<
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/02/upshot/nyc-trash-rules.html>
"Consider the ubiquitous New York trash bag. It tears. It leaks. It smells. It
multiplies on the sidewalk, attracting carryout clamshells and still-full
coffee cups tossed on top until it all melds into a sticky mess. That mess
feeds rats, blocks sidewalks and spills into the street. Then it strains the
sanitation workers who must move every bag by hand into a trash truck, as testy
drivers honk behind them.
Conversely, if the city could just tame all of this garbage, New York might be
transformed.
The Sanitation Department has vowed to do this, shifting the bulk of New York’s
waste out of sloppy sidewalk piles and into containers in a manner more closely
resembling that of other American cities and global capitals. The prospect has
prompted much snickering: New York’s big idea to clean up trash is to … put it
in trash bins? Like other cities have done … for decades?
(It’s not lost on the Sanitation Department that the city is a punchline: “This
was our moon landing,” the agency posted self-deprecatingly on X when video of
its newly unveiled trash truck was shared widely last month.)
But the details of how this might be done in New York turn on a number of
deeper and more difficult questions about the city itself: Where, exactly, do
you carve out space for an essential city service in a place with so little
space left? How should the city dole out what has become its most contested
public asset, the curb space in the street? Would New Yorkers give up parking
to clean up the trash?
These questions are about no less than the dilemma of a truly dense city, where
anything that demands its own space means something else must give."
Via
Fix the News:
<
https://fixthenews.com/goodnews-meals-brazil-rewild-denmark-mangroves-pakistan/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
