half-hour blocks.
Movement of The Modern Waste Stream
Waste, as we know it, is a distinct byproduct of modernity. Pre-industrial refuse was largely recyclable, biodegradable or compostable. For centuries, generally, wastefulness was counterproductive to the success and longevity of life. As society scaled upwards, industrialized and scientific innovations progressed, municipal solid waste became a more apparent issue. The United States first developed the modern concept of solid waste management in the 1890s (). By the turn of the 19th century many cities provided garbage collection services that moved waste further away from the communities that produced it. The rapid development of industrial capitalism gave way to waste establishing a functional role in the production of capitalist value. Author Vinay Gidwani, in his essay Waste/Value, articulates waste as the antithetical and reoccurring ‘other’ of capitalist value — reiterated, and transformed over modernity, “as part of capitalism’s spatial histories of surplus accumulation,” (Gidwani 1).
International policies backing the ‘war and waste economies’ of the early 20th century largely transformed the flow of materials and waste, reorienting industries so as to serve their countries' military. In Chad Denton’s article Rethinking Waste Within Business History, he writes, “After 1939, warring nations shaped waste collecting into a means for citizens at the home front to sacrifice and contribute to war making,” (Denton). Waste salvaging, land exploitation and the use of ‘disposable’ laborers largely fueled economic productivity at that time, establishing residual effects and policies for the post-war period. The production boom post-World War II marked the change of the engine of capitalism— markets once driven by the production of primary commodities were instead driven by nichely marketable consumer goods. Where consumers initially had a single option for a good, in the Post-World War era they were now presented with an array of brands and variety – for example, with automobiles.
The post-war era of consumer capitalism also marked the formalization of municipal waste management systems across the country. Gidwani writes, “...Capital always draws its economic vitality and moral sanction from programs to domesticate and eradicate waste,” (Gidwani 1). As consumer goods were increasingly produced overseas, the waste stream internationalized as well. In Gone Tomorrow:The Hidden Life of Garbage, author Heather Rodgers describes, “Increasingly, what gets thrown away is shaped by monopolistic corporate power…With annual consumer spending in the United States now, accounting for about two-thirds of the nation's $11 trillion economy while outlays on discard handling and disposal approaches $50 billion, it’s no wonder there’s so much trash – garbage is good for business,” (Rodgers 9). The narrative of garbage as good for business is perceived to go both ways – as being beneficial, and even vital, to both the economies of Western exporters of waste and the Global South importers. The relationship of waste export/import between Western and Southern economies establishes a relationship of waste colonialism that reiterates, consistent with Gidwani’s waste/value dialectic, the perception of the West as ‘valuable,’ and the Global South as ‘disposable.’ Consumer capitalism introduced planned obsolescence, which describes not only the intentional, rapid, short lifespan of products, but also social obsolescence, for the purpose of promoting the purchasing and consumption of new items. Especially with the planned obsolescence of technologies, E-waste production is constantly growing, disposed of illegally and informally, out of the country of origin, mostly in ‘developing’ Global South nations.
While the flow of waste across state/national borders became increasingly free and mobile in the post-world-war period, the flow of migration became increasingly restrictive. Whereas people used to be able to travel more freely from place to place in the early industrial era, the World Wars produced legislation that mitigated and restricted the flow of foreign nationals, especially differentially across populations. In the contemporary context, refugees and economic migrants are not treated the same, both upon arrival, and over time, in receiving nations. Empirical evidence regarding the 1980 and 1990 U.S. Census reveals that, over time, refugees are much more likely to become citizens than economic migrants (Cortes 13). The value and perceived waste of receiving refugees and economic migrants is differential, although both are contested, especially in a Post-9/11 context. Economic migrants, however, occupy a particularly interesting position that exemplifies the waste/value dichotomy– as their status reflects the interplay of their economic utility, yet labor disposability, across the global landscape. Economic migrants are subjected to systemic devaluation in receiving countries, where their labor is treated as expendable, while at the same time their labor is often vital for their economic growth.
SMR, as a site that functions to reinfuse value into perceived waste, largely relies on the labor of economic migrants. According to Iveth Dias, the HR director of SMR, 64% of employees are Latino, 5% are White, 29% are African American, and 2% are Asian.While SMR does not keep track of what employees are migrants, particularly seeking economic prosperity, from my interviews the majority of employees are. Over my time at SMR I wanted to explore the manifestations of waste and value in recycling – from within education, labor opportunities, and economic migration.
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DSNY Duel-Stream Diesel Collection Trucks & SMR Netted Barges
On SMR’s Education Center
Formal Curbside Municipal Recycling
Nearly 7 days a week 364 days per year recyclables are collected and transported by DSNY.
DSNY employees are known as NYC’s Strongest!
Municipal recyclables arrive at SMR/Balcones Sunset Park’s Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) 24 hours, six days a week. Per day, around 1,000 tons of materials arrive on the tipping floor — via barges and diesel fueled trucks. Trucks are provided by DSNY, while barges belong directly to SMR.
When trucks arrive, they are weighed before and after leaving the facility to determine the weight of materials.
Sorted materials are moved from storage units to the Bayler which compresses material into transportable, single-material blocks
After materials leave SMR it becomes extremely difficult to accurately trace their journey. Paper and cardboard are the only accessibly traceable materials, and, according to Kara Napolitano about 90% end up at Pratt Industries Paper Mill on Staten Island. Metals, glass, and plastic (MGP) are primarily sent to domestic reprocessing plants, but from there may be resold internationally.
Staten Island, NYC — Pratt Industries Paper Mill
Bales are stacked and stored in container units until they’re ready to be transported to the next stage.
Optical Sorters
Air Jets
Important Parts of the Sorting Process:
Trommel Screens
Drum Magnet and Eddy Current
Metal / Glass Smelters
Duel System for efficiency
Claw cranes scoop materials into the piles. Push dozers move the materials to a belt where they go up and into the Liberator, which tears apart plastic bags, so that the materials are free to be sorted. Materials then move into the Sorting Room.
Final Manual Sorter Station
Public awareness is crucial for the success of curbside recycling programs, and waste management more generally (Hassan). As part of SMR Sunset Park’s 20-year contract with the city, the facility was required to offer some form of accessible public education on recycling. SMR constructed an on-site Education and Community Outreach Center where educational tours are hosted by the education and outreach coordinator, Kara Napolitano. Kara, who has been employed at SMR for five years now, originally pivoted from theater, to art education, to receiving her master’s in social work, and then to SMR. Her background in performance arts shines through in her animated tours, educational videos, and recycling-oriented puppeteering. When I learned about her background, it connected some dots. While I don’t necessarily think Kara puts on an act during tours, minus when she utilizes ‘Bary the recycling educator’ hand puppet, she is certainly expected to perform, and does successfully, for SMR, and the company’s majority stakeholder, the Closed-Loop Partnership. Kara has well crafted and rehearsed answers to all recycling associated questions – it was hard to get deeper than the scripted answers allowed.
Suzanne MacBride explores the history of American curbside recycling programs within her book Recycling Reconsidered, highlighting how recycling has become contested and co-opted by corporations over time. Whereas recycling once meant to target high tech fields, especially the oil and nuclear industries, these same industries have assumed influence over the recycling industry, so that it has been shifted to focus on the reuse of consumer goods. MacBride discusses the role of recycling education, propaganda, and issue framing as central to the development of the modern recycling industry. Growing up, in my experience, it certainly felt like recycling was portrayed as a feel-good act that helps to make the world a better place. MacBride writes critically of this dominant, homogenized perspective towards recycling as a “good” and “necessary” process in aiding environmental sustainability. Kara wrestles with this perspective daily as an educator, “It is necessary in a sense, because we are dug so deeply into being a single use culture of convenience. We are just deep in that. And it's going to take companies, manufacturers, the big corporations that make packaging, specifically. It's going to take them a long time to dig themselves out of that.” I asked Kara, what, if any, influences she has had over the Closed-Loop Partnership, and other manufacturing companies that tour the facility. She said, “I'm seeing the awareness growing and some very small changes. I'm seeing them implement the initial changes, some changes in packaging and some. But you know from the way they tell it, this stuff takes years.” The recycling movement is now over 40 years in the making, and corporations have increasingly played a role in the industry. How many more years of patience should be afforded to manufacturers who have yet to move beyond environmental ‘awareness’ and small changes? MacBride argues that substantial industrial change is long overdue largely because so much attention has been fixated on consumer recycling. Recycling has largely purported an illusion of change, while diverting attention away from more substantial legislative action that could reel in waste production, and plastics manufacturing.
In MacBride’s introduction, she evokes Steven Lukes identification of ‘three dimensions of power,’ of which the second and third dimension are the most related to recycling education. The second dimension, “has less to do with overt and formal means [of power] – by [rather] controlling the agenda,” (MacBride 12). For a long time, recycling was considered the first, and most important, of the ‘R’ hierarchy: recycle - reduce - reuse. Kara recalled, “When I was a kid it was recycle, reduce, reuse. There were songs, recycle, reduce, reuse. It was in the wrong order. Yeah, so I'm trying to correct that.” MacBride explains that “issue framing,” like the dated organization of the hierarchy of R’s and the “mobilization of bias,” by the private recycling companies and manufacturer investors that wished to expand their industry, emerged from corporate lobbying and mass media manipulation. As the NYC curbside recycling program began to take shape, multi-lingual promotional ads for the program were promoted via radio, public transportation, print, television, billboards, school assemblies, churches, business fronts, and more to spread the word (Farrell). These targeted ads pushed responsibility and blame onto residents/consumers rather than producers/manufacturers, spurring a sense of “can-doism” in individuals, as MacBride calls it. While Kara doesn’t perpetuate a ‘feel-good’ attitude towards recycling, she does believe it is something we can do presently. Kara said, “Any time we're like, ‘let's recycle to save the planet.’ I'm like, ‘Nope, that’s not what you're doing when you're recycling. Not what you're doing.”
MacBride writes that “busy-ness” is the “successful outcome of power excursion,” (). SMR’s recycling facility can certainly be described as busy-work: a lot of action, movement, and labor goes into producing very little, sometimes no, financial value. Yet, at the same time, it is cheaper to produce bales of recyclables that are sold for free, than it is to sink money into transporting unwanted materials to the landfill. It is over $40 cheaper per bale to recycle invaluable material than to send it to landfill, Kara told me. My internship work felt like busywork a lot of the time as well, outside of my role facilitating tours. Sending emails, scheduling tours, filing waivers, cleaning up the Ed. Center – no task took me particularly long, and there were moments when I would just sit around. I found myself questioning how valuable my presence was, given that Kara could clearly operate the Ed. Center on her own. Despite the entire education department resting on Kara’s shoulders, the tours she gives do not even cover her salary– the operation of the Ed. center, and her wage, has to be subsidized by the city in order to stay afloat. Given that Kara’s work is subsidized, it raises a question as to how valuable the entire recycling process really is.
When I first approached Kara about interviewing employees at SMR, she told me not to get my hopes up. “A lot of them are shy,” she had said to me at the end of October; She explained that, generally, the employees preferred to keep their heads down –they were here to get paid, and not much else. I thought, okay that’s fair, but also probably not all-encompassing. I pushed a little further, and again my plans were slightly shot down. This time, she said that even if I did get to interview a single employee, they might not want to engage with me very much and could have concerns over speaking on behalf of the other employees or their union. There may also be language barriers, she told me. Again, fair, but I was really adamant on connecting with at least one of the employees I see in passing each week. Kara then said that I could forward her all the potential questions I would ask an employee, and that she would forward my questions to HR for approval. I made sure to cover my bases with my questions, as I didn’t know what type of employee I would end up talking to. Under nine umbrellas of inquiry, I presented Kara with almost thirty potential questions regarding different aspects of their work and personal lives. That raised concerns with Kara as well. Finally, after I was approved to interview employees, Kara said she had a good sense of someone who would be open for conversation. She put me in contact with Santosh Timilsina, a five-year employee of SMR, who works as an equipment operator on the tipping floor. Santosh was a good candidate for an interview, Kara explained, as he was previously comfortable having his picture taken to be put on SMR’s website. I later found out that his picture was also included in this year's company holiday card that is only sent out to office employees. On my last day of the internship, I made sure that Santosh got a copy of it as well.
Santosh Timilsina emigrated from Nuwakot district, just outside Kathmandu, Nepal, and settled in Jackson Heights, Queens nearly a decade ago. Waste work is not a career Santosh would have organically entered, especially in his home country where jobs are delegated by caste. In Nepal, waste work is typically handled informally, and often without pay, by the “untouchable” caste. “So we're not allowed to touch them,” Santosh explained. Despite waste work being off limits to the Timilsina’s, who are part of the second highest caste, they were still deeply familiar with Nepal’s waste management system. Santosh explained, “We got a dumping site and it goes through my hometown. You know, they make a special road, right outside my house.” The Sisdol landfill of the Kathmandu Valley, received around 800 tons of municipal solid waste per day, and was recently closed in 2022 (Shrestha). The government constructed and recently began dumping in the new Banchare Danda landfill, not far from the original dumping grounds. “The poor people, they live over there,” Santosh explained, “so that’s why the government decide to dump over there.” The proximity to waste in Nepal was one of few push factors that led Santosh to leave for the U.S. Now that Santosh has achieved U.S. citizenship, in part because of the financial stability provided by working at SMR, his biggest goal is to help bring his wife over from Nepal. Santosh explained that it was shortly after he was hired at SMR, that he was able to return to Nepal to marry his wife. “Once my wife is here, it will be complete,” he said.
After initially working in New York City as an Uber driver, Santosh was recommended for a job on the picking line at SMR in 2019, by his housemate and sister-in-law Bindika Panday Timilsina. After my initial interview with Santosh in late November, he helped to set up an interview between Bindika and I. Bindika had found out about SMR a year prior, through a job offering posted in a NYC Nepali Facebook group that was recommended to her by her Nepali neighbors, in Jackson Heights, Queens. The job at SMR was appealing, Bindika told me, because it paid at least $18 per hour and did not require customer service interactions.
After their Tibetan neighbor was the first acquaintance hired, Bindika secured a recommendation, and was hired shortly thereafter. Over about a year, the Timilsina’s and four of their Nepali neighbors were hired at SMR. Bindika was hired alongside a female friend from her neighborhood; Together, the two women worked the plastic film picking line. “When I come first, me and my friend, we were two, so we can easily talk each other. Then we can do work here easily,” she explained. The cultural and linguistic bond between the two women on the picking line helped to make the shifts more enjoyable. Together, the Nepali friend group always had someone to carpool with, talk to at work, and at lunch. Santosh recalls feeling “surprised,” when he first moved to the Jackson Heights area where he discovered a strong Nepali community. He explained that through movie portrayals of the city, he thought they would have to completely adjust to speaking English, and engaging in American culture. Walking 72nd to 74th street, Santosh discovered Nepali restaurants and shops that would help him to feel more at home. Having solidarity in shared experience amongst his Nepali coworkers helped to extend that feeling of belonging beyond his neighborhood and into the workplace.
In the past year or two, things changed for the Timilsina’s work friend group after SMR implemented EverestLabs robotic arms that utilize high-speed A.I. algorithms to assist with the final sorting process along picking lines. A few of these robotic arms were introduced to the line where Bindika, her friend, and another Nepali woman were working. Both of Bindika’s friends ended up quitting the job due to issues with the loud noise caused by the arm’s air jet. Santosh helped to explain, “The two ladies, they was complaining to the supervisor that noise they said that make them uncomfortable. So they request them to put them somewhere else but, like you know, they keep forgetting them. That's why they decided to leave the job.” The woman who worked with Bindika longer had pre-existing hearing problems that were exacerbated by the robots. After allegedly being denied her request to be moved to a different position, the woman quit the job. The other lady simply couldn’t tolerate the loud noise, the Timilsina’s explained. Santosh told me that as much as they would like to be rehired, it is unlikely to happen now that the robots are in place. As important as automation is for diminishing human exposure to health and safety risks, it comes at the cost of dispossessing certain jobs, and posing further risks to those who have to work in its company. Shortly after the two women quit, Bindika developed body burdens associated with her waste work– she was having wrist issues that inhibited her ability to work along the picking line. She was transferred to a different position, and is now not only the only woman on her shift, but also the first woman to work traffic control. Despite the changes, Bindika appreciates the knowledge and skills that come with her new job, “I feel good, I’m the first Nepali woman [in traffic control],” She said, “I like that part. Before, I don't know that a lot about this recycle, when I work here it it give me more knowledge.”
The Timisinas told me that their household, including four others, their brothers/cousins, began to improve their recycling habits, only it became their job to sort materials on the picking line. “In my community too, everybody, I'm telling my family, friends to recycle.” Bindika said, “This will be more helpful for other of us, right?” Weekly, the Timilsina’s take time to wash and sort their recyclables before collection, and promote recycling to their neighbors. Information from the DSNY 2023 fiscal year annual report on municipal refuse and recycling statistics indicates that residents in the Timilsina’s neighborhood are conscientious about recycling. Jackson Heights, part of district ‘QE12’ as designated by the New York Department of Sanitation, had 33.0 tons of metal, glass, plastics (MGP) collected over the year, the largest tonnage of MGPs out of all New York City districts (Tisch). While their district had a slightly below average diversion rate, of 16.1% as compared to the boroughs average 18.8% (Tisch), the large tonnage of MGPs suggests residents are correctly identifying and sorting a considerable portion of their discards. Having an active, and close knit social circle in the neighborhood, who possess not only the recycling knowledge but the ability to communicate that knowledge colloquially and in native-tounge, could be contributing factors to the large tonnage of MGPs collected in the area. The Timilsina’s have established themselves as valuable members of their neighborhood, and in turn, have helped to communicably elevate the value of recycling.
Santosh and Bindika Timilsina, Photographed by me.
As materials travel through the sorting room, they pass through multiple stages of sorting. First materials are sorted by size, using trommel screens, which break and sift out glass, and small plastics. Metals are sorted using magnets and an Eddy Current, to attract or repel ferrous and non-ferrous materials. Next, plastics are sorted with infrared optical sorters, that use air jets to send certain kids of plastics to other conveyer belts. Finally all materials pass through manual sorting stations, where employees do a final check.
Baled materials travel via truck, barge, and train out of SMR’s Sunset Park location, to recycling processing facilities across the country.
Sunset Park SMR Municipal Recycling Facility
Tipping Floor W/ Solar Panel Roof
This pile is about 4 stories tall!
Coming Soon to NYC: Standardized Composting Bins
Now operating in Brooklyn, and Queens, NYC will be moving towards standardized composting across boroughs by 2024.
Barges arrive to the opposite side of the tipping floor, and are similarly weighed by how much water is displaced
Plastic Reclaimers
Sorting Room
On SMR Economic Migrant Employees:
Santosh Timilsina, Photographed by SMR
Reprocessing and Manufacturing
Grocery Stores
Conclusion — On Canners
While I have focused so far on the formal recycling stream, mediated through SMR’s material recovery facility, there is a whole other side to the recycling world. According to CannersNYC, a site dedicated to tracing the experiences of eight NYC canners, there are approximately 10,000 ‘Canners,’ or individuals in the city, who make their livelihood from recycling bottles and cans. The canning career took off after the 1982 Bottle Bill, which qualified certain cans and bottles to be worth a 5¢ deposit, redeemable at bottle/can redemption centers, in grocery stores, and through reverse vending machines. The CannerNYC site includes an experiential map, “Mapping the experience of people who live on the geographical and social margins of the city, is a way to challenge this authority, and an opportunity to reflect on our notion and relationship with waste,” site author Francesca Berardi explains (Berardi). Canners are typically profiled as mostly elderly, houseless, disabled, immigrant workers. The legality of their work also teeters along a line, and is highly contested from the perspective of formal waste management.
There is a one-sided strife between the formal and informal recycling systems of New York City. In Alex Barnard’s ethnography Freegans, which focuses on the experiences and livelihoods of those who survive off of recovered food waste, he talks about SMR’s issues with canners. Barnard writes, “In New York, Sims Municipal Recycling—a private company with a $1.5 billion contract with the city— claims that ‘thefts’ of recyclable materials by scavengers cost it between $2 and $4 million per year. Partly under industry pressure, New York City recently passed Local Law 50, which makes it illegal for anyone but the Department of Sanitation to remove or transport recyclable materials from residential stoops,” (Barnard 274). Despite the perception of canning as ‘theft’ by SMR’s corporate talking heads, that sentiment is not shared amongst its employees. The Timilsina specifically make sure to sort out all cans and bottles for an elderly, disabled, immigrant woman in their neighborhood whose livelihood similarly depends on recycling. Rather than perceiving her work as theft of theirs, Santosh explained that they are working towards the same goal, “she’s helping us to reduce the garbage.” Understanding the experience of the ‘untouchable’ cast of recyclers in Nepal, the Timilsina’s do their part to elevate and respect the valuable work of their local canners.
From the surface, or rather from the curbside, waste management does not seem so multi-dimensional. In reality, this multi-billion dollar industry differentially infuses waste and value relations into all aspects of its infectious ecology. As waste management continues to be a prosperous industry for those in power, and from its success will further automate, it is important to acknowledge all the lives that are impacted and potentially dispossessed. While visiting SMR’s Sunset Park location for a tour certainly cannot radically reorient the recycling industry, experiencing the four-story pile sure does make it a bit more difficult to carry on mindlessly wasting. Through establishing a particular consciousness about our discarded materials, and the embedded relationship between waste and value, New Yorkers can move closer to reconciliation with the matter and those who are discarded. As Santosh put it, “It’s been a good journey.”
Work Cited
Berardi, Francesca. “About This Project.” CannersNYC, canners.nyc/about/.
Beyer, Don. “The Contributions of Immigrants are Essential to U.S. Economic Growth and Competitiveness” United States Joint Economic Committee, 14 Dec. 2022, www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/democrats/2022/12/the-contributions-of-immigrants-are-essential-to-u-s-economic-growth-and-competitiveness.
Cortes, Kalena. Are Refugees Different from Economic Immigrants? Some Empirical Evidence on the Heterogeneity of Immigrant Groups in the United States, Mar. 2004, docs.iza.org/dp1063.pdf.
Denton, Chad, and Heike Weber. “Rethinking Waste Within Business History: A Transnational Perspective on Waste Recycling in World War II.” Tandfoldonline, 10 May 2021, www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00076791.2021.1919092.
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Farrell, Kevin, and Martha Hirst. “NYC Recycles, More Than a Decade of Outreach Activities by the NYC Department of Sanitation .” About 1999 Outreach Activities. 1999. www.nyc.gov/assets/dsny/docs/about_1999-outreach-activities_0815.pdf.
Garcia, Kathryn. “2017 NYC Residential, School, and NYCHA Waste Characterization Study.” DSNY, DSNY, 2017, dsny.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/2017-Waste-Characterization-Study.pdf.
Gidwani, Vinay, and Anant Maringanti. “The Waste-Value Dialectic: Lumpen Urbanization in Contemporary India.” Experts@Minnesota, Duke University Press, 21 Aug. 2016, experts.umn.edu/en/publications/the-waste-value-dialectic-lumpen-urbanization-in-contemporary-ind.
Hassan, S.E. “Public Awareness Is Key to Successful Waste Management.” Journal of Environmental Science and Health. Part A, Toxic/Hazardous Substances & Environmental Engineering, U.S. National Library of Medicine, pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15027831/.
Lange, Robert. “One Small Step for NYC, One Giant Leap for Recycling.” Resource Recycling. Nov. 2009. www.resource-recycling.com.
MacBride, Suzanne. “Introduction” and “Municipal Curbside Recycling.” Recycling Reconsidered. MIT Press. 2012.
Michaelson , Ruth. “‘Waste Colonialism’: World Grapples with West’s Unwanted Plastic.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 31 Dec. 2021, www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/31/waste-colonialism-countries-grapple-with-wests-unwanted-plastic.
Paben, Jared. “MRF Robotics Company Gains Traction over Two Years.” Resource Recycling News, Resource Recycling, 27 Sept. 2023, resource-recycling.com/recycling/2023/09/05/mrf-robotics-company-gains-traction-over-two-years/.
Pinto, Nick. “The State of Recycling in New York City Is Extraordinarily Grim.” Hell Gate, 21 Sept. 2022, hellgatenyc.com/state-of-recycling-in-nyc-is-grim.
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