Commissioner Anderson gives historical overview of NYC recycling and waste management

Great.

Good morning, Chair Sanchez and members of the Committee on Sanitation and Solid Waste Management.

I'm Gregory Anderson, Commissioner of the New York City Department of Sanitation.

I'm joined today by Jennifer McDonald, Deputy Commissioner of Solid Waste Management, Kate Kitchener, Executive Director of Resource Recovery at DSNY, and Jane Gajwani, Director of the Office of Energy and Resource Recovery at DEP.

Thank you for inviting us to testify today.

We'll start with a little history.

New Yorkers have been recycling in some form for more than 200 years.

In the 19th century, rendering plants, scrap dealers, and an informal network of rag and bone pickers ensured that the most usable discards were given new life.

In the early 20th century, during the World Wars and the Great Depression, New Yorkers used and reused products out of a sense of civic duty, necessity, or both.

But in the 20th century, industrial growth and economic transformation in the United States built a powerful economy.

Based on the insatiable appetite of a growing population of Americans as consumers of products, of energy, of land, and of water.

The fundamental premise of this 20th century economy was to take, make, and waste both natural and labor resources from around the globe to fuel economic growth.

At the same time, we found every possible way to dispose of the growing volumes of trash we generated, dump it in the ocean, burn it, bury it in giant mountains of trash.

And over time, there was a growing realization that we are asking more of our planet and of its people than we can endure, and that this economic model, take-make-waste, was unsustainable.

And here in New York City, we struggled with the reality that our means of disposal in polluting incinerators, in barely regulated landfills across the city, and the behemoth Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island would not last.

For decades, the Department of Sanitation has endeavored to recover and reclaim as much of the value remaining in the products New Yorkers use, whether by reuse, recycling, or composting, through conversion to energy, or through other means.

Now, our modern recycling programs were born out of the environmental movement of the 1970s and 80s, beginning with grassroots efforts to collect recyclable products like cans and newspapers at the neighborhood level.

New York City instituted its first recycling program in 85, collecting old newspapers in Greenwich Village before expanding to other neighborhoods and other material types.

Local Law 19 of 1989 codified the city's mandatory curbside recycling program and is the foundation of the city's recycling program.

of the program we have today.