In seminar this week we discussed the consequence of the use of incinerators in New York City. For one, the amount ash from the incinerators was quite large and took up a great amount of room in landfills. The gases released from the incinerators also were quite harmful for everyone in the city. Although the municipal incinerators did damage, the worst was the sheer number of incinerators in apartment buildings. Even though the incinerators are no longer in use, they are still affecting the city. It seems amazing the damage these machines can cause in just a short time seems impossible. In just over 40 years over 12,000 tons of particulate matter was emitted, damaging both the environment and the body.
We also discussed the survey done on youths in New York to study the amount particulate emissions on an average student. The discovery was that students who have long commutes to school inhale a significantly higher amount of toxic pollutants than students who have short commutes. This is due to the high amount of steel that is released in subway stations. There are many ways that this problem could be fixed. For one, the MTA can change the wheels on the subway to a difference substance so the wheels do not cause friction releasing the steel particles into the air. Another option is to add more ventilation into subway terminals so the particles can release into open air instead of staying contained in the tiny space. A last option is to add a glass barrier between the subway and the platform. Many cities in other countries have such things such as London. Not only does this add protection from commenters falling onto the tracks, it also will keep the particles from releasing into the terminal. Something really should be done. As a commuter who takes the subway almost everyday, I do not like to think that my commute could be slowly damaging my lungs. I have to take the subway in order to get around so there is no way of avoiding inhaling the steel. I would much rather the MTA do something in order to protect the people.
We also discussed in class this week Landfills and Brownfills and what they are made of. An important part of keeping accurate records about the contents of Landfills and Brownfills is so public policy is directed in order to keep waste low. If accurate records were not kept correctly certain laws would never have been passed such as the deposit laws.
I thought the refuse composition contents over the certain years were very interesting. One of the percentages that interested me the most was the decrease in ash from 1905 to 1989. It is quite amazing to see how quickly the American population adjusted to electricity and completely gave up the old methods of keeping heat and light. Obviously this progression was bound to happen but in just 34 years, the amount of ash deposited dropped by just under 40%. A percentage that confused me however was that of glass. I would like to know why there was a sudden increase in 1971 and then a decline in 1989.
I was disgusted by the amount of waste humans throw into landfills. In 2004 millions of tons of garbage was just thrown away without any thought of where it will go and how it will affect our future. I am most disgusted by the sheer number of diapers thrown away. 3,470,000 tons of diapers in just one year are too many. Not only is that disgusting, but also wasteful. They never decompose and just stay in landfills forever. Gross.

New York City has an exceptional system for tracking the waste of its industries and residents. It can keep track of what gets thrown out and where it goes. It knows what can be recycled and which materials decay safely. It knows what industries and activities produce toxic and persistent chemicals that could maim people and damage the environment.  It just doesn’t put this that knowledge to as much good use as it could.

That’s the problem with most of the world. We have all the information at our fingertips. We have opportunities to reverse the trend—sometimes they’re even shoved in front of us by others. We know what we can do better. We just don’t do it. Instead of taking our plastic bottle home to recycle it, we throw it wherever is convenient. Instead of packing our own lunch, we eat at McDonald’s. Instead of buying solar panels, we buy a third plasma-screen television. Cultural norms in the West today emphasize instant gratification whenever possible, and this leads to a huge system of efficient wastefulness. Today’s norms emphasize convenience, and this leads to laziness—or, to put it more kindly, to a general sense that things that require a little more work to get aren’t worth the effort. And, despite cultural norms that claim to appreciate independence and individuality, most people still continue to do as the majority does—whether it means “forgetting” to recycle, not thinking about the long-term consequences of their actions or simply not caring.

When it comes to the environment, this boils down to soiled disposable diapers floating in the Rio de Janeiro. We know that there is no way to recycle these things—they will persist for ages to come. Their numbers will keep growing, unless: a) people stop having babies altogether, or b) people start using cloth or biodegradable diapers. What stuns me is the fact that their mass production and use ever started. What dumbfounds me is how today, having had decades to ruminate the consequences, people have still not done anything to stop or reverse this trend.

Didn’t the inventors stop to think that there would eventually be mountains upon mountains of used diapers with nowhere to go? Did they maybe imagine they could be used to build out the coasts of Manhattan or San Francisco? Did they hope that somebody would eventually shoot them into the Sun, or find something else to do with them? Did they just forget that the Earth does not expand into infinity and that everything produced takes up some more of its finite space? Or did they not bother to consider any of these possibilities, deciding that they didn’t care, or that—despite creating it—the problem was not their responsibility to solve?

The data is at our hands, along with the wherewithal to improve things. We can begin to turn our ship away from the iceberg whenever we feel like it—even if it’s only by fractions of a degree at a time. So why does change drag its feet? It goes back to the way that people think, and what they value. If cultural norms insist that something—a lifestyle, a tradition—is right, then not many people will easily believe that anything is wrong with it, however harmful it is. People might not see a reason for change. Why should a faraway coastline be more important than your ability to change diapers as quickly, cheaply and easily as possible? Why should anything be more important than doing those annoying day-to-day tasks of living as quickly, cheaply and easily as possible?

The city of New York has laws meant to prevent toxins from infiltrating the environment and people’s lives. Carbon filters and dumping regulations have certainly helped curb pollution and improve quality of life, but it’s hard to imagine that these timely developments would’ve happened at the hands of corporations. And, whenever there are violations—as, unfortuanetely, there are—, the corporations make their excuses. My favorite so far:

EPA: These ponds have 20x the level of benzene deemed legally safe!                                         Exxon Mobile: . . . No they don’t.

And, whatever their profits are, one of their common excuses involves corporations pointing out that it is their honor-bound duty to provide the consumers with what they want—quickly, cheaply, and easily.

Quick. Cheap. Easy. Are these qualities all that we, as a society, as a world, value? We need to reflect upon what we, as human beings, want out of life, and decide carefully.

Harmful emissions and waste plague our world especially here in New York City.  Each year a huge amount of waste is produced by every person in the world, and with a population of over 20 million, those in New York City have faced an issue of overflowing waste since the Dutch came in the 17^th century.  With so many people producing so much waste each year, the question begs, what to do with all of it?  At first, landfills seemed to be a hugely effective means of recycling waste, Battery Park being accredited to large amounts of landfilling throughout the 17^th and 18^th centuries.  As discussed in class, as waste levels increased, incinerators became the common means of destroying waste.  In theory I agree with this plan, without the need for more landfills, burning huge piles of garbage seems like the best way to reduce space taken up by filth.  As eleven municipal refuse incinerators were built by the end of the 60’s, and 700 cities using those municipal incinerators by the late 1930’s, it seems as if the general belief was similar to mine own back then.  Matter cannot be destroyed, but rather only altered, so the incinerators only change the form of garbage, in essence making garbage easier to breathe, in everyday life.  This is the flaw in the practice with these eleven municipal incinerators up until they were all removed in the 90’s.  My parent’s apartment building shows its age with the incinerator still present, yet inactive.  Unlike the general consensus I felt last class, I do not believe that incinerators should not be used.  It is very possible I am just ignorant to all of the facts, but my goal is to change this so please correct me if I am wrong.  All the harmful emissions out of incinerators were unknown to the populations of the day when the incinerators were being constructed.  Today we have a much larger wealth of information on the subject, and as I am to understand, filters placed in the stacks would eliminate the particulate matter that gets blown to Ohio when we burn our garbage here in New York.  I understand that the garbage itself can never be destroyed, but is rather converted into smoke and trapped in the filters, so the filters still remain with all of the harmful PMs, so there is still a physical remainder of the garbage.  Is that garbage not made significantly more manageable?  My question is why there is an uproar over incinerators if they have the potential to largely shrink the amount of physical garbage in the city?  With tens of thousands of waste produced by Americans each year, would it not make sense to reduce the 26, 800, 000 tons of food for instance, into a stack of filters much smaller in size and mass?  While investigating this idea, the numbers shock me, and what worries me most is the plastics portion of the graph displayed in class.  Plastics are one of the few numbers that showed a sharp increase, with potential to continue at the same rate.  In addition to the more recent prevalence of plastics, plastics themselves are extremely complicated chemically, and I wonder how one would break down five million tons for instance of glass and plastic bottles each year.  The danger with burning plastic is also worrisome, but should there not be a filter for that?  The past week in class has already changed my outlook on the way I live, and I can already sense a change in the ways I recycle and what I use that must be disposed of.  This week I feel a little less ignorant than I did the week before.

I’m really starting to question if there is nearly any part of my life isn’t slowly killing myself, my generation, my children’s generations or their children’s generations. If you had asked me a month ago if eating fish from the Hudson River was a good idea I’d probably be sensible enough to guess that it probably isn’t, but the thought that even taking the subway is doing my body damage seems beyond what I could have imagined possible. New York, and maybe even just first world culture altogether, seems so filled with peril around every bend that it makes me question if anything can really be done. It seems that all of the foundation to which we built our society atop was faulty, and as it slowly disintegrates those particles are building up, giving us cancer and slowly killing us right under our noses. Our every day lives function because of how effortless it is to ignore these problems and in part it probably is a factor to why our society has been so successful. We don’t worry about our trash, energy, cars or food, and because of that we have more time for other matters; even if caring about these issues will impact the rest of our lives and the lives of those long after us.

I’m starting to think change isn’t even worth striving for because the scale of the change necessary to truly fix things seems so utterly impossible. Some of the most basic ideology our country was founded on, steadfast doctrines we Americans swear by such as private property, and consumerism and capitalism simply don’t seem to be achievable in a world that truly addresses all the dangers to the environment present in our society. While the 99% can continue their lives blissfully ignorant of the damage that is being done to them there will always be someone there to take an advantage of them and the environment. The simple truth is that unless an issue can so impact a person that it changes their daily life, the average person will simply go about their day without dealing with it. The only way for things to really change would be from a universal change of attitude across the population or an acceptance that these issues are not simply the ramblings of radicals and intellectuals, but rather serious dangers to everyone; neither however seems even remotely likely.

I do feel privileged taking this class knowing that I am less ignorant than the masses but my complete lack of ability to make any difference leaves me just frustrated and disheartened. I’ve tried explaining some of the issues discussed in class to friends, and when I bring up brownfields, air pollutants or PCBs, their response is nearly always a resounding “…so?” People my age would rather discuss nearly anything than these matters, and in the twitter generation I am a part of that is becoming the absolute norm. When I brought these issues up to my parents and older relatives they at least knew what I was talking about, but even then I doubt any of them ever took action to stop these problems and truthfully they came from a different era where attention spans could last longer than 10 seconds. In 2012 if you ever don’t want to address a problem and clear your head, it’s as simple as jumping on your smart phone and seeing what 140 characters your favorite celebrity felt the need to broadcast to the planet; that is not a mindset to tackle these kinds of issues with. I can’t seem to find any audience in my friends over these issues and I’m still yet to find a way that I can make an impact beyond signing an occasional petition I see online and trying to be more conscious of my power usage and recycling. I just feel like my hands are tied. Truly I can’t wait for the later part of the course where I can try to figure out how to make an impact because right now I just feel really quite powerless.

In the previous class, we left off wondering what the possible source of Central Park’s lead levels was. Since it was not the leaded gasoline, as originally thought, researchers pinpointed it to New York City’s use of incinerators. As elated as they might have felt in finding the source of NYC’s lead pollution, what was the point? Incinerators were stopped years ago. This research didn’t solve any problems of today, so what was the idea behind trying to find out why? This requires a small digression into NYC’s trash management and the New Bedford case study.

Getting rid of our waste and garbage has been a ubiquitous and constant problem for cities and villages alike. As cities grow, they sought cheap and effective means of getting rid of the garbage. Rivers were used to dump sewage until reports in the mid-19^th century showed that waste would build up downstream. Then incinerators were used to burn any trash that could be burned until reports showed that airborne pollutants are released when trash is burned. Now landfills are used but research has shown that some plastics are leeched into the ground and could contaminate ground soil.

What is important about NYC’s trash management records is how accurate they are. They have recorded how much and what kinds of trash are thrown out annually. Over the course of decades, the introduction, drop off, and general flux in consumption of goods can be seen in what is thrown out. The introduction of breakout products (the nylon stocking, the disposable diaper, etc.) can be seen in the landfills like layers of sediment at the bottom of a lakebed. But again, there is question, why does it matter?

The New Bedford case study illuminates a number of key points to understand. History is important, and this cannot be emphasized enough. Before any action can be taken to undergo treatment of the environment, it is important to understand how the present state of the environment came to be. The case study of New Bedford shows us how damage to the environment is rarely caused by a one-time incident. New Bedford, like many American cities, underwent a number of changes over the course of time. From agriculture, to whaling, to textiles, to industry, each phase of New Bedford presented another new problem to the environment. An environmental issue is rarely an “accident” in the strictest sense of the word but a result of continuous, lasting, and detrimental actions. By pleading ignorance, it is easier for us to call them “accidents.” The inability to fish in New Bedford was not the result of a singular cause, but the result of a combination of sewage, PCBs, and industrial waste.

The Central Park study, the NYC waste management records, and the New Bedford case study show the importance of knowledge and history. History provides context for the issues of today; it allows us to make informed decisions of what does and what does not work; lastly, it shows just how fragile our environment is. Every action we have taken can still be seen within the layers beneath.

Now after seeing what happens when companies are given the freedom to do what they want without significant penalties, we’ve moved on to policy with regards to public services and the public itself.

We began the discussion with an overview of trash incinerators. I hadn’t realized that this type of waste disposal was at one point so common, but it makes sense. Incinerators are evidently small and cheap enough to install in every apartment building, and conveniently decrease the quantity of waste for ultimate disposal in a landfill. In addition, ash doesn’t attract rats or other pets.

But over the last half century, health standards have risen, requiring expensive new air filters for them to remain operational. As a result, incinerators have fallen out of favor (and of course this explains the historical drop in lead levels, not the end of leaded gasoline).

But not all of them have been closed – the largest in the US continues to operate under the guise of being a power plant. From the video we watched, it seems that the Detroit incinerator survived due to the side-benefit of power production, as well as being cheaper in the short run for the city. Although a long-run alternative to the incinerator might be cheaper and more productive for Detroit, it would require setting up landfills and recycling programs, and generally disrupt the status quo for a city with few resources.

In addition, the operators of the incinerator certainly stand to lose if it is shut down – and they’ve had twenty years to influence members of the city government. This seems like a situation where the state or federal government should provide loans to invest in a greener form of disposal, but nothing will be done unless the city government decides it wants to make the change.

In a similar vein, the MTA makes little note of studies suggesting a link between time in subway platforms and steel particle exposure. The administrators of the MTA know that even if they convince the NYC government to give them money to improve health standards, announcing this new-found risk of riding the subway could decrease ridership. Such an event , even if it wasn’t economically bad for the city, would decrease revenues to the MTA and ultimately might force them to reduce pay or downsize. So employees to the institution have a vested interest in keeping ridership high.

So government as well as business is susceptible to corruption and short-sightedness, but only because both of these institutions are made up of people. Most people are much more focused on their day-to-day existence than in saving the earth. Even more than that, because each person contributes such in such a small way to the whole of human waste production, it’s incredibly hard to assign personal responsibility to the decision to throw out a soda can or hold onto it the entire walk home.

So the can/bottle deposit is an example of good government. It presents an incentive to recycle, where before it was a matter of personal satisfaction. Although the value of the deposit has gone down with inflation, it is still high enough to be economically viable. We talked about how the destitute collect recyclables from trash cans, but I know from personal experience that some businesses do recycling explicitly for the deposit as well. Something I’m going to look into soon is how much the proportion of cans and bottles that are turned in for a deposit has changed over time.

            We never really think about what happens to our garbage; we just throw it into the garbage bins and it gets taken away.I remember one of the earliest times that I ever considered what happens with what we throw away. It was when my father took me to a local landfill on Long Island that had been partially converted into a park. We used to go crabbing there and I had always thought that it was incredible that the big hill I was standing on was made of garbage. In retrospect, it seems almost ironic that they used a landfill to create something that promotes environmental awareness like a park does. However putting a nice little park over the landfill does little to alleviate the growing problem of our garbage accumulation.

In my personal family, we try to limit our garbage use. My dad lives by the philosophy that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. He not only saves our own junk to refurbish and reuse but also gathers what other people are throwing out. All of my family’s bicycles are bicycles that my dad recovered from other people’s trash. My dad also always had my sisters and I gather our family’s glass bottles and aluminum cans and return them at our grocery store so we could get the deposit back. My grandparents would have a compost and save their food garbage to use to make soil for their plants. There are many different ways to try and reuse items to limit our consumption of goods and creation of garbage.

At work I see the other end of the spectrum. I work at two different jobs in the food service industry and it is apparent that ridiculous amounts of garbage are generated in this industry. Not only is all half-eaten food thrown out, but all food that is made by mistake, left out, old, or tainted is as well. At the end of night I am left taking out bag after bag of garbage. Also neither of my jobs has an adequate recycling program. I am always left throwing out numerous bottles and cans. Also at each of jobs, one employee has tried to collect the recyclables themselves but it has been unfeasible for one person to collect that many bottles and cans and they have given up. On a related note, my mother works as a nurse in the neonatal ICU ward and can confirm the sheer amount of diapers that are thrown out each day. She also says that she has witnessed many parents swear they are going to use cloth diapers either for environmental reasons or to save money, only to give up later once they realized what exactly cloth diapers entail and how often newborns have to go to the bathroom. She has yet to see anyone stick with cloth diapers yet.

I think that the biggest issue when it comes to environment is what to do with our wastes. We have learned that our toxic wastes pollute or breathing air and drinking water, while our material wastes are taking up and dirtying our space. As our population grows, the amount of waste we generate will only grow as well. I think more should be done to encourage recycling or even composting so food and other waste that would decompose easily can be dealt with in a more environmentally sound way. It seems strange that if New York City is able to keep detailed accounts of what garbage was thrown out that they couldn’t then separate this garbage to recycle what could be recycled.

I like how the last lectures were about the issue of trash. I feel this issue directly relates to us then the PCBs in the Hudson River issue did, for instance, because we are the ones generating the trash. We are the ones contributing to the issue. Of course, we have no choice. What would we do with all of our wastes, then? Right now there are the two options: the landfills or the incinerators.

I would like to say thank God for no more incinerators! The 12,000 tons of particulate matter released every year during the 1930s-1970s would have surely given us all cancer by now if it was allowed to continue. It’s interesting though that incinerators are still around in some areas. Well in actuality, Detroit doesn’t call it an incinerator, but what else would it be? They’re burning trash the same way incinerators did decades ago. Detroit is in debt and the “incinerator” is a good way to make some profit for the city, but the city should take more responsibility of its people and think of new ways for waste disposal. It is known that particulate matter can be an immediate danger to people when exposed.

Which is why I found the case study of particulate emissions in NYC so very interesting. They were trying to determine the Fe/Mn ratio, and instead found a ratio of 104- for steel. So everyday I take the train in order to go to class and I am consistently exposed to steel thanks to the train braking, causing friction and releasing steel dust. But honestly this is not going to stop me from taking the train. How else would I go from the very tip of Manhattan to the Upper East Side every morning? I already walk a few train stops in order to get exercise, but to walk the whole ride would be outrageous.

Speaking of the tip of Manhattan, though, I always loved the fact that I live on garbage! I just hope it’s not diapers. And I am still stunned at the fact that almost 15% of refuse composition in homes are made up of diapers. I would like to think that maybe we can decrease that number, but what are we going to make the mothers do? Go back to cloth? We released them from that burden and as mothers they shouldn’t be given more burdens to deal with- raising a child is enough! But diapers are quite difficult to get rid of due to their chemical complexity, and that is the problem with the majority of waste today. Through time, a lot of our products are chemically complex in order to give us instant gratification, and of course that results in a huge issue with waste disposal. No more ash thanks to a switch in fuel means we don’t know how to build out land, but can we try out plastic? I actually like the sound of that, but I just find it difficult to imagine. There was so much ash (80%) leftover to make land out of it, and there isn’t as much plastic nowadays compared to that number (10%). But let’s just say we keep all of the wastes at landfills. The one shown in the video at Florida seemed very close to the city: what effects will that have on it? There must be issues already, especially for those who are working there directly, like the truck drivers. I would assume if it ever reached its peak of 193 feet high, the wastes at the bottom must have dug into the soil and reached water, causing quite an effect on the city and everyone in it. But that’s not going to stop the use of landfills. I can only think of one sure-fire way to get rid of our wastes: send it off into space! If only.