Sanchez asks about marine transfer station usage and private operators
Sanchez asks for updates on increasing barge transport and whether private operators could use marine transfer stations. Anderson says DSNY is looking seriously at this after commercial waste zones are fully implemented and has started conversations about accepting commercial paper at the 59th Street MTS.
Having said that, are there any updates on increasing usage of marine transfer stations to move additional solid waste via barges in order to shift away from truck-based transport?
Is there any applicability of this program to private operators?
And has there been any discussion of this being scaled up for municipal waste transfer stations?
Again, yes, looking very seriously at doing this after the full implementation.
of commercial waste zones next year.
We've already started conversations with our 59th Street MTS, which we don't often talk about, which handles
all of our paper that we collect in Manhattan, to see if there would be feasibility for accepting commercial paper, commercial office paper specifically, at that transfer station.
At this moment, we only have one zone, or I guess now two zones fully rolled out in Manhattan.
So we still need more data on how much commercial office paper is being collected separate from single stream recycling collections.
And as we have that data, we can start to formulate what that would look like.
Have we also had a discussion about collecting all of the paper from the universities that we have on the Isle of Manhattan?
So we haven't looked at universities specifically.
Many of them use private carters, so they would be covered by commercial waste zones.
The challenge with the 59th Street MTS is that it only takes paper.
Many of the private carters are offering single stream collection where it's paper commingled with metal, glass, and plastic containers.
And so once that's commingled, we can no longer take it at 59th Street because that goes straight to the paper mill on Staten Island.
So we can certainly look into those universities and where their material is going.
So is there a discussion in which we no longer allow universities to commingle their trash in order to get better streams of flow, trash flow?
We can certainly have conversations with the universities about how much material they're generating and what kinds of recycling products.
We will be definitely having that conversation.