This is just three days' worth of trash —
most coming from New York City.
And that claw is taking it to be burned into electricity.
But we're not actually in New York City — we're in Jersey.
Once the garbageman comes and picks it up,
you don't think anymore about it.
But it has a long way to go after that.
None of New Yorkers' waste
is processed in the city.
Instead, it ends up as far away as Ohio, Pennsylvania,
and even South Carolina.
So getting trash from here to here
takes thousands of workers, trucks,
trains, cranes, and even barges
operating nonstop to ship waste across the East Coast.
Rain, snow, hail, storm. There's no stopping us.
And it all costs the city hundreds of millions.
Here's what actually happens to New York City's
3.2 million tons of trash a year.
New York City's Department of Sanitation
sends its fleet of 2,000 garbage trucks
to start picking up at 5 a.m.
We have to keep active.
Some guys like to work out. Some guys don't.
Basically, it depends on you.
Me? I don't work out. This is my workout.
This is my daily workout.
That's Frank,
a 23-year veteran sanitation worker.
Well, you get immune to the smell.
You don't smell garbage, you smell money.
Checking to see how solid it is.
You can tell when the truck is full.
Frank heads to the dump station
in the Upper East Side.
By then, the sun's coming up.
We are currently at 91st Street MTS.
Doors will open as the truck comes in.
And there's radiation detectors that will read the truck.
Trucks pause at the weigh station
to help the city keep track of how much trash
New Yorkers produce.
Then, handles tilt the hopper.
Then she'll push the blade,
and the blade will push the material all the way out
to clear the whole truck.
It's roughly 450 to 600 tons a day.
Tractors move the trash
into the containers beneath the ground.
It's sort of a dance.
One FEL will clear the wall,
and one FEL will load containers.
Getting the material containerized as quickly as possible,
and sealed, keeps that smell down.
A stamper then packs in the garbage.
Mattresses are used like a sponge
to sop up anything left over.
When we have garbage on the floor,
it will take anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes
to load a container.
Once the Department of Sanitation
seals a container and slides it out to the dock,
responsibility then goes to Covanta.
The waste-to-energy company
handles two marine transfer stations in the city.
Containers are picked up by the crane and put
on the barge. Forty-eight containers go on the barge.
Every one of these containers represents a truckload
that we've taken off of the city streets
and out of the tunnels,
reducing carbon emissions and reducing congestion
and wear and tear on the city's infrastructure.
A tug attaches to the loaded trash barge.
Tug captain Jason Harris is now in charge.
He gets the go ahead for a 9:30 a.m. departure.
What you see here is called Hell's Gate.
This is the upper end of the East River.
Tides play a major factor in the times
that we can transfer barges.
You can't go against the tide.
When it max tide, it's too strong.
We would actually come to a dead stop
on this boat and barge.
You wait until you can go with it.
Quite often, a barge gets filled up
and we will have to wait two, three,
maybe four hours before the tide is in the favor.
He navigates this heavy load safely
along one of the busiest waterways in the world,
down the East River, through New York Harbor
to Staten Island.
Three hours later, the tug and barge
back up into the Global Transfer Station.
It is an inherently dangerous operation
to move heavy equipment overhead.
Then a train takes it
to one of Covanta's waste-to-energy facilities.
It can also get there via truck.
All of Manhattan's residential trash
goes to waste-to-energy facilities like this one
to be burned and turned into electricity.
This facility processes
up to a million tons of waste annually.
Once the trucks scale in
and come up to the tipping floor,
they dump in front of one of these bays.
Tractors push the trash
into a massive storage pit
93 feet deep and 270 feet long.
Between 8,000 and 9,000 tons are in the refuse pit.
It's about three to four days' worth of trash.
A giant grapple claw
descends over the trash.
In one swoop, it can pick up
as much as one trash truck carries.
The claw builds a wall of trash
to prevent it from avalanching onto the tipping floor.
It also helps to make more space for incoming refuse.
I do look at garbage a very different way
since I've been working here.
We create a lot of garbage as a population.
Two claws work together in tandem,
dumping trash into hoppers leading to the incinerator.
Romeo's an expert giant claw operator.
There is no shortage of fuel for our boilers.
"Toy Story" is the first thing everyone thinks of.
Disney actually got inspiration
for the "Toy Story 3" incinerator sequence
from a Covanta plant.
The incinerators burn the trash at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
It takes one to two hours to burn an entire hopper load.
We have now entered the control room area of the plant.
Yes it is.
And here's your brain.
He's got camera views of the combustion zone.
How important am I?
I am the guy.
He's in the hot seat.
Russell monitors as the furnace heats up steam,
turning this turbine and generating enough energy
to power this plant and 46,000 homes in the region.
After everything's burned,
all that's left over is ash and metal.
This magnet pulls off enough metal to make 21,000 cars.
The leftover ash goes to cover landfills.
Next, the plant tackles those nasty fumes
that burning trash causes.
First, leftover gases go through a scrubber reactor.
A lime slurry cleans any acid gases.
And activated carbon absorbs pollutants.
Then it goes through a baghouse,
basically a bunch of filters.
So what's left coming out of that smokestack?
Constituents of the flue gas is what's in normal air,
like nitrogen, carbon dioxide, moisture.
The alternative to this would be going to a landfill.
Waste-to-energy does produce CO2 emissions,
but in a year, this process eliminates a million tons
of CO2 emissions a landfill would have produced.
We generate a very small amount of methane.
The methane we offset from a landfill
results in an actual decrease of CO2 emissions.
The city hopes to keep moving trash on waterways
to facilities like this one.
It's all part of its goal of becoming
zero-waste-to-landfill by 2030.
But that is becoming harder and harder to reach.
Only about 30% of New York City's waste turns into energy.
The rest ends up in harmful methane-producing landfills
as far away as South Carolina and Ohio.
And it takes a significant investment to move it.
Every year, exporting trash
costs the city about $400 million.
So why does New York City send its trash so far away?
In 1881, New York City streets
were notoriously filthy.
So dirty, people were getting sick.
So the Department of Sanitation was established
to clean up the streets.
And the department did help mop up the city.
But the city quickly ran out of room
to put all of its trash.
In the early 1900s,
the city turned to dumping trash into the ocean.
Even though it was illegal,
as much as 80% of the city's trash ended up in the sea.
This continued until 1934,
when a Supreme Court case forced the city
to stop ocean dumping.
In the '70s, incinerators used for much of the 1900s
were closed down because they didn't meet
the EPA's clean air standards.
So the city opened up landfills across the five boroughs,
including at one point the world's largest.
In 1973, New York even built out Lower Manhattan
using trash mounds.
But even that wasn't enough.
With nowhere else to put it,
the city began sending its waste to other states.
Most of the landfills in this area
have been closed down,
so the available landfills
are getting further and further away.
Exporting trash is a costly practice
with a big environmental footprint.
And it puts the burden on communities
far from these shiny skyscrapers.
For now, New York City's only choice
is to keep exporting the trash.
But ultimately, the department says the best solution
would be getting New Yorkers to waste less altogether.
Trash is like one of those things
that you put it outside and forget about it.
I think everybody should know what happens
to what they get rid of.
If you know where it's going
and then you don't like where it's going,
maybe you'll find ways to recycle things.
I would never take anything home
because my wife wouldn't allow it.
But, there will be a but there,
if I see something that's "Star Wars,"
I'm going to look for it,
and if it's good, I'm going to take it home.