New York Plans For Bigger and Better Recycling Efforts

Boro-Wide Recycling Corp.

Maspeth, NY 718-416-1656

www.BoroWideRecycling.com

The Bloomberg administration has set a goal: to double the amount of garbage it diverts from landfills over the next five years.

The plan reflects a deeper commitment to programs that encourage the reuse and prevention of waste, including the city’s long-neglected residential recycling program. “It calls for increasing the proportion of residential and other waste diverted from landfills to 30% by 2017 from 15% now. By meeting a target of 30%, the city would keep 550,000 tons of garbage out of landfills each year,” (New York Times).

Currently, the city’s Department of Sanitation sends 3 million tons of solid waste to landfills annually. 

Mayor Bloomberg said “if we’re going to be the most innovative city in the world, we also have to be the greenest – because that’s how you attract the most talented individuals and the most forward-looking companies,” (New York Times). 

The plan envisions opening two sites this year; one to compost yard waste and one revitalizing recycling from residences and institutions. Mayor Bloomberg will commit the city to expand recycling to include all rigid plastics, like yogurt cups and medicine bottles, by the summer of 2013, when a new recycling plant under construction in Brooklyn is expected to come online. “The effort also calls for increasing the number of recycling receptacles in public spaces to 1,000 by 2014 from about 600 now,” (New York Times).

Both types of recycling, compost yard waste and recycling from residences and institutions, were included in legislation passed in 2010 by the City Council. “That measure required 1,000 public recycling bins by the year 2020 and directed the Sanitation Department to start taking rigid plastics for recycling if it was determined to be cost effective,” (New York Times). 

The efforts still fall far short of what many other American cities are doing, but environmentalists who have followed the New York’s waste management over the years said they were “cautiously optimistic,” (New York Times). 

The city also envisions diverting waste by trying out new technologies to convert garbage into heat and electricity. Mayor Bloomberg’s deputy mayor for operations, Caswell Holloway, said the city would “start soliciting proposals by next month for an installation in or near the city that could handle about 135,000 tons of waste a year,” (New York Times).

Combined, these programs would help the city save $55 million of the $300 million it spends exporting garbage to out-of-state landfills by truck and railway transportation. City officials calculate that these efforts would reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with the transport and handling of solid waste by 7 percent by 2017, (New York Times).