(opening music)
- [Narrator] New Yorkers generate 12,000 tons of trash
each and every day.
Much of that trash ends up in bags ready to be picked up
by the city's 8,000 municipal sanitation workers.
But where does it go from there?
Recyclables get separated out,
sent to recovery facilities and, well, recycled.
The rest of the garbage ends up in two places.
About 30% gets incinerated in waste-to-energy facilities.
Picture that scene from Toy Story, but in real life.
The rest end up in landfills.
Some of of those landfills are in upstate New York,
no surprise,
but some of the trash also ends up on trains
and shipped to landfills
as far away as Pennsylvania, Ohio,
Virginia, and South Carolina.
Why is New York sending trash hundreds of miles away?
Why can't it do what it used to do,
which is use the trash to create new land for itself
or simply dump it in the ocean
with no plans to add apartment buildings on top?
Well, as it turns out, oceans aren't a good place for trash,
which we'll discuss more in a minute.
Landfills are better, but they have some issues
that make them incompatible with being very close to cities,
and when I say issues, I mostly mean smells.
Trash stinks, and trash in landfills continues to stink
as materials decompose.
This decomposition can generate methane, carbon dioxide,
and sulfur gases that contribute to a general rotting smell.
When the wind picks up, it can carry these gases miles away.
In high concentrations, the smell can get so bad,
people don't wanna leave their homes.
Landfills can reduce smells
by capturing gases and burning them.
Some will also generate electricity from the gases.
Dumping soil on top of the newly deposited trash,
or misting the trash with water, can reduce smells, too.
But landfills just don't work
within populated parts of major metropolitan areas.
An ideal site will be located far from population centers,
away from seismic fault zones, and flood zones.
Landfills can't be near airports, as they attract birds.
The best location for landfills
are expansions to existing ones,
as local opposition to building an entirely new landfill
is higher than simply expanding an existing one.
This may be part of the reason why New York ships its trash
as far away as South Carolina.
It can be difficult for a city the size of New York
to find enough suitable sites for landfills
within close proximity.
But landfills in South Carolina
willingly take the city's trash because its a moneymaker.
New York pays the Lee County Landfill
a $112 per ton to dispose trash there.
And hundreds of thousands of tons of New York's trash,
we found in that one landfill.
There is a major downside
of shipping that trash out of state, and that's cost.
There's the monetary cost, but also the environmental cost.
Shipping the trash essentially adds
to its negative environmental impact.
For both of these reasons,
most cities, ones without 8 million or so people in them,
generally deposit their trash in landfills
closer than New York does,
though ideally far enough away to minimize smells.
No matter where the landfills are,
it's not great to be sending any waste there.
New York has an ambitious goal
to send zero waste to landfills in 2030,
which, in addition to reducing trash,
would also save the city money and reduce emissions.
The city, as well as cities around the world,
are also looking into pneumatic tubes to transport waste,
including recycling and food scraps,
from homes to transfer points,
eliminating the need for garbage trucks.
But eliminating those last mile garbage trucks
reduces the environmental impact of the trash.
Walt Disney World in Florida
and Roosevelt Island in New York City
have had these systems since the 1970s,
and the idea is coming back today.
- Trash moving through a pneumatic tube sounds cool,
but you know what's not cool?
Trash entering our beaches, rivers, lakes, and oceans,
our waterways.
That's why I'm posting this video
and other YouTubers are posting videos,
encouraging you to sign up for the #TeamSeas campaign
and make a donation.
$1 raised equals 1 pound of trash removed
and the goal is $30 million or 30 million pounds removed.
#TeamSeas is teamed up with organizations
to make this happen,
and every dollar you donate goes directly to the cause
so consider donating.
Go to teamseas.org or click a link in the description.
And if you can't donate, consider doing your part
to keep plastic and trash out of our waterways
by recycling or using less plastic in the first place.
Thanks a lot.