The New York Times reported that 3 workers died today at a waste transfer plant in Jamaica, Queens. They went into an 18 foot deep hole filled with 4 feet of sewage decomposing anaerobically and giving off so much hydrogen sulfide that it killed the workers. "According to state records, the commercial plant is run by M. & P. Reali Enterprises, doing business as the Regal Recycling Company. A man who answered the phone at the plant said the company had no immediate comment." The NYT did some pretty lazy investigating to report these rather unglamorous deaths that are a cost of our throw-away economy. Shouldn't we care that the way that we have chosen to deal with human waste (modern plumbing and chemical water treatment) leads to us having 18 foot holes full of toxic sewage in our city's peripherial, low-income, predominantly minority neighborhoods?
These fumes were the result of a waste management infrastructure that is trying to cover up the ecological realities of decomposition because the scale of NYC's waste is way too massive for any ecosystem nearby to digest. NYC's sewer system is so poorly built that even a minor rain event will overflow the drainage culvert into the sewage culvert, part of a system called "combined overflow". The two mix together and pour out into the city's waterways as water infused with petrochemical residues from the streets and untreated sewage. On a dry day, the sewage would make its way to a treatment facility. Probability would have it end up at the NYAFCO plant in Hunt's Point, which chemically treats 70 percent of New York City's effluent waste. Finding info online about NYAFCO is pretty hard, similar to the elusive waste transfer station in Queens. It would be hard for them to put up a snazy website like Monsanto, where they cover up the systemic messes they make with photos of smiling kids with dark skin who benefitted from some Monsanto funded community development project.
To mention the systemic messes breifly, I taught fourth graders in a classroom a quarter mile from the NYAFCO plant for two years. It smelled like feces in my classroom as my students took their high-stakes state tests that determine whether the school gets federal funding or gets shut down. This is an example of society literally shitting on low-income students of color, denying them access to the excellent education that their wealthier, whiter, more suburban peers have. I do not think it is a coincidence that the neighborhood with the largest waste treatment plant in the city has some of the city's lowest test scores. As Majora Carter (who founded Sustainable South Bronx) puts it, if industrial polluters were operating in neighborhoods like the Upper East Side, which is 88 percent white and has a per capita income of $85K, the green movement would have cleaned up industry long ago. In fact it did. Something New Under the Sun by John Robert McNeil talks about American cities in the early 20th Century pushing their industrial factories, especially coal, out of the city limits. Back then, the effects of pollution were immediately visible to people. Soot from coal hovered over the city, coating everything, and causing people to get sick and die. Today, environmental justice is about race and class because the people most affected by industrial pollution are the people of color living in the areas with low property values.
As far as trash, we need mechanical, chemical, and dangerous, exploitive labor solutions to bottle it up, pipe and truck it away from the eyes of the people who created it. NYC trucks 600 tractor trailers full of trash every day out of the city to landfills as far away as Michigan. That is a line of trucks 9 miles long every day! If NYC had a comprehensive composting program, that costly, environmentally destructive, and deadly pipeline of trash would be cut in half.
New York has some work to do to descend from this zenith of consumption and waste. We can start by not collecting our putrescent wastes in toxic cesspools that actually kill the people that have to go into the pools and drain them.
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