Every night, black plastic garbage bags appear on the streets of New York City, like blackheads on a teen-ager’s nose. A little more than a third of each bag is food scraps: vegetable peels, moldy berries, unwanted tuna salad—organic matter that, in another city, might have been composted. About a sixth is material that should have been recycled: junk mail, plastic water bottles. The rest is what the Department of Sanitation calls “refuse.” This is the actual trash. Broken phone chargers. Cat litter. Expired pills. Nail clippings.
Two or three times a week, depending on the neighborhood, large white collection trucks make their rounds, each operated by two Department of Sanitation workers, who collect the bags. In the summer, the bags reek. In the winter, they’re frozen solid. When lifted, they often leak a dark, viscous juice whose smell can linger for days. Sanitation workers quickly learn that the liquid can be a distraction from other dangers in the bags. Wire hangers. Chicken bones. Things that puncture not just plastic bags but human skin and flesh.
Many bags can be carried in one hand, but outside large apartment buildings superintendents put out “sausage bags,” long, unwieldy monstrosities that typically require two sanitation workers to toss into the hopper, the open mouth at the rear of a collection truck. With the pull of a lever, a worker activates the hopper’s powerful hydraulic jaw, which chomps down on the trash and compacts it. Workers stand away from the truck while this is happening, as liquid and small metal objects sometimes fly out at high speeds.
Each collection truck can hold up to twelve tons of waste—about the weight of a school bus. When a truck is full, sanitation workers often drive it to a facility where the garbage is prepared for export. For fifty years, New York City sent residential trash to Staten Island, where Robert Moses built Fresh Kills, a landfill two and a half times the size of Central Park. Staten Islanders threatened to secede if the city didn’t shut it down. In 1993, Rudolph Giuliani won the mayoral race, with Staten Islanders delivering his margin of victory. Three years later, he unveiled a plan to close Fresh Kills. The landfill was finally shuttered in 2001; the last materials dumped there were the remnants of the Twin Towers.
Today, New York City sends its garbage out of the city altogether, primarily via facilities known as marine-transfer stations. When the stations were being built, during Mike Bloomberg’s and Bill de Blasio’s mayoral administrations, hundreds of residents protested, fearing mess, smell, and exhaust fumes. Sanitation officials readily admit that the fight drained significant energy out of City Hall. De Blasio’s aides used to wonder whether the furor over a station on East Ninety-first Street, on the Upper East Side, was what compelled their boss to work out at his old Y.M.C.A. in Park Slope, Brooklyn—at least a half-hour drive from Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s residence. The Ninety-first Street station was built right next to a fitness center called Asphalt Green. “That was the closest gym to Gracie Mansion,” a former aide said.
The Department of Sanitation now has five marine-transfer stations, which largely go unnoticed. Many collection trucks in Brooklyn use the station on Hamilton Avenue, on the edge of Red Hook—a multilevel depot with tall harbor cranes behind it. Inside, nozzles on the ceiling emit a fine mist that dampens the trash, and a ventilation system deodorizes the air using a kind of military-grade Febreze. Sanitation workers sit in glass-walled command centers, or “fishbowls,” overseeing the operations. During shifts, a truck enters the station every few minutes and backs up to the edge of a large open pit, one level down, to unload.
A garbage truck tipping its load bears an uncanny resemblance to a person throwing up. Some of the trash bags have burst open, but others are curiously intact, and you can still make out a few pieces of furniture that never got a chance to be fully digested. Sanitation workers driving front-end loaders collect the trash in the pit and dump it into shipping containers, which each hold twenty-five tons of waste. After the containers are filled and sealed, they are taken through the back doors of the station, while loudspeakers ring out with the sound of hawks screeching. “That’s by design,” Anthony Bianco, a sanitation chief, told me. It dissuades nearby seagulls from approaching.
Occasionally, a New Yorker will call 311, the city’s all-purpose help line, to report that they have mistakenly thrown out something of great value. If their trash hasn’t already gone in the pit, the caller is told to visit their local marine-transfer station, where the truck that collected their garbage will be tipped in front of them. The owner is given ninety minutes to wade through the muck to look for their discarded item, a protocol known as a Lost Valuables Search.
With surprising frequency, people find what they came for. New Yorkers have a way of recognizing their own garbage. “That’s my bag,” they’ll say, making a beeline toward a corner of the trash pile. Over the years, tax documents, false teeth, family heirlooms, and hard drives have been recovered. Last year, a woman called to say that she’d accidentally tossed out a diamond ring. Department officials told her that they could hold the truck that picked up her garbage. Then they described the procedure she’d have to follow. The woman told them to forget it.
Outside the Hamilton Avenue station, the shipping containers are loaded onto barges, where the trash becomes the property of Waste Management, Inc.—one of the companies to which the city government pays hundreds of millions of dollars a year for the municipal happiness that comes from trash being transported far, far away. Tugboats push the barges to Port Elizabeth, New Jersey, where the containers are transferred to freight trains, destined for a landfill in Virginia. Other New York City residential trash ends up in landfills in western New York, or in other states, such as South Carolina and Ohio. Or it gets incinerated in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, or upstate New York and turned into energy. This is how the city gets rid of twenty-four million pounds of waste each day—enough to fill more than two dozen Statues of Liberty.
In 2022, a few months after taking office as the city’s commissioner of sanitation, Jessica Tisch began fixating on plastic garbage bags. The bags have been around since the nineteen-seventies, when Mayor John Lindsay pitched them as a modern alternative to Oscar the Grouch-style metal cans. They seem to have only made the city dirtier. “Bags just create more litter,” Clare Miflin, a waste-reduction advocate, told me. “Rats rip them open. People throw garbage on them.”And yet the bags have also become indelible aspects of the city’s psyche. “I’ll take Manhattan in a garbage bag,” Lou Reed once sang. Sanitation officials have long known that there are better ways to take it.
In Buenos Aires and in Barcelona, people dispose of their residential trash in communal bins installed on sidewalks. In Singapore, some apartment buildings are equipped with pneumatic tubes that whoosh trash into large containers. In Chicago, residential waste goes in bins stored in back alleys. Such systems are part of a global leap forward in urban sanitary policy, known as containerization. But in New York, Tisch told me, “the way that we’ve managed the trash and recycling left on the curb every single day hadn’t really changed in decades.”
Last April, the Department of Sanitation published a report, titled “The Future of Trash,” examining why the city was stuck in its garbage-bag era. At times, it reads like ripe source material for a reboot of “Escape from New York.” Between parked cars, fire hydrants, bus stops, halal carts, Citi Bike racks, and dining sheds, there is little space left on the streets and sidewalks for a trash bag, let alone millions of bins. According to the report, containerizing the densest streets would require installing communal bins, which would mean getting rid of tens of thousands of parking spots. Few local issues are as intense as parking-space politics, Gale Brewer, an Upper West Side City Council member, told me. “I got an e-mail this morning,” she said. “It read, ‘I don’t care about Israel and Palestine, but what about the cars that haven’t moved for alternate-side parking?’ ”
And yet “The Future of Trash” concludes that bags could be eliminated from many of the city’s residential streets, without messing with parking, simply by telling people who live in houses and small apartment buildings that they couldn’t put their waste out in bags anymore. On April 1, 2023, as a first step, Tisch implemented the first change to the city’s waste-set-out times in decades. Residents would no longer be allowed to put garbage bags on the sidewalks before 8 P.M. (It was a small change, but an inconvenient one: putting the bags out so late would force many co-op boards and management companies to pay their building staff overtime.) Publicly, sanitation officials emphasized that the change would deter rats, by limiting the amount of time that bags sat outside. But the department was also quietly testing whether New Yorkers would containerize themselves, by giving them a nudge. The new rules had a carve out: if the trash was put in a lidded plastic bin, it could go out as early as 6 P.M. Bins soon began appearing on sidewalks all over town. “You never really saw containers on the streets of New York City until April 1st, and now there are lots of them,” Tisch told me last summer. “There’s about to be a whole lot more.”
Tisch believes that she and her aides have developed a plan that will clean up New York City. It’s a program they refer to, grandly, as the Trash Revolution. Bags off the sidewalks. Clean highways. Citywide organic-waste pickup. Beefed-up enforcement of sanitary laws. Tisch has committed her department to implementing these changes, along with other improvements that have eluded previous sanitation commissioners. “At the moment, in New York City, all the smartest people are focussed on garbage,” one of Tisch’s aides told me. “We’re running the Manhattan Project of municipal government here.”
Historically, the Department of Sanitation has been something of a neglected younger sibling among the city’s uniformed agencies. “We pick things up, we put things down, we drive the same route, and traverse the same streets,” Garrett O’Reilly, who recently retired as the department’s top uniformed official, told me. “Some people say that it’s a thoughtless job. I know that it’s not.” Sanitation veterans like to note that New Yorkers call on police officers and firefighters when there’s an emergency, whereas they rely on sanitation workers every day. Yet the city employs thirty-six thousand uniformed police officers, eleven thousand firefighters, and roughly eight thousand sanitation workers. This still makes for the largest municipal sanitation force in the country. New York’s Strongest, they call themselves.
Sanitation work is hazardous. The workers I spoke with mentioned serious injuries and respiratory issues they’d suffered as a result of the job. “I used to have allergies when I drove the broom,” Robert Casanovas, a retired supervisor, said of his days driving a street sweeper. “I don’t have them anymore.” Sanitation workers cleaned up Ground Zero after 9/11, and a hundred and nineteen have since died from illnesses related to that effort. At the start of the pandemic, sanitation workers were forced to work shifts without masks or hand sanitizer. Thousands of department employees got sick, and nine of them died.
The pandemic was a full-blown operational crisis for the department. To help pay for the city’s COVID-19 response, de Blasio cut the nearly two-billion-dollar sanitation budget by more than a hundred million. Litter-basket maintenance was cut by sixty per cent, street-sweeping services by fifty. Between the spring and the summer of 2020, the 311 hotline was flooded with complaints about trash, from all five boroughs. Andrew Cuomo, the governor at the time, spoke at a press conference about how bad the city smelled: “Literally, people saying there is an odiferous environment.” Kathryn Garcia, who was then the commissioner of sanitation, resigned in protest of the cuts.
This is the mess that Tisch inherited. (New York magazine proclaimed her first August on the job “Hot Garbage Month.”) But it was also a propitious time to become the sanitation commissioner, she told me, because city officials were finally acknowledging the severity of the situation. Tisch was appointed by Eric Adams, whose mayoral campaign, in 2021, was all about the new unease that New Yorkers felt on their streets. Part of this unease was about crime—that was the part that Adams, a former cop, talked about the most. But part of it was about trash. “The Mayor came to me with a goal,” Tisch said. “He likes to say—and it’s a good line—that New York streets need to look as good as New Yorkers do.” Given that Adams often wears custom-tailored suits and Ferragamo loafers, this is a high bar.
Tisch likes designer clothing, too, though you’ll more often see her in Chanel. Garcia was known for wearing a department-issued windbreaker and blending in with the rank and file. Tisch, on the other hand, recently took a tour of rat-infested zones in Flatbush, Brooklyn, while wearing a thousand-dollar silk dress from Zadig&Voltaire’s fall 2020 collection.
The sanitation commissioner comes from one of the richest families in the country. (They rank forty-third, according to Forbes.) Her father, James Tisch, is the C.E.O. of the Loews Corporation, a multibillion-dollar conglomerate whose holdings have included Loews Theatres, Loews Hotels, Lorillard Tobacco Company, the Bulova Watch Company, and CBS. Her mother, Merryl Tisch, was a top state education official for many years, and a prominent supporter of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Senator Chuck Schumer. The family’s name is etched all over the city: there’s the Tisch School of the Arts, at New York University; the Tisch Cancer Institute, at Mount Sinai; and the Tisch Galleries, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Yet Jessica Tisch, who is forty-three, has known only government work. After receiving a B.A., a J.D., and an M.B.A. from Harvard, she took a job, in 2008, in the counterterrorism bureau of the New York Police Department. “My grandmother was incredibly supportive,” she told me. “Everyone else was, like, ‘Really?’ ” Tisch helped develop the N.Y.P.D.’s surveillance-camera networks and set up its officer body cameras. In 2019, de Blasio appointed her the commissioner of the city’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, where she helped improve the city’s Wi-Fi, oversaw the 311 system, and coördinated vaccine distribution during the pandemic. “One of the things that Jessie learned at N.Y.P.D. is all the ways that money, contract, or legal issues can completely fuck up a project,” Ryan Merola, Tisch’s chief of staff, told me. “She keeps a budget expert, a contracts expert, and a lawyer around her at all times.” Adams and Tisch had several mutual connections, including the former police commissioner William Bratton, whom they both consider a visionary. Bratton supported Adams’s decision to appoint Tisch to Sanitation, as did Garcia, Bloomberg, and Schumer.
Many of Adams’s appointments have gone awry—his former commissioner of buildings has pleaded not guilty to bribery charges, and his former commissioner of corrections stepped aside after failing to address the deadly conditions in the city’s jails. Adams’s own phones were seized as part of a federal investigation related to his campaign fund-raising. (He has not been accused of any wrongdoing.) Tisch has managed to skate above this turmoil so far. “As many faulty appointments as Eric has made,” Bratton told me, “he’s very fortunate that he’s got people like Jessie to make up for all the characters.”
At a ceremony on February 1st, Tisch unveiled what she called “a super weapon in the fight against filth.” It’s an automated side-loading garbage truck, which can lift bins by itself, so that sanitation workers can collect trash without breaking their backs. Other cities in the U.S. have mechanized trash trucks, but, according to city sanitation officials, no domestic manufacturer makes a model compact and quiet enough to drive down a Manhattan street. At the ceremony, the department showed off a prototype of a vehicle it had created from a mix of American and European parts. The truck hoisted bins into the air in front of a cheering crowd. The event climaxed with Adams emerging from the truck’s cab, as “Empire State of Mind”—his personal theme song—played over loudspeakers. All this fanfare, one person commented on X, for “technology that places like Akron, Ohio have had since 1973.”
The task of cleaning New York has traditionally been divided among various agencies. The Department of Transportation cleaned the highways, the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection enforced food-vender rules, the Economic Development Corporation handled graffiti removal, and the N.Y.P.D. towed abandoned vehicles. But, for these agencies, cleanliness was generally a low priority. With Adams’s blessing, Tisch has absorbed these responsibilities into her department. When Sanitation began removing graffiti, there was a backlog of a thousand requests; the department cleaned eight hundred locations in just one month. As part of a new joint effort with the N.Y.P.D., Sanitation has helped remove more than eleven thousand abandoned cars from the streets.
The Department of Sanitation also has its own law-enforcement arm, the Sanitation Police, which enforces city trash rules. In 2023, summonses for sanitation violations were up sixty-two per cent. After a snowstorm this January, the NYC Sanitation account posted a warning on X: “New York’s Strongest will be out there en masse enforcing the basic rules intended to keep our sidewalks safe and passable.” The department ended up issuing four thousand citations to property owners who didn’t clear the snow from their sidewalks.
Residential waste accounts for only part of New York City’s trash. Offices, restaurants, shops, industrial facilities, and other commercial enterprises produce another twenty million pounds a day, and must pay private waste haulers to cart it away. A few months ago, Tisch announced that commercial businesses would have to containerize their waste. The NYC Sanitation account has begun publicly shaming establishments that haven’t complied. “MEMO TO @WALGREENS: Jamaica isn’t your damn dumping ground,” the account posted in mid-January. In another post, the account suggested that a Dollar Tree in Coney Island be called the “Two Hundred Dollars Each Day Tree,” because “that’s what they’re racking up in NIGHTLY summonses for failing to follow the chain business containerization rules.” To the Chick-fil-A on Fulton Street: “$200 per day, every day (except Sunday),” the account wrote, with a smiling emoji.
Law enforcement, as a general concept, is the underpinning of Tisch’s work as the sanitation commissioner. The Trash Revolution is in many ways inspired by the CompStat Revolution, a set of data-driven reforms that Bratton introduced at the N.Y.P.D. in the nineties. Studies suggest that these reforms contributed to an over-all decline in crime, but they also led to the stop-and-frisk era, in which police officers hassled millions of young Black and brown men in the city with little pretext. While campaigning for mayor, Adams said that he wanted every city agency to set up its own CompStat-style system.
On Thursday mornings, Tisch attends a meeting called Trash Dash. Whereas CompStat involves meetings about changes in crime stats—murders, shootings, and robberies—Trash Dash involves Sanitation brass grilling lower-ranked officers about missed collections, dirty conditions, and street-sweeping efficacies. As a uniformed agency, Sanitation has a chain of command similar to those in place at the N.Y.P.D. and the F.D.N.Y. (“It’s a paramilitary organization,” Casanovas, the retired supervisor, told me.) I recently attended a Trash Dash meeting on the eighth floor of the department’s headquarters, in lower Manhattan, where three- and four-star sanitation chiefs sat across the table from borough chiefs and district superintendents. Tisch was the only woman in the room. (Her department is more than ninety per cent male.) During a discussion of conditions in one part of Park Slope, she bolted out of her chair and made her way toward a screen displaying a map. “Tenth Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenue,” she said, indicating for an official controlling the screen to zoom in. “Five missed collections in a twenty-eight-day period—what is going on at that address?”
There was silence in the room. “That particular street, that’s the night recycling route,” a district superintendent said. “Uh . . . they’re saying it’s dark out.” Tisch rolled her eyes. The names of two sanitation workers were displayed on the screen. “I don’t care if they’re working at night or during the day,” she said. “If you are having a chronic problem with a location, a chronic problem with individuals, stick supervision on them and write them up!”
On numerous occasions, Tisch has described “dreaming” of becoming the sanitation commissioner. Some have speculated that Tisch is using Sanitation as a step toward becoming the N.Y.P.D. commissioner, or as an entryway into electoral politics. With the latter, she’d be following in the footsteps of Garcia, who ran for mayor after resigning from her post. (She ultimately came in second in the Democratic primary, behind Adams.) “I heard that narrative myself,” Tisch said, with a smile, when I mentioned the rumors about her eventually running for office.“I am largely a private person,” she went on. “What I enjoy is doing the work of running agencies.”
Tisch told me that, years from now, we will look back on this dirty city and its outdated sanitation policies in horror. “Do you remember when it was legal in New York City to dump your trash on the street in the middle of the day?” she imagines people saying. “Do you remember when it was normal for the Department of Sanitation to allow twenty per cent of that trash to sit there for twenty-four hours or more before it was collected?”
New York used to be unspeakably foul. At the turn of the twentieth century, according to one estimate, three million New York City residents each produced about a pound of garbage per day, plus ashes. Some of the trash consisted of things you might see today: soiled rags, oyster shells, fish heads. Other trash—wood shavings, pig organs—reflected the realities of the time. Much of this daily deluge of sludge and cinder was dumped in the harbor, an environmental calamity from which local marine life has never fully recovered. A lot also ended up on the street, where it got mixed in with decaying animal carcasses, manure, and urine. “The railroad avenues displayed great mounds and ridges of a black, unsightly substance to which science has not yet applied a name,” an 1874 op-ed published in the New-York Tribune bemoaned. “Everywhere filth offended the eye and soiled the person of the unfortunate pedestrian.”
At the time, the Department of Sanitation was the Department of Street Cleaning, and Tammany Hall—the city’s dominant Democratic Party machine—distributed street-cleaning jobs as patronage spoils, installing flunkies who collected their wages without reporting for work. This changed when William Strong became mayor, in 1895. He appointed George E. Waring, Jr., a civil engineer and a former Union Army cavalry colonel, as his head of Street Cleaning. Waring told the Tammany freeloaders to report for duty or beat it. Almost half the department quit.
Waring imposed martial discipline on the remaining workers, many of whom were poor Italian immigrants. He dressed them in bright-white uniforms and pith helmets, and he established the department’s chain of command. At morning roll-call meetings, sweepers and cart men were put in teams and assigned to specific streets. “To a modern sensibility, some of Waring’s reforms sound like simple common sense,” Robin Nagle, an anthropologist in the school of liberal studies at N.Y.U., wrote in her 2013 book, “Picking Up.” “But in New York’s gaslight era they were almost revolutionary.”
Clean curbs, gleaming cobblestones, fresh breezes—when New Yorkers saw and smelled these things, they celebrated. Waring threw a parade, marching his uniformed workers down Fifth Avenue. “New York has long had a street department,” an editorial in Harper’s observed. “It was an original discovery of Colonel Waring’s that this could be made and used to clean the streets.”
Why is New York City such a difficult place to keep clean? Garbologists, anthropologists, and discard scholars have been debating this question for decades. It helps to think of New York City not as one big metropolis, Nagle told me, but as a network of interconnected villages. The neighborhood of Washington Heights, in Manhattan, is different, in density and geography, than Elmhurst, in Queens, or Tottenville, in Staten Island. “Each one has to be served in a way that is uniform and fair, but they also require specific, unique details and logistical solutions,” Nagle said. “When you get to things like different ethnic enclaves, people have different habits, different relationships to consumption and to discard, to a sense of relationship with, ‘All right, I’m going to throw this thing away.’ ”
Throughout the city’s history, some have been tempted to write off New York as fundamentally dirty, or as somehow uncleanable. “The feeling among most experienced citizens of New-York in regard to the possibility of cleaning its streets properly is of resigned hopelessness,” the Times reported, back in 1881. But then came Waring. Tisch has a similar goal of changing cultural expectations about trash, but she’s relying on lessons she learned at the N.Y.P.D., rather than in the Union Army. “There can never be another Waring,” Nagle told me. “Waring solved the problem for the first time, and what he changed—those changes stuck. Will Tisch’s changes hold after she is no longer commissioner? We’ll see.”
Within the Department of Sanitation, there have been complaints about Tisch’s leadership style. Some former officials told me that she’s been barrelling ahead with her reforms, ignoring the input of longtime staff, and installing loyal aides to top positions. In late November, I received an anonymous e-mail that made similar accusations. “We cannot write to you directly because anyone criticizing her at DSNY is blacklisted,” it said. (“We are fundamentally changing the way we approach cleanliness and sustainability in New York City,” the department said in a statement. “Whenever someone proposes new ways of doing things, their feedback—agreement or disagreement—is both welcome and considered.”)
Recently, I accompanied two sanitation workers, Nick Himariotis and Paul Unger, on a midnight collection route in the West Village. The West Village is a plum gig in the department. “This is just throwaway garbage that you get from Amazon,” Himariotis said, gesturing toward the curb. People in the West Village eat their food out of takeout containers. “You go to Chinatown, they still cook,” he went on. “You pick up a bag—you can’t even pick it up. Food is the worst. Heavy and sloppy.”
I asked the men how they felt about Tisch and her directives. Large city agencies are naturally resistant to change, new demands, and hard-driving bosses. “You probably would find it split down the middle between the workforce,” Unger told me. “People say don’t reinvent the wheel. I disagree.” He added, “We don’t want to see rats everywhere when we’re working.”
One morning in September, before dawn, I walked into a Department of Sanitation garage in South Brooklyn to meet with Lieutenant Anthony Rizzo, of the Sanitation Police. Rizzo’s squad specializes in cases of illegal dumping, a practice that has plagued New York since the days of the Dutch. (The city’s first street-cleaning law, from 1657, barred residents of New Amsterdam from tossing “tubbs of odour and nastiness” into the streets.) From his desk, Rizzo has access to the feeds of nearly three hundred surveillance cameras around the city, most of which were installed after Tisch entered office. Catching offenders used to involve days-long stakeouts, Rizzo said: “We had to actually catch them in the act.” With the cameras, he’s able to track culprits to their home addresses. His squad issued three hundred and thirty-two summonses last year.
Illegal dumping usually happens on the margins of town—on dead-end streets or lonely stretches of boulevard. Cemeteries are popular. “I think it’s disgusting,” Rizzo said. “That’s someone’s resting place.” Rizzo has nearly two decades on the job, and has worked cases involving construction and landscaping companies, restaurants, electronics stores, and ordinary residents, who often dump yard waste. “We just caught a family in Queens,” Rizzo said. “Husband, wife, and two sons came. They broke their backs. They were dumping bags of dirt. Thirty, forty bags of dirt.”
The motivations of illegal dumpers vary widely. “Everybody here tries to be a major-case detective,” Rizzo said, of his squad. “I tell them all, ‘Don’t do it. You’ll fry your brain.’ ” New Yorkers often go to great lengths to illegally dump items that could legally be left out on a curb, like mattresses. If dumpers are caught, they’re fined at least four thousand dollars, and any vehicles used in the dumping are seized. On the day we met, Rizzo impounded a minivan that had been spotted, on multiple occasions, being driven by a man who was dumping dirt along the eastern shore of Staten Island. The owner of the minivan, a woman, said that the man who’d dumped the dirt was a friend who had borrowed the car without saying what he’d use it for. Her vehicle was seized shortly after she finished dropping her kids off at school.
The enforcement of illegal-dumping violations is part of a larger effort, by Tisch, to shift her department’s focus to what she calls “quality-of-life concerns.” This is the same language that Bratton, her mentor, used to make a case for broken-windows policing, a zero-tolerance approach to misdemeanors like vandalism. Rizzo told me that a lot of the people he cites are immigrants; there are also many construction workers who are caught dumping debris on orders from their bosses. New York City may not be fundamentally dirty, but it is fundamentally unequal. Impounding people’s vehicles seems harsh. Yet Rizzo told me that dumping is rampant in working-class, outer-borough neighborhoods, where residents have long felt overlooked by the Department of Sanitation, and that many people have welcomed the surveillance cameras in the hope of getting relief from all the junk. “Finally, they are taking action here in the community,” Rafael Peña, a resident of the Bronx, told the Hunts Point Express. Even local officials who have been skeptical of heavy law enforcement have praised Tisch’s reforms. Antonio Reynoso, the Brooklyn borough president, has publicly slammed Adams for tolerating an increased use of stop-and-frisk by the N.Y.P.D. But he had positive things to say about the Trash Revolution. “This mayor, on trash, on garbage, is doing an amazing job,” he told me in November.
Last summer, Tisch made one of the most controversial decisions of her tenure when she sent the Sanitation Police to clear out Corona Plaza, in Queens, where an unlicensed Latin American street-food fair had sprouted up during the pandemic. “Corona Plaza symbolizes something that is very core to the American ideal,” a food influencer told the Times. But the fair had prompted complaints from the owners of local brick-and-mortar shops, who said that the area was getting crowded and dirty, and that they were losing business. The Sanitation Police told the unlicensed venders to pack up, leading to rallies where demonstrators held up signs with phrases like “También somos parte de la economía de esta ciudad ”—“We’re also part of the economy of this city.” When I asked Tisch about the incident, she gave me a matter-of-fact response. “I think we knew going in that it was going to be a politically charged thing,” she said. “But what was there before we went in was chaotic, unsafe, impassable.”
In September, the department installed giant dumpsters along a dozen blocks in West Harlem, as part of a pilot program in European-style communal containerization and mechanized collection. Some people in the neighborhood hated the bins. “You pay a certain amount of rent for, like, a pretty, cute neighborhood feeling,” an opera singer named Caroline Miller told the local-news site Gothamist. She questioned whether such bins would ever be installed on the Upper East Side. Meanwhile, Shaun Abreu, West Harlem’s City Council member, told me that he’d heard from longtime residents who liked the bins. Perhaps gentrifiers thought they were eyesores. But, as Abreu said, “are they any more eyesores than piles of trash on the street?” Between April and December of last year, the city saw its largest decrease in rat sightings in years. In West Harlem, sightings were down sixty-eight per cent. “You cannot walk through any neighborhood in the city without noticing the progress that we are making, without feeling that Trash Revolutionary fervor,” Tisch said at an October press conference. “To the status quo, that inertial obfuscator of progress, I issue a challenge—take a deep breath through your nose and admit that deep in your heart you know the truth, that the city finally, at long last, does not smell like trash every hour of every day.”
There are two kinds of people in the world of garbage: those who are focussed on picking up trash, like Tisch, and those who are focussed on where that trash goes. “We’ve all bought into this false optimism that it can be solved in collection,” Elizabeth Balkan, a top civilian official at the Department of Sanitation during the de Blasio administration, told me. Balkan said that there’s no such thing as throwing something “away”; someone always suffers the consequences of trash. A recent study in Science found that landfills emit methane—a potent greenhouse gas—at higher rates than previously known, contributing to climate change. In recent years, residents of upstate New York who live near landfills full of New York City waste have filed multiple lawsuits, complaining of nausea, headaches, and a “never-ending odor event.”
These days, Balkan consults with businesses and governments looking to reduce waste, often by introducing pay-as-you-throw regimes or privatizing the collection of residential waste. She is one of many former department officials who now focus on environmental efforts. Benjamin Miller, who served as the director of policy planning at the Department of Sanitation under Mayor David Dinkins, is now an adviser with the Center for Zero Waste Design, an organization that aims to create more sustainable cities. Miller told me that Tisch has been too cavalier in making big policy and logistical changes without fully engaging community stakeholders. Some people in city government admire Tisch’s steamroller tendencies. But Miller thought she’d eventually run into trouble. “Who gives a fuck if they have the Mayor’s ear?” he said, of Tisch and her team. “That’ll take them as far as the first court case.”
Both Balkan and Miller criticized Tisch for cutting three million dollars in department funding for community composting programs after Adams ordered city agencies to tighten their budgets. The department had already begun rolling out its own program for collecting organic waste, instituting curbside pickup for residents and public schools and installing hundreds of orange organics bins on street corners. But the community composters felt like food-co-op members with a Whole Foods moving in down the block. “To not see the value this sector brings to N.Y.C., both practically and symbolically, is truly shortsighted,” Balkan said. Supporters of community composting have argued that the city’s current plan for organic-waste collection shouldn’t be called “composting.” Much of the organic material isn’t turned into soil; instead, it gets broken down into methane gas and burned for energy. In November and December, community composting groups protested outside City Hall. (“Composting Rules! Methane Gas Drools,” one sign read.)
One day, I rode with Tisch on a trash barge to Port Elizabeth. Only after we set off did Tisch ask an aide how long the trip to New Jersey would take. A hundred and forty minutes, the aide said. “A hundred and forty minutes?” Tisch yelled, in disbelief. Ed Whitmore, the owner of the tugboat pushing the barge, went to consult the captain, then returned. “Good news,” he said. With the tide moving the way it was, we could make the trip in about an hour. Soon, white spray was shooting off both sides of the barge as the tug chugged through the water, pushing a thousand tons of rotting cargo across the harbor.
“I have something I want to bend your ear on,” Whitmore told Tisch. (Before purchasing his tugboat company, in 2002, Whitmore worked in structured finance.) Once the barge arrived in New Jersey, the trash would be put on a freight train. He noted that “the whole system” of sending trash down the East Coast “is leveraged to the railroads, and the railroads’ capacity. We could put some of this waste on oceangoing barges and compete with the railroads.” Tisch nodded in contemplation. “I’ve planted my seed,” Whitmore said.
“Consider it planted,” Tisch replied.
Afterward, Tisch told me that New Yorkers don’t realize just how brittle something as basic as trash collection is. A few months after she took office, the national rail workers’ union almost went on strike. If that had happened, the city would have had six days before trash started piling up. “We talked about it every single day for a very long time,” Tisch said. “This is the essential service. If we don’t do our jobs for two or three days, it’s actually a public-health crisis.”
This might sound like an exaggeration, but I’d recently seen evidence of it. Harry Nespoli, the seventy-nine-year-old head of the Uniformed Sanitationmen’s Association, had given me an in-house magazine commemorating the union’s 1968 strike, which lasted nine days. Garbage piled high in the streets, filling in the gaps between parked cars and blocking entrances to hospitals and schools. “Trash fires flared all over town,” Time reported. “Rats rummaged through pyramidal piles of refuse. Public-health authorities, warning of the danger of typhoid and other diseases, proclaimed the city’s first general health emergency since a 1931 polio epidemic.” When their strike was over, sanitation workers cleaned the mess up themselves.
Many people involved in waste management end up loving trash, in some weird way. Tisch doesn’t. “I really think, in this day and age, to be a good sanitation commissioner you have to hate trash,” she said. “The whole job is to make it not omnipresent. Make it go away. Make it so that people who are using the streets don’t see it at all hours of the day.” I asked her about getting people to produce less of it. She waved me off. She didn’t think it was her job to reduce garbage—just to remove it. “Trash service,” she said, “is the last all-you-can-use service in New York City.” ♦
