[The following content has been edited and reorganized based on the original interview conversation recorded virtually on March 18, 2022.]


Me: Hey Carl, thank you so much for agreeing to be a part of this. Could you introduce yourself briefly?


Carl: Hi! I'm Professor of Sustainability studies at Pratt institute. I'm an environmental historian who looks at ways in which industrial society defines, classifies, manages waste and what some of those consequences are to the people in ecosystems that are affected.

Me: Thank you. Let me start by asking you this: Why is New York so dirty?


Carl: Are you talking about the full garbage bags that you see constantly on sidewalks here in New York City? (Me: unsure how to respond.) The reason why I ask is that this particular thing is somewhat unusual in American cities. The reason for it involves urban planning, or the lack thereof. There’s a book by Martin Melosi called Fresh Kills, which is ostensibly a history of that landfill that New York City uses. But what it really is, is a history of the systems of practices of disposal in this modern city from the 19th century to the present. What I want to do, to start our conversation off, is identify a key point that Melosi makes in the book Fresh Kills: New York City is an incredibly wealthy city. An incredible amount of trade and economic activity takes place in New York, so it's rich in terms of that. BUT, New York is also land poor. And the result of this is this is an incredibly densely developed metropolitan area. Some of that relates to waste in general.

But in terms of the garbage bags on the street, what’s really important here is that the waste management infrastructure is different than you’d find in other American cities, and I’ll just give an example that I know very well because it's my hometown and I've done some policy work here. In Chicago, you wouldn't see these bags of trash on the sidewalk. The reason for that is when garbage trucks move through the Chicago metro area to collect the debris that has been generated by apartment buildings, houses, and businesses - they do so through the network of back alleys. And if you were going to look at a block of Chicago, you'd see the sidewalks, the front facing of the street, might not be that much different from New York in that you'd have houses, townhouses, and apartments. What would be different is if you took a drone and looked above the city blocks, you'd see behind these places, you'd see a lot of backyards behind the backyard. There'd be these alleyways. these little streets that are behind all of the houses, because there's enough room to develop in Chicago, so that you're not cramming residences in every square inch. The garbage trucks will drive mostly in these back alleyways, and all of the collected material will be in that way mostly out of sight and out of mind, because mostly people aren't hanging out in the alleys. It's true of Chicago. It's true of Washington Dc. It's true of most cities in the United States, but with the exception of summaries of Queens and Staten Island. It's not true of New York City. We really try to maximize the space and put more buildings in. And so a lot of what would be in the back alleys of most American cities is taking place in clear view.

And so one of the things that might be relevant to your study is that the blinders that people have so that we're deliberately ignoring those garbage bags that are right under our feet is because we become used to this, being sorry part of an American infrastructure of waste management. Because our front streets are effectively doing the work of the back alleyways, and those people who have grown up in the United States may have normalized, “Oh, we go to the back alley”, and we go “Oh, there are no back alleys in New York City”. That's why, it's like this that's obviously not the entire story. But that is one key urban planning dimension to this problem that's particularly distinctive of New York City, and I hope I haven't derailed too much.


Me: Since you mentioned Fresh Kills, you must be aware that it’s in this redevelopment project of being turned into a recreational park. What are your thoughts on that?


Carl: The redevelopment of Fresh Kills is something I generally support. The idea of turning what is very much a visual blight - all the debris from several decades of being discarded - can be turned into functional land, and as I mentioned before using Melosi's thesis. and, by the way, if you're interested in the fresh Kills park I strongly recommend reading his book for a large context here. That because New York City itself is so land poor, creating new public land that people can eventually use for recreation is a public good. This is not entirely unproblematic, and there are two ways I want to get to it. The first one is cultural, and the second involves some of the issues involved with building on landfill.

I’ll just start at the really rough thing with Fresh Kills: it's not just a landfill, it's a cemetery. The reason it’s a cemetery is we closed it as a landfill in early 2001, and then reopened it after 9/11, because when the terrorists strike knocked down the twin towers, we had an immense amount of material, some of it very toxic as well as unfortunately the remains of thousands of people that we had to deal with in some way, and the commingling of so many of those people's bodies were with the toxic materials in the buildings meant that we weren't going to separate them out and have given people individual funerals in individual coffins. This happened for some of the victims, but certainly not all so. The very last function that fresh kills had as a landfill was as the depository of human remains.

So “do we build soccer pit fields over cemeteries?” is one of those cultural things we have to really think about with fresh kills in particular, it wasn't designed to be a cemetery but it had to become one, ultimately for that. So the really rough cultural thing is, are we making a place for recreation over the bodies of some of the thousands of living New Yorkers’ loved ones? I’m not really sure how we resolve that. And if you look at the history of cemeteries, especially in Western society, this would be by no means the first time. Something like that has happened that's a particularly dramatic effect.

Okay, that major point aside. There are some other difficulties to building on landfill, and let's see one of them is probably not tremendously an issue in New York. But I want to unpack it. So you're building a building, whether it's a house or a high-rise, or like a big box store like a BestBuy. One of the things that the architects and the contractors really have to think about is the stability of the foundation. So oftentimes you'll think about “Oh, there's good bedrock here, nice and solid”. And there are a few reasons for that. One is subsidence. If you put a really heavy building on very loose soil, as it would be, it will sink. The more concerning issue, and this is something that cities on what would be called the Ring of Fire on the Pacific, whether it's San Francisco or Tokyo, is, if you have seismic activity on loose soil that's going to put much more stress on your buildings.

I went to college in Santa Cruz, California. During the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which happened to be Ground Zero, the downtown was virtually destroyed. San Francisco itself, though, did pretty well. There were a lot of communities that did very, very badly. The one part of San Francisco that had severe damage to the buildings was a very rich neighborhood, called Pacific Heights, with some of the most expensive townhouses in the United States, because it overlooks the water. The reason Pacific Heights did so badly: those townhouses were built on one landfill as opposed to on bedrock. So there's certain limitations to what you can do in terms of seismic activity. In building buildings on these landfills there are other case studies of building on landfill where you've seen problems. But I figure that's the most dramatic one.

The other issue, which I think is actually going to be more of an issue for Fresh Kills, and I will say right now they are developing infrastructure to mitigate this issue if you've capped a landfill and you've put soil over it, and you've put grass and sod, and maybe you've done some other development with that and we've done lots of this in places like you golf courses. One of the issues is you are ceiling off the organic matter in the landfill. And if you seal it off, anaerobic digestion will start to happen. Basically what anaerobic digestion is going to do, without oxygen, it's going to produce methane. And there are a lot of problems with methane one is it's a very potent greenhouse gas. So if we are simply doing that, and not capturing the methane we're contributing to global warming.

But there are other issues as well. Going back to the San Francisco Bay Area. San Francisco is great for this because it's American and the United States: we love throwing stuff away, we're a really good society for that. And there are a lot of the ecological issues with landfill are particularly well developed in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Let's travel about 40 minute south of the Pacific Heights neighborhood. Back in the mid-eighties, a landfill on the peninsula below San Francisco filled up. One of the problems with landfills is that they're not infinite, they will eventually fill up, and the local community decided to cap that landfill. And we develop it, and one of the great things about landfills, and you see this with Fresh Kills is you are creating these new hills - they might have good views, so maybe you put buildings on it. But that could be a problem for reasons we've already talked about.

One of the other things you can do with these hills is develop outdoor amphitheaters. In 1986, The shoreline amphitheater was opened. It had a performance space with some speakers for outdoor concerts, and then the hill up, the big part of the landfill. They planted lots and lots of grass, and made it so that people could take a blanket or some lawn shares.They bring their wine, they bring some food, and they go listen to a concert. So the shoreline amphitheater used this plan, and they opened in the summer of 1986. There was a performer named Steve Winwood. He's like 75 years old now. So he just dressed like he's going to the office. He has no pyrotechnics, no stage show, no props like some performers do, it's just him and a keyboard, and as a band playing music, that's the entire visual aspect of a show. And I say that because this is going to show that people in the crowd realized something was very wrong when, as people with their blankets and their chairs started to light up cigarettes and marijuana joints, these eight-foot plumes of fires started erupting around them on the hill. What had happened is this methane which was just generated under the ground. Once a flame was erupting out the ground and lighting up basically the place where 3,000 people were seated. Happily, no one was seriously injured, but what they had to do was close the amphitheater and develop this piping and venting system to capture the methane and keep it from generating where it would be a real public health hazard.

I know one of the reasons why the Freshkills park project is taking a long time to develop is that they're developing systems of capturing the methane generated by that landfill before they do things like put a soccer field on it. But that's just one of the issues other than the subsidence and the seismic activity. The generation of methane is a local environmental hazard that you have to worry about. The other ones that you might have to worry about, and this is also what's causing some of the protracted nature of the development, is making sure that the toxic materials that might be in that landfill aren't immediate dangers to whatever people are going to be using the landfill. And again to get back to what I first talked about, there are going to be some particular toxins in there, due to the removal of the twin towers which those buildings by the way, one of the lessons of the tragedy there is don't put toxic materials in skyscrapers like asbestos for example. Because then, if the buildings have to come down, either planned or otherwise… I mean, the reason why there's a fund for people who are at ground level who have respiratory illness is in most part because of the construction of those buildings that opened in the mid 1970s and had lots of known carcinogens in them, and those are things that are unfortunately in Fresh Kills now. They're not the only toxins but they're particular ones that we know about.

Me: One of your published articles talks about Zero Waste. It’s the concept that we as humans, just like any other natural creatures, can’t help but produce waste - but we (the production industries AND everyday individuals) can recycle and reuse everything, so it becomes this healthy wasteless cycle. Is this your vision for the future?

Carl: The very short answer is “Yes, but.” and here's how I'll put that. What we have done in industrial society in general, and I'll say in the United States in particular, is develop an economy that prizes mass production and pushes the burdens of mass production away from the companies that are producing things. So what I would say is the real problem with that is: New York City has a massive sanitation department. There are over 10,000 employees in New York City's Department of Sanitation dealing with our garbage recycling, and to a lesser extent our compost every single day. And even with this huge labor force you're still seeing the waste issues that are visually apparent every single day in all 5 boroughs. The problem is, if Coca-Cola is going to make PT bottles that are going to live in landfills for hundreds of years, and don't have much of a market for recycling, we're going to have real problems dealing with the thousands, and thousands of coke bottles are being, empty coke bottles, that are being generated in New York City every single day.

So in terms of thinking through a zero waste future, by the way, I don't think we can ever truly get to absolute zero waste, and we might talk about that in a separate question. What I think the future needs to have as a first step is a redesign of public policy. So that the manufacturers of waste bear the economic responsibility for managing that waste, so that if Coca-Cola is making all of these plastic bottles they should foot the bill completely. Or whether it's recycling, incineration or landfill, whatever the end of life phase is their packaging, Amazon should be doing that with their boxes.

We can think that of every large producer. The good news is we're starting to see that type of policy forming and it's in the form of what would be called Extended Producer Responsibility laws and there are several of them on the books in various countries. The European Union has much more advanced ones than most of the United States. But last summer the State of Maine produced an incredibly ambitious Extended Producer Responsibility law that would pledge to put 100% of the economic burden on producing industries. How this works in practice will see because obviously it's only been the law for what now? 7 months, 8 months. New York State is considering adopting the Maine bill. If that happens, I know one thing that will have to be discussed in the corporate offices of Coca-cola, at Apple, at Amazon is, “How can we design our services?”

Because key Industries producers are really services right? Coca-Cola: delicious caffeine that will keep you awake while you're in your studio. Amazon: delivery over the Internet of basically everything capitalism can possibly have. How can we design those services so that we're not generating material that will have to be dealt with in the waste stream?

Have you seen what Starbucks did this past week? They announced a policy, that by 2025, they're not gonna be giving single-use disposable coffee cups out anymore, but developing mugs that you can return or encouraging people to just bring their own mugs to starbucks to fill up with their coffee. And the reason they're doing that is because they're seeing these Extended Producer Responsibility laws getting passed, including the U.S. And how many Starbucks cups are generated every single day? And that includes the paper, and that includes the polystyrene (the top of it) - that's an immense stress on local waste systems. So the biggest coffee producer in the world is changing the way the delivery happens so that they're not throwing out all these cups. That's going to have an incredible effect on New York City's waste stream, as well as Seattle's, as well as you know, Rockville, Maryland's and other small towns as well, because there are just thousands of these Starbucks around generating the waste. So that's an example of what I hope the future will bring, is that the companies that are responsible for designing and mass producing all the stuff that's going to the landfills and recycling streams. I'd love first to have less stuff to recycle, honestly, just keeping stuff out of the single-use disposable stream is gonna be better for the environment than capturing everything and recycling it as well. So my hope is, part of our future is erecting policy measures that will disincentivize just the one-time creation of disposable materials. From there, then, industrial design and even urban planning can be reshaped so as a reflection of the policy, so that with luck the streets of New York just have far fewer disposable things in them, whether they're in garbage cans whether in the garbage bags that they're just proliferating, or whether they're just litter, that people are just throwing away.

Will we eliminate the stuff? No. Can we minimize it and make it a small fraction of what it is? I think we can, and we're starting to go in that right direction, but recognizing that the burden shouldn't fall with a city that's got the responsibility picking up all this stuff, or even the individuals like you or me who pick up like a starbucks coffee and Go “Oh, i'm doing a terrible job with the environment.” Well, you have a role to play, but it's a much smaller one than Starbucks itself, for deciding to have this system. What Starbucks has done this week is recognize it doesn't have to be that way. So I'm hoping that now that they've done this, other companies will follow suits. But they're not going to do it out of the goodness of their heart, they're going to do it because there are regulatory and really economic penalties for not doing it.

Me: Well, despite what they think and why they're doing it, for if they're doing it, I think it will just definitely be a better future.

Carl: Exactly yeah. So I'm actually quite optimistic about the future, as it relates to waste. Even more so than I was when you took my class, because it was like, “Oh, this is actually happening in the U.S.” Before I would just talk about, like I'm on an Apple Macintosh laptop right now, and I've talked about Apple has actually made these computers far less toxic in the last 10 years. And that's really good, but they didn't do this out of the goodness of their heart. They did this because there are designs for recycling Extended Producer Responsibility Laws in the European Union. If they wanted to keep selling these computers in Germany, they were going to have to change the designs of the computers. So from our perspective, New York, it's like “Oh, apple what a responsible corporation!” No, Apple is dealing with regulatory restrictions that other countries have put on them. Now, some of those regulations are coming to the United States, which I never thought I'd see.

Me: Thank you. I really appreciate how you are placing the main responsibility on producers. Because as consumers, a lot of the time it feels like the responsibility is put on us. We feel bad for using this one plastic straw, and even if we switch to something more “environmentally conscious”, it doesn’t do anything in the whole scale of things.


So we were mainly talking about New York City, or American cities in general. But I also looked into other places, like European and Asian countries. I read a NY Times article about how trash is collected in Taiwan that’s particularly interesting. Basically, every night, garbage trucks would go around the city playing “Für Elise”. When Taiwanese residents hear the Beethovan melody, they naturally bring out their own trash bags from their apartments to be picked up. It’s become a daily routine, a chance to catch up with neighborhood friends, a “glimpse of humanity” in the covid times (even with the masks on). The act of personally and intimately taking care of the waste is very different from how Americans deal with waste, which is distant and a dirty duty. Also, Germany has one of the best waste management systems in the world, but I won’t go into too much detail here. So my question is, how can we learn from other countries to make New York cleaner?

 
Carl: This is actually probably going to add to your problem, that you are dealing with as a designer, that is, what is the role of local culture as it relates to waste management systems? Culture, beliefs, practices, and norms. Now, with Germany, if we were to talk about Munich specifically, one of the things that's going to relate to that are these Extended Producer Responsibility laws because there is a shared responsibility for getting everything in the right bin and that responsibility, again, I'm being repetitive, is not just the local sons of Munich but also the producing industries that are shaping the waste. But in both Germany and Taiwan, there's something different than what we find, not just in New York, but in the United States, and this is a real problem of American culture, where we are a little bit more disconnected not only to each other, but to the land under our feet, especially in cities, right? And I'll try to do this really briefly, and this is depressing.

Americans hate our cities. There is a strong anti-Urban sentiment that has been part of this country since colonial times when cities weren't really that large. Thomas Jefferson very much talked about the ills that city springs such as disease and squalor and pollution, so everyone should be a yeoman farmer out in the sun and nature and stuff like that. And that's never really gone away in this country, even though there's almost 9 million people in the 5 boroughs of New York. Los Angeles is a huge city and populations all around the world, including this country, are becoming more urbanized every single year. The related aspect of this is the Xenophobia and racism in the United States, as it relates to land use. And I think we talked about redlining in class. It’s not an accident that, unlike South Africa, the wealthiest areas in American communities are on the suburban fringe of cities where people might have to go into the city to go to work. But then they had their clean and (up until really the 1980s) lily white neighborhoods in terms of the racial characteristics that urban land was seen as polluted and something to be thrown away. There really wasn't that kind of communal stake in loving it and loving each other in the city itself, that the places and the people were ultimately to be disposed of as well.

And there a lot of the environmental justice literature is about illegal dumping, often in cities. The South Bronx and Brooklyn have had terrible problems in the past with that. But it relates to this culture of anti-urban and often xenophobic, because cities are cosmopolitan places with a diversity of people in them, and I don't know that you separate that out where you don't see this as much. I am painting with a very broad brush.

I should also say that there's some wonderful community bonds in New York City, as it relates to this. And, for example, I live in Bed-Stuy. The Brooklyn Botanical Garden has a greenest block competition every year. And frequently neighborhoods in Bed-Stuy, which was an area that suffered terribly from red lining over the last century, win that greenest block, and I go for walks between Clinton Hill and Bushwick, because It's a very large neighborhood: there's some wonderfully tended neighborhoods in here, and we can't lose sight of that. But the larger cultural context of America being so anti-urban has consequences when it comes to waste and blight and pollution. And a really depressing thing, and one of the reasons why I wrote a book about environmental races, and after I wrote my first book on recycling just like, Oh, there's some larger issues in this country that really are related to this, and we have to understand it more. And so yeah, it's hard to separate a lot of how America's organized without talking about white supremacy.

Bonus content >>>

So I said to Carl that as a Communication Designer, I don’t feel like I can do much, compared to say architects and industrial designers, as they choose the materials that go into the production of buildings and products that are directly related to waste.

Carl disagrees with me and here’s his response:

I actually think that communication designers have a tremendous role to play one is, if you're thinking about things like the German waste management, where they're like 5 different bins figuring out legible ways, with communications so that people can intuitively navigate, that is important. But there's a bigger issue for communications design, and it involves this individual responsibility of garbage, pun fully intended, that we've been indoctrinated into in this country. So if you go into a first grade classroom, it's quite often that you'll see posters up there: “Recycling will save the earth” and stuff like that. That's communications design, that's design that's intended to internalize individual responsibility for this. Those posters were developed by Keep America Beautiful. Who is Keep America Beautiful? Coca cola and Heiser Busch Cores. These large companies that are producing this.

So communication design has been very effective in shifting the burden on the individuals. Recognizing that history and figuring, how can we counter that? Your skills are the most important ones encountering that. So figuring out who really should have the burden here, we can pass these Extended Producer Responsibility laws. But making sure that the legibility of that for just an 8 year old, or a 75 year old, and a 75 year old, who may not speak English, that they can all see. and go “Oh, yeah, Starbucks shouldn't be giving us these mass-produced disposable coffee cups”. You and the people in your specific profession. have a vital and unique role to play with this. So don't sell yourself short. No, you do really important work.