Speaker 1: Hey, it's Alec Baldwin here. Before we launch our next
Speaker 1: season of Here's the Thing at iHeartRadio in January, I
Speaker 1: thought i'd play some of my favorite shows from the archives.
Speaker 1: Next up is Pam Alardo, former Deputy Commissioner of the
Speaker 1: Bureau of Wastewater Treatment in New York City. I enjoyed
Speaker 1: talking with her about what happens to all the water
Speaker 1: that goes down the drain in New York. Also joining
Speaker 1: us is Ron Gonan, former Deputy Commissioner of Sanitation, Recycling
Speaker 1: and Sustainability aka New York City's first recycling Czar. Enjoy
Speaker 1: my conversation with Pam Alardo and Ron Gonan. This is
Speaker 1: Alec Baldwin, and you were listening to Here's the Thing
Speaker 1: from iHeart Radio. Think about how much waste you generate
Speaker 1: every day. The advil bottle, the styrofoam tray for your chicken,
Speaker 1: the chicken bone, the toilet, paper tissues, and paper towels
Speaker 1: you consume. We're about to get dirty here, so think
Speaker 1: of the human waste too. Now multiply that by eight
Speaker 1: point five million for all of New York City. That's
Speaker 1: one point three billion gallons of wastewater every day. Sixteen
Speaker 1: million pounds of trash eight million pounds of recyclables every.
Speaker 2: Day of every week.
Speaker 1: Today you'll hear from two of the best people tackling
Speaker 1: all that waste after the break. New York City's first
Speaker 1: recyclings are but first. Pam Alardo a big name in sewage.
Speaker 1: Since last year, she's led New York City's Bureau of
Speaker 1: Wastewater Treatment. Mayor Deblasio poached her from Seattle, where she
Speaker 1: spearheaded an unprecedented upgrade of that city's wastewater treatment infrastructure.
Speaker 1: Why'd you leave Seattle to come here?
Speaker 3: Great question?
Speaker 4: Do you ever look at your life as an older
Speaker 4: person and you kind of look at your life as
Speaker 4: a third party? Like that wasn't me. But I'm observing
Speaker 4: it right, And there's a few things that are foreshadowing.
Speaker 4: Like I my both my brothers at one time another
Speaker 4: lived in Manhattan, and so I would visit New York frequently, Yeah,
Speaker 4: a couple once or twice a year, and I would come,
Speaker 4: I would land, I would have a great time.
Speaker 3: I'd be thinking about Holy Cow.
Speaker 4: I can't imagine what it'd be like to work in
Speaker 4: New York City with just think about all the pipes
Speaker 4: under the street.
Speaker 3: It's crazy. And I would take a tour on the Hudson.
Speaker 4: I would see one of the treatment plants is on
Speaker 4: the Hudson up by Harlem, be like, wow, that's a
Speaker 4: treatment plant.
Speaker 3: It's huge.
Speaker 4: And then I would get on a plane and I
Speaker 4: would fly back to Seattle and go, oh my god,
Speaker 4: I don't have any problems here.
Speaker 3: This is easy. There's there's no comparison.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 4: And in Seattle I did great and I plateaued at
Speaker 4: the top of my game.
Speaker 3: In the wastewater world.
Speaker 1: There would you one of the Killiman Jarro of wastewater Treatments.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah you.
Speaker 3: Are, Yeah, the kill him and Jaro of waste Mount Everest.
Speaker 4: Maybe because you know, I used to work in the pall,
Speaker 4: so that's kind of where I got my appreciation for
Speaker 4: the value of wastewater. In Peace Corps experience. Actually, children
Speaker 4: don't make it to their fifth birthdays or their twelfth
Speaker 4: birthdays often because of the amount of disease that's out there.
Speaker 4: And that's you know, it makes me take my job
Speaker 4: seriously because we do save lives every day people, you know,
Speaker 4: controlling sanitation, controlling disease that comes from sanitation, that's not
Speaker 4: handled properly is what we do and it's the fundamental
Speaker 4: reason why we enjoy the quality of life we have.
Speaker 4: Fact in point, British Medical Journal did a study in
Speaker 4: two thousand and seven about They interviewed hundreds of doctors
Speaker 4: what is the biggest medical breakthrough in the laste hundred
Speaker 4: and fifty years? What came on top sanitation. It's responsible
Speaker 4: for extending lives. It's the biggest reason why, really we
Speaker 4: have the kind of quality of healthcare throughout the world,
Speaker 4: and living in places where that didn't exist. Talking to
Speaker 4: parents whose children died because of dysentery or other diseases
Speaker 4: that come from lack of wastewater, you know, that's what
Speaker 4: makes me passionate about this stuff. My goal in life
Speaker 4: is that everyone should know what happens after they flush
Speaker 4: the toilet. Yes, because it is a communal social responsibility,
Speaker 4: environmental environmental, public health, and people don't want to think
Speaker 4: about it.
Speaker 3: They want it to go away and be gone.
Speaker 4: And we have the luxury in this country for it
Speaker 4: to be taken for granted, and it's because we do
Speaker 4: such a great job.
Speaker 1: So by and large, are the systems generally in principle
Speaker 1: in terms of science and so for that engineering, are
Speaker 1: they the same in all major cities where what happens
Speaker 1: to water that goes down a sink, down, a shower,
Speaker 1: a bathtub, a toilet, It all pretty much just managed
Speaker 1: the same way.
Speaker 3: There's there's a variety of technologies. I mean they're that's
Speaker 3: a good one.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 4: Let me just talk about what happens from the beginning
Speaker 4: to the end that might be. So let's say you
Speaker 4: use your toilet. It goes down out of your house
Speaker 4: and then into a local collection line, so there might
Speaker 4: be one down your street, and that'll dump into a
Speaker 4: larger collection system, which is a larger pipe you just
Speaker 4: called it interceptor, and that eventually will take it to
Speaker 4: a wastewater treatment plant. And New York City, for example,
Speaker 4: we have fourteen wastewater treatment plants. We have ninety six
Speaker 4: pumping station big.
Speaker 1: So the pumping stations continue to force the material and
Speaker 1: the liquid and everything whatever's down there down toward.
Speaker 3: The train plant. So we at the tream plant.
Speaker 4: Moving water is expensive and going by gravity is always cheaper.
Speaker 4: So where there's a hill, we take advantage of the hill,
Speaker 4: but at some lower points we always have to elevate
Speaker 4: it and get it back to gravity, so we can
Speaker 4: flow it to the treatment plants. Very expensive the pumping system.
Speaker 4: So when it gets to the treatment plant, the first
Speaker 4: step there is a screen. There are bar screens are
Speaker 4: about half to three quarter inch spacing, and they collect
Speaker 4: trash things that people should not be flushing on the
Speaker 4: toilet like wipes, baby wipes, facial wipes, dental floss.
Speaker 3: All that stuff gets it gets stuck, get stuck.
Speaker 4: And if it weren't trapped there, it's actually on the way.
Speaker 4: It messes up a lot of the pumping systems because
Speaker 4: we have so much of this material, So we take
Speaker 4: it out there. We spend about seven million dollars a
Speaker 4: year just in land filling the trash to people flush.
Speaker 4: And then it goes to some kind of grit removal
Speaker 4: to move remove like sand and chunks of rock, and
Speaker 4: then to a primary sedimentation basin that allow solids, in
Speaker 4: organic solids for the most part that are suspended to
Speaker 4: settle onto the bottom. And it also has skimmers on
Speaker 4: the top that takes grease off the top. So that
Speaker 4: goes to a solid treatment system. And then the next step,
Speaker 4: and this is the fascinating world of biology. The next
Speaker 4: step we use a community of bacteria that actually digests
Speaker 4: the suspended organic material and clean the water.
Speaker 3: Via that method, you're bringing things in that it will consume.
Speaker 4: It is food, right, And from there it goes to
Speaker 4: another settling tank where we settle out the biomass that
Speaker 4: just consumed all this organic matter. But the water that
Speaker 4: comes out of the final settling tank gets disinfection basically
Speaker 4: household bleached to take any particular pathogens out, and that
Speaker 4: gets either discharged to receiving water or in some cases
Speaker 4: in some cities they're able to polish a little bit
Speaker 4: more easy for irrigation purposes, especially in the arid Southwest.
Speaker 1: And you said, what happens to it here?
Speaker 3: What happens to here?
Speaker 4: It gets discharged deeply into the surrounding water bodies after
Speaker 4: getting cleaned up. You might have noticed. And I'm taking
Speaker 4: credit for this, and all the people who work in
Speaker 4: the Bureau of Wastewater Treatment can eighteen hundred people. We
Speaker 4: take credit for the whales coming back because because of
Speaker 4: the work that they do twenty four to seven and
Speaker 4: the experience and skill those whales have been able to
Speaker 4: come back into as.
Speaker 1: Ort of is discharged deep into the neighboring waters, it's
Speaker 1: that clean, very clean. And what about the solids? Where
Speaker 1: were human waste solids? Where does that salid?
Speaker 4: So the solids are basically the bacteria that's settled out
Speaker 4: as well as the solids we collected in the primary basins,
Speaker 4: and that gets thickened and then it goes to a
Speaker 4: anaerobic treatment process.
Speaker 3: So if you're in Brooklyn and you.
Speaker 4: See those big eggs shaped metal eggs, those are actually
Speaker 4: digesters and those are heated to ninety eight degrees and
Speaker 4: within that we're using an anaerobic bacteria, so bacteria that
Speaker 4: live without oxygen, and they'll digest those solids even more.
Speaker 3: And then that is a valuable fertilizer product. So it's
Speaker 3: a very viable product.
Speaker 1: So who sells it?
Speaker 3: It's called bioslids.
Speaker 1: Now in New York's biosolize. Yes, I'm thinking of like
Speaker 1: a conveyor belt, like a giant brownie is coming off there.
Speaker 1: Where does it go?
Speaker 3: Every day?
Speaker 4: About fourteen hundred wet tons we create of biosolids. Now,
Speaker 4: it's no only great because it's a great resource that
Speaker 4: we don't want to waste, but it returns carbon to
Speaker 4: the soil and you actually can run a wastewater treatment
Speaker 4: plant at carbon neutral because of all the carbon benefit,
Speaker 4: we have the sequestration benefit from that bioslids product.
Speaker 1: Now, another thing I think that occurs to me is
Speaker 1: that there's auto mechanics, and there's places where work is
Speaker 1: being done and chemicals of every fashion are being used
Speaker 1: to clean parts and cleaning solvents and motor oil just
Speaker 1: to pick one industry. I'm not even talking about, you know,
Speaker 1: PCBs up the Hudson from ge and the fifty, that
Speaker 1: kind of thing going into the Hudson River. I'm talking
Speaker 1: about right here in New York in restaurants. Every time
Speaker 1: somebody washes their hair, and every time somebody dyes their
Speaker 1: hair in a beauty salon. All this stuff is going
Speaker 1: down the drain. What's the process that removes all those chemicals?
Speaker 4: So some of those chemicals break down very easily. They're
Speaker 4: biodegraded quickly within the plant. They respond to the biological
Speaker 4: conditions within the wastewater plant, and you won't find traces
Speaker 4: of it in the effluent. Some of them break down
Speaker 4: into different types of chemicals, pharmaceuticals, right, you'll get you know,
Speaker 4: people have chemotherapy. You know that waste from their bodies
Speaker 4: might even end up in the treatm plant system, and
Speaker 4: you can't get all that no, and so there are microcontaminants.
Speaker 4: So there is some studies about potentially ecological impacts from
Speaker 4: some of those micro pollutants. We don't see that in
Speaker 4: the scale of New York City. The water bodies here
Speaker 4: are well flushing. If a wastewater chili charging to a
Speaker 4: small lake, for example, you're going to have much stricter
Speaker 4: standards on that end.
Speaker 3: You know, it's interesting. I'm a strong environmentalist.
Speaker 4: I have been my entire life since third grade, as
Speaker 4: a matter of fact, and I care about trying to
Speaker 4: do the best we can by nature and get us
Speaker 4: back to nature the best we can. We live in
Speaker 4: a world that's got plastics and papers and also so
Speaker 4: many things. We're really we're really doing a fantastic job
Speaker 4: and eliminating the risk to the environment into health. And
Speaker 4: as monitoring and chemistry gets better, we can get down
Speaker 4: to lower and lower concentrations and we're going to learn
Speaker 4: a lot more about ways that we can make it better.
Speaker 4: But today we're just miles ahead of where we've been.
Speaker 3: And when I'm.
Speaker 1: Safe to say that it's been about environmentalism for you, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and an environmental environmental work.
Speaker 4: I became an environmentalist in third grade and I'm still environmentalist.
Speaker 4: It kills me now that some environmental groups think I'm
Speaker 4: a polluter. I'm a very practical environmentalist. We've we're spending
Speaker 4: public money. We've got to be good to the dollar
Speaker 4: and make sure that we're doing the most effective way.
Speaker 4: There's not an unlimited amount of money.
Speaker 1: What would you say, what's the Mercedes Benz, what's the
Speaker 1: Rolls Royce of? For lack of a better way of
Speaker 1: putting of wastewater management around the world? Who has a
Speaker 1: Mercedes over us?
Speaker 4: So let me Wastewater treatment, like many things, is an evolution, right.
Speaker 4: The Cadillac version depends on the situation you're in now.
Speaker 4: Back when everybody were farmers and people did not live
Speaker 4: in concentrated cities, it didn't matter that people pooped in
Speaker 4: the field. Use pitler trenes, maybe, no big deal. As
Speaker 4: we started to get closer together, we started to evolve
Speaker 4: techniques for dealing with they well, they had collection systems,
Speaker 4: and prior to the nineteen thirties in New York City
Speaker 4: and prior to probably the nineteen fifties, and even the
Speaker 4: nineteen seventies and the rest of the world. The whole
Speaker 4: driver towards wastewater treatment was to get it from people.
Speaker 4: So they put a pipe in the ground and you
Speaker 4: got it to the nearest water body, and that was
Speaker 4: totally fine. But when the cities got bigger and people
Speaker 4: were more concentrated, we said, look, we got to start
Speaker 4: training it. First treatment plants in New York City were
Speaker 4: Coney Island, Jamaica Bay, places where people were record from
Speaker 4: at the beach right, And that's what drove those early
Speaker 4: early investments around the turn of the last century and
Speaker 4: the very first treatment plants, and that was just primary
Speaker 4: treatment systems. After more and more people started using treatment
Speaker 4: or using wastewater and conglomerting in large groups, the Federal
Speaker 4: EPA said nineteen seventy two, everyone's going to do the
Speaker 4: secondary treatment part, which is that biological system.
Speaker 3: And so that's now the standard to United States.
Speaker 4: Some places are treating to the extent where they can
Speaker 4: drink it directly. And then is Singapore, and they what
Speaker 4: they do is they do everything it just described, add
Speaker 4: additional filtration and then a reverse osmosis, which is very
Speaker 4: very fine filtration to create drinkable water. The city has
Speaker 4: strict difficult a lot of difficulties, strict limitations on the
Speaker 4: amount of water that can come to their city freshwater,
Speaker 4: so they create water.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but you started your education in nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 1: Not a lot of women were doing this kind of work,
Speaker 1: were they.
Speaker 4: I think I was like the first quote wave of
Speaker 4: women in engineering, which the wave has never grown.
Speaker 3: I think it's kind of fat.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 4: My high school advisor, who was advising about college, told
Speaker 4: me I can't be an engineer because that was a
Speaker 4: man's job. Flat out told me that. And my response was,
Speaker 4: I'm not going to listen to you. If you told
Speaker 4: that to one hundred girls, there might be eighty of
Speaker 4: them who said, oh, okay, no, you know what I'm saying,
Speaker 4: and that you know.
Speaker 3: That's too bad.
Speaker 1: You went to college.
Speaker 4: I went to college, my undergraduate Northwestern University, got a
Speaker 4: chemical engineering degree back in nineteen eighty three. You're in
Speaker 4: the technology building, the engineering building. You can't find a
Speaker 4: woman's bathroom. You got to go to where the secretaries.
Speaker 3: That you know it was. It was frustrating.
Speaker 4: You know, the forms all started out mister period than blank.
Speaker 4: It wasn't like you get to choose. I'm like, come on,
Speaker 4: you can update this stuff. They're like, oh, we don't
Speaker 4: want to waste paper. I don't care, you know, so
Speaker 4: stuff like that. It wold and some of the older
Speaker 4: professors are just their minds were blown. But you know,
Speaker 4: I just had the calling and I what I did,
Speaker 4: I think was imprinted in third grade.
Speaker 3: To be honest, what was it about it.
Speaker 1: That intrigued you? Just the problem solving them?
Speaker 4: No, in third grade, I had a student teacher, you know,
Speaker 4: probably I was probably eight, so this person was twenty
Speaker 4: twenty two, taught us about environmental science.
Speaker 3: Changed my life that day forward.
Speaker 4: I said, I want to learn this, I want to
Speaker 4: know about I want to fight polluters. I want to
Speaker 4: make the world a clean, healthy place. That commercial with
Speaker 4: the people throwing trash on the ground and there's a
Speaker 4: Native American person standing here.
Speaker 3: I mean, that was what I was all about.
Speaker 1: Well, that's the difference in New York to me now.
Speaker 1: I mean I got my first home here in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy nine, and in the years that I've lived in
Speaker 1: New York, New York is a lot dirtier, and New
Speaker 1: Yorkers are a lot dirtier. How does New York strike
Speaker 1: you when you got here and you saw the amount
Speaker 1: of stuff going into those screens compared to Seattle.
Speaker 4: I've noticed things like there's a trash can sitting on
Speaker 4: the corner. Somebody walks by throws their plastic bottle on
Speaker 4: the street. I don't get that. I do notice too.
Speaker 4: I have a dog. I pick up my dog poop.
Speaker 4: I put it in a plastic A lot of people
Speaker 4: don't do that, right.
Speaker 1: I want to do a video for you. I want
Speaker 1: to do a video for the Department of Sanitation Wastewater Management.
Speaker 1: Alec wants you to know when you flush the toilet,
Speaker 1: let's keep the diapers, coloss of your read and the condoms.
Speaker 1: Let's okay, let's be an equal opportunity. Fingerpoint to hear.
Speaker 1: It's the tampoons in the cons.
Speaker 3: They don't break down.
Speaker 4: Poop, pee, puke, toilet paper, four piece that's all we
Speaker 4: want to see.
Speaker 1: What's hi. I'm Alec Baldwin here with the four reminding
Speaker 1: you of the four p poop, pee, puke and paper.
Speaker 4: I think the more people know what happens after they flush,
Speaker 4: the more people are gonna respect what they put down
Speaker 4: their toilet and the more the less they're gonna want
Speaker 4: to litter. And that's why I really appreciate talking with you,
Speaker 4: and I'm so glad you have this interest. It's just
Speaker 4: over the top interesting. You're taking pool water and making
Speaker 4: it clean.
Speaker 1: New York City's Deputy Commissioner for Wastewater Management, Pam Alardo,
Speaker 1: a woman so passionate about her job that we had
Speaker 1: to interrupt the interview.
Speaker 3: I'm hitting the table.
Speaker 1: Don't mash your hands in the table. I think it
Speaker 1: even says here that you are from an Italian Catholic
Speaker 1: factory town. Are you an Italian Catholic? Yes, absolutely right, Well,
Speaker 1: then sub pounding on the table and the Italian Catholics too,
Speaker 1: you can help it. Waste management, with all its implications
Speaker 1: for our health and the health of the planet, is
Speaker 1: still about politics. Like everything else. We can't fix the
Speaker 1: problem if we don't elect leaders who devote their resources
Speaker 1: and enforce the rules. And nobody, nobody was better at
Speaker 1: gaming that system and getting us to vote his way
Speaker 1: than Ed Rollins, Ronald Reagan's brilliant and controversial campaign manager.
Speaker 1: When Democrats go out and say I want you to
Speaker 1: turn out your churches, your bus drivers all the rest
Speaker 1: of it. We go out and say, here's the payday
Speaker 1: you would normally get. Just you know, don't turn your
Speaker 1: vote out. I know the game. I know how to
Speaker 1: make it work. And part of the reason I know
Speaker 1: the game is I was trained as a Democrat. More
Speaker 1: from Ed Rollins at Here's Thething dot org after the Break.
Speaker 1: New York City's original recyclings are former Deputy Commissioner for
Speaker 1: Sustainability and Recycling Ron Gonan. By'm Alec Baldwin and you
Speaker 1: were listening to Here's the Thing. Ron Gonan is a
Speaker 1: capitalist even a hippie could love. In two thousand and four,
Speaker 1: he founded a recycling startup that grewed be worth hundreds
Speaker 1: of millions of dollars. Now he runs a group of
Speaker 1: investment funds dedicated to new ideas in recycling. In between
Speaker 1: those two jobs, he was hand picked by Mayor Bloomberg
Speaker 1: to be the city's first recycling czar. But when he
Speaker 1: walked into the studio, he didn't look like someone who
Speaker 1: could have had all that on his resume. You're so young,
Speaker 1: I mean, how old were you? Ten years old and
Speaker 1: work for the Bloomberg administration.
Speaker 5: I joined the administration around was thirty seven. I'm about
Speaker 5: to turn forty three.
Speaker 1: Okay, But Gonan got a very early start. As a kid,
Speaker 1: he cleaned houses and babysit to help his mom out
Speaker 1: with the bills. One day, he ended up in the
Speaker 1: house of one of the pioneers of the sustainability movement,
Speaker 1: architect Paul Mocked.
Speaker 5: I met Paul Mocked when I was in seventh grade.
Speaker 5: Probably the most important thing that happened to me in
Speaker 5: my will tell me about this. I grew up with
Speaker 5: a single mom, lower middle class neighborhood in Philly, got
Speaker 5: a sports scholarship, financial light opportunity to go to a
Speaker 5: great private school called Germantown Academy. But needed to get
Speaker 5: a job because I needed to earn someone for my tuition,
Speaker 5: and started working for Paul and his wife.
Speaker 2: This is the late eighties.
Speaker 5: Early nineties, and I was doing everything from babysitting to housework.
Speaker 5: But he would talk to me about what he was
Speaker 5: doing over dinner. He gave me a book called Cradle
Speaker 5: to Cradle, the first book around circular economy. He would
Speaker 5: talk to me about these issues. I was really I
Speaker 5: was blessed to be around someone like that. So oftentimes
Speaker 5: people will come to me and say how do you
Speaker 5: start these ventures and say, I've been thinking about this
Speaker 5: stuff for twenty twenty five years.
Speaker 1: And the first recycling company was what.
Speaker 5: A friend from high school approached me with a concept
Speaker 5: of could we pay people for recycling? And that's what
Speaker 5: I ultimately became Recycle Bank. I ended up building the
Speaker 5: business model and developing the software for my first recycling company.
Speaker 1: I'm a recycling I'm not going to say nut but
Speaker 1: I take it very seriously. And even if recycling it's
Speaker 1: just an exercise, people want to believe they can participate
Speaker 1: to make things better. I'm like, don't discourage that, but
Speaker 1: is it just an exercise or it's not.
Speaker 5: As far as you're concerned, it's absolutely not just an exercise.
Speaker 5: Recycling has tremendous environmental value in terms of resource protection.
Speaker 5: It also has tremendous economic value to you as a taxpayer,
Speaker 5: and that's part of the message that oftentimes doesn't get out.
Speaker 5: So I appreciate that you have great spirit behind recycling.
Speaker 5: You should keep that, but also feel good about the
Speaker 5: fact that you're doing something really important for the environment
Speaker 5: and something really important for your city.
Speaker 1: When those bags of recyclables hit the street, where do
Speaker 1: they go?
Speaker 5: All of the metal, plastic, and glass goes to a
Speaker 5: recycling facility in Brooklyn called SIMS Metal Management. They actually
Speaker 5: have a phenomenal education program there, so I highly recommend
Speaker 5: folks to go to see the SIMS facility. And they
Speaker 5: also get fifty percent of the paper. The other fifty
Speaker 5: percent of the paper goes to Pratt Recycling out in
Speaker 5: Staten Island, and that paper then goes over to a
Speaker 5: mill right next door that Pratt owns and has turned
Speaker 5: into pizza boxes that then get resold right back into
Speaker 5: the New York City economy.
Speaker 1: The box that it comes in was your New York Times.
Speaker 1: Could be was you were a New Yorker magazine a
Speaker 1: couple a couple months ago, could be that's amazing.
Speaker 5: Could BET's let's break it down to brass economics. If
Speaker 5: you threw that paper in the garbage, the city would
Speaker 5: be paying one hundred dollars a ton to export it
Speaker 5: to a landfill. If you put it in your recycling bin,
Speaker 5: the city will get paid a minimum of ten dollars
Speaker 5: a ton, So there's one hundred and ten dollars swing there.
Speaker 5: Then it will go over to a New York City
Speaker 5: business and employees. People in New York City turn it
Speaker 5: into a pizza box.
Speaker 1: What's the stuff the city collects and what don't they collect?
Speaker 1: What are some of the biggest misconceptions.
Speaker 5: So for recycling, the city collects dry paper and cardboard,
Speaker 5: aluminum and metal, all glass, an all rigid plastic like
Speaker 5: a Fiji bottle, exactly, So any plastic that's rigid goes
Speaker 5: into the city's recycling program. A plastic a plastic that's
Speaker 5: flexible like a bag or plastic wrapping, does not.
Speaker 1: You mean, so like a cup from Starbucks can go
Speaker 1: in there.
Speaker 2: A paper cup from Starbucks can go in there.
Speaker 1: There's not a plastic cup.
Speaker 2: No, a plastic cup can because a plastic cups has.
Speaker 1: Rigidity too, correct, So any formed plastic like cups so forth,
Speaker 1: the city will take that exactly well, and the city
Speaker 1: exempts those businesses from doing their recycling themselves. Well, Starbucks
Speaker 1: is not obligated to recycle.
Speaker 5: So the city currently collects all residential recycling, so they
Speaker 5: collect from every home in the city, not the businesses.
Speaker 2: Not the businesses.
Speaker 5: The businesses are responsible to contract for their own waste
Speaker 5: and recycling collection independently.
Speaker 1: Does Starbucks recycle.
Speaker 5: They that's a so so right, So they're not obligated to.
Speaker 5: They technically are obligated. What the city is working on
Speaker 5: is a better enforcement system to make sure that everyone
Speaker 5: actually is recycling. One of the challenges in New York
Speaker 5: City sometimes you have so many businesses, the enforcement cost
Speaker 5: of checking on every business is very expensive.
Speaker 2: Starbucks could be doing a better job.
Speaker 1: We're the recycling bins on the street, I don't see
Speaker 1: very I've seen some of them by Washington Square Park.
Speaker 5: Work live, especially in Manhattan. If you just look around,
Speaker 5: you'll see there the metallic looking bins with a green
Speaker 5: top and a blue top, and the blue top is
Speaker 5: for your metal, glass and plastic, and the green top
Speaker 5: is for your paper.
Speaker 1: Talk to me about a timeline to your knowledge about
Speaker 1: this movement over the last fifty years or forty years,
Speaker 1: I mean, before you got started with Bloomberg, What was recycling?
Speaker 1: What was the dawn of recycling in this country? And
Speaker 1: is there somebody who's the mother or father of that
Speaker 1: to your knowledge?
Speaker 2: Sure, it's a good question.
Speaker 5: So up until the early nineteen hundreds, Americans didn't waste
Speaker 5: things because there wasn't that much packaging recycling really became
Speaker 5: necessary when a lot of packaging came along. Now, up
Speaker 5: until the nineteen thirties and forties, in New York City,
Speaker 5: Department of Sanitation legally collected everything, including all of our
Speaker 5: bodily waste and whatever waste there was, and just dumped
Speaker 5: it in the East River. At the Department Sanitation, we
Speaker 5: literally have pictures of our trucks lined up on the
Speaker 5: East River dumping garbage, dumping garbage in there. Then you
Speaker 5: started seeing more and more consumption come along and more
Speaker 5: and more packaging. With World War Two, however, there was
Speaker 5: such a huge need for raw resources that America did
Speaker 5: an amazing job recycling up until and during.
Speaker 2: This part of the war, effort exactly waste exactly.
Speaker 5: Post World War Two, you actually saw a major divergence
Speaker 5: between what was what York was doing where they were
Speaker 5: very poor in the fifties, sixties and seventies, They were
Speaker 5: rebuilding their economies and countries and they had very little land,
Speaker 5: so recycling was critical to their economy to what you
Speaker 5: saw in America in the fifties and sixties and seventies,
Speaker 5: which is people moved out to the suburbs, there was
Speaker 5: no collection infrastructure, the concept of more and more and
Speaker 5: more as a status symbol became very important to people,
Speaker 5: and recycling took a back seat. And then you saw
Speaker 5: an emergence of it again in the nineteen eighties and
Speaker 5: nineties and through today.
Speaker 1: We're taking a break. Stay with us now. When you
Speaker 1: started with Bloomberg, which was in twenty twelve, I believe
Speaker 1: he had been in office for how long by then
Speaker 1: he'd been nine years? He was there already there for
Speaker 1: quite a while. And give some insight into what made
Speaker 1: him want to hire a recycling czar, What did he
Speaker 1: see and what pressures you think were brought on him
Speaker 1: to take this to another level.
Speaker 5: He had a deputy mayor named Cass Holloway, who, when
Speaker 5: he came in too be deputy mayor, looked around and said,
Speaker 5: New York City taxpayer spent four hundred million dollars a
Speaker 5: year exporting waste to out of state landfills. We have
Speaker 5: recycling companies in New York City that will pay the
Speaker 5: city for that material. What is going on here? I
Speaker 5: want to get someone in here who can fix this system.
Speaker 1: Turn it into a business exactly.
Speaker 2: And that's what I was brought in to do.
Speaker 1: Why do you think Bloomberg chose you.
Speaker 5: People associate me with being very left progressive but had
Speaker 5: some successes as an entrepreneur, and the waste guys were
Speaker 5: comfortable with me. So I sort of fit everybody's everybody's criteria.
Speaker 1: And how did you start?
Speaker 5: Infrastructure and communication? So in infrastructure, we started rolling out
Speaker 5: containers all over the streets to make sure that there's
Speaker 5: infrastructure collect material. But people would also see recycling bins.
Speaker 5: We made sure that all rigid plastics could be accepted,
Speaker 5: so people didn't have to worry about can I put
Speaker 5: this in? Connect put that in? That was the first
Speaker 5: thing we did. The next thing we did was start
Speaker 5: focusing on food waste and organics, because food waste represents
Speaker 5: about forty percent of what we landfill, and we started
Speaker 5: rolling out a curbside organics program. There's about two hundred
Speaker 5: and fifty thousand homes in New York City today that
Speaker 5: get their food waste collected separately. The city will be
Speaker 5: citywide with the program within two years, and all New
Speaker 5: York City public schools now separate out their food waste.
Speaker 1: Is it safe to say, therefore, that you would discourage
Speaker 1: people from putting their compostables in their organics into the
Speaker 1: garbage disposal.
Speaker 5: That's not bad. That's actually much much better than putting
Speaker 5: in the garbage. But there's something even better that we
Speaker 5: could be doing, which is collecting the food waste separately
Speaker 5: and turning it into clean natural gas locally, which the
Speaker 5: city started doing on the Bloomberg is now expanding.
Speaker 1: Describe how that happened. You take that, you collect that
Speaker 1: bround bin and it goes where.
Speaker 5: There's a process called anaerobic digestion. Anaerobic digestion converts food
Speaker 5: waste into gas. If MIMX goes into yours, where there's
Speaker 5: one anaerobic digester right now in the city, which is
Speaker 5: at the wastewater treatment facility out in Green Point, all
Speaker 5: the food waste goes there and it gets put through
Speaker 5: the anaerobic digester.
Speaker 2: The gas is generated and right.
Speaker 5: Now it's pumped right into the grid. Ten twenty years
Speaker 5: from now, people are going to look back and scratch
Speaker 5: their head and say, let me get this straight. New
Speaker 5: York City was spending two hundred million dollars a year
Speaker 5: to pay to export food waste to out of state landfills.
Speaker 5: That can't be possible because what we do with it
Speaker 5: today is we use it to generate fuel for our
Speaker 5: city vehicles and gas for our homes.
Speaker 1: That's what they do. What were people thinking, is that
Speaker 1: where they do?
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, today it's generating gas that's going into the grid.
Speaker 5: I'll give you a forecast. Ten years from now, New
Speaker 5: York City will be picking up food wasts, driving it
Speaker 5: to the anaerobic digester, dumping it going ten feet away,
Speaker 5: and refilling their gas tank from the gas that was
Speaker 5: generating from the food waste that they dropped off the
Speaker 5: day before.
Speaker 1: You think it'll become a break even proposition or better
Speaker 1: or you always be losing money on that.
Speaker 5: Probably you'll always be making The city will be making
Speaker 5: hundreds of millions of dollars off of it, because right
Speaker 5: now the city is spending two hundred million dollars a
Speaker 5: year to export.
Speaker 2: It to land stuff just doing the organics exactly.
Speaker 5: So if you don't make any money on the process,
Speaker 5: you don't make any money on the sale of the gas,
Speaker 5: you've saved yourself two hundred million dollars.
Speaker 1: Now, when you have ten thousand restaurants or whatever it is,
Speaker 1: you're always hearing different figures twelve thousand and fifteen thousand.
Speaker 1: I don't even know anymore. What do you need to
Speaker 1: do to get them to comply? How do you do it?
Speaker 1: Is it a law you make? I'm sure they're going
Speaker 1: to fight like hell against that, aren't that? There's no
Speaker 1: law now that for there's a law that forced them
Speaker 1: to separate their organics.
Speaker 5: That the Bloomberg administration passed legislation that the Blas administration
Speaker 5: is now continuing that by certain years, all food service
Speaker 5: generators in New York City, by law, are banned from
Speaker 5: sending that food waste to landfill. This year it came
Speaker 5: into practice with all large food service generators that the stadiums,
Speaker 5: that's the universities, that's the large kitchens. The great news
Speaker 5: is there are some restaurants in New York City that
Speaker 5: recognize that they can run their business more efficiently if
Speaker 5: they can send their food waste to an anaerobic digestor
Speaker 5: rather than paying to send it to landfill. And we
Speaker 5: had some great, great restaurant owners or early adopters who said, hey,
Speaker 5: we want to do this, Prademanje. You will see a
Speaker 5: compost bin right in every single process.
Speaker 2: So has it been It's been successful. It's been successful.
Speaker 1: What do you think we're not doing that. We should
Speaker 1: do what's the next level for recycling.
Speaker 5: Great news about recycling is the money is there because
Speaker 5: we're already spending it sticking the stuff in a hole.
Speaker 5: So there's a lot of opportunity the Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania,
Speaker 5: South Carolina, and Ohio. But there's a senator, Senator Casey
Speaker 5: in Pennsylvania that he's trying desperately to get legislation passed
Speaker 5: to enable Pennsylvania to stop the importation of garbage. He
Speaker 5: runs into you can't legislate against interstate commerce. But New
Speaker 5: York City's got a big problem if other states say
Speaker 5: we don't want your trucks, we don't.
Speaker 2: Want your garbage.
Speaker 1: Does the city have a plan for that?
Speaker 5: No, the only plan for that is recycle. Right, eighty
Speaker 5: percent of what's in the New York City waste stream
Speaker 5: can be recycled. Anybody who talks about recycling doesn't work.
Speaker 5: We shouldn't be recycling. They're living in an alternate universe.
Speaker 1: So why are they saying that? You think obviously there's
Speaker 1: a business interest involved. What business interests are they representing?
Speaker 2: What they say that, there's a few interests.
Speaker 5: There's the landfill business, interest, Right, there's the interest of
Speaker 5: the companies that export this out of the city, and
Speaker 5: then you've got some political interests of folks that like
Speaker 5: to pupoo anything to do with the environment. But they're
Speaker 5: all living in an alternate universe because if you don't
Speaker 5: recycle where you plan and to put the stuff.
Speaker 1: How has Deblasio done in terms of upholding this process
Speaker 1: that Bloomberg installed.
Speaker 5: He's done a good job that most of the credit
Speaker 5: goes to the sanitation commissioner, Commissioner Garcia. She was the
Speaker 5: chief operating officer of Deep under Bloomberg, and Deblasio, to
Speaker 5: his credit, brought her over to become the sanitation commissioner,
Speaker 5: and she's done a fantastic job continuing the programs or
Speaker 5: developed on the bloomberginistration and implementing her own programs.
Speaker 1: Someone told me that dumpster divers as people call them,
Speaker 1: people who are going into the waste stream and taking
Speaker 1: out recyclables for their own use to claim the money,
Speaker 1: is hurting the city's program. Correct. Correct, The city's relying
Speaker 1: on that stuff being available to them to monetize this
Speaker 1: whole thing.
Speaker 2: Correct.
Speaker 5: That's one of the cure things about people saying that
Speaker 5: recycling doesn't work. In fact, the city Sanitation department has
Speaker 5: fifty sanitation police scouring the city trying to stop people
Speaker 5: from you stealing recycles.
Speaker 1: People are opening garbage bags in front of my apartment
Speaker 1: on those nights that stuffs put up there Monday night
Speaker 1: or whatever it is.
Speaker 5: One caveat to that is that it's actually not waste
Speaker 5: pickers anymore or homeless people going around. That's what it
Speaker 5: still appears to be, but in fact it's organized. So
Speaker 5: if you were to follow those guys for a couple
Speaker 5: of blocks, you'll see that they end up at a
Speaker 5: very large truck with.
Speaker 2: About there had a union, they got a union.
Speaker 5: Now they're coming in from Jersey, they're coming in from Westchester,
Speaker 5: and they fan people out. They go cut bags, take
Speaker 5: the material, put it in their trucks, and they drive
Speaker 5: it out of the city and sell it. And that's
Speaker 5: a major problem for the City of New York for
Speaker 5: two reasons. One is that's revenue that's supposed.
Speaker 2: To go to the city.
Speaker 1: Number one relying on that, yeah.
Speaker 5: Number two is it impacts our ability to do reporting
Speaker 5: and understand how successful the program is because the numbers
Speaker 5: end up going down and then people will say, oh, see,
Speaker 5: recycling's not working in Park Slope or the Upper west Side.
Speaker 5: The numbers are low. It's like, no, no, actually it's
Speaker 5: working incredibly well.
Speaker 1: Someone's stealing all the procts know to go there right now?
Speaker 1: Do you believe if they if everything went went I mean,
Speaker 1: I mean, I know this is a fantasy, but let's
Speaker 1: play it out anyway, and that is that restaurants and
Speaker 1: delis markets, Starbucks type of takeout places and everything where
Speaker 1: there's a big, big flow of recyclable heart plastics and
Speaker 1: so forth like that. Let's say they all participated in
Speaker 1: the program better and everybody was more conscientious and people
Speaker 1: recycled properly, and we didn't have the bad commingling, and
Speaker 1: let's say everything got better. Could the city handle that flow?
Speaker 5: The city could absolutely handle that flow. Under the Bloomberg administration,
Speaker 5: a lot of money was invested in the infrastructure around recycling.
Speaker 5: All that being said, the most important thing today is
Speaker 5: what you're referring to, which is people need to get
Speaker 5: the message that when you throw paper, metal, gloss and
Speaker 5: plastic in the garbage, which that costs the city money.
Speaker 5: And I'm not interested in subsidizing your laziness.
Speaker 2: You you don't want to put it in the.
Speaker 5: Recycling but no problem, but you got to You got
Speaker 5: to pay the tab Number one. Number two is if
Speaker 5: you see somebody just throw something on the street, you got.
Speaker 2: To say something. Uh.
Speaker 5: And that's that's a really critical part of actually making
Speaker 5: this better is there's a lot of more money that
Speaker 5: needs to be spent, there's a lot of innovation that
Speaker 5: needs to come into place, but the messaging also needs
Speaker 5: to change, and the expectation of people needs to change.
Speaker 1: Give me an example of some city around the world
Speaker 1: where how they're handling their recyclables is commendable.
Speaker 5: Almost any German or Scandinavian city, And what are they
Speaker 5: doing that we're not doing?
Speaker 2: Everybody recycles.
Speaker 5: I was meeting with a government official in the Netherlands
Speaker 5: and I said to him, how much do you find
Speaker 5: somebody when they put something in the recycling bin that
Speaker 5: shouldn't be put in there? They put something in the
Speaker 5: garbage that's recyclable, so we have no fines, So well,
Speaker 5: what do you do when they don't do it correctly?
Speaker 2: Why wouldn't they do it correctly?
Speaker 5: And that's how culturally different we are, is there to
Speaker 5: your point? There's that expectation around civics that if you've
Speaker 5: been asked to do something for the betterment of your
Speaker 5: community society, you do it. So if you look at
Speaker 5: communities in Scandinavia, they're doing a great job. In the
Speaker 5: United States, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco doing a pretty good job.
Speaker 5: New York City and a lot of neighborhoods doing a
Speaker 5: great job actually, and a lot of neighborhoods in New
Speaker 5: York City.
Speaker 1: What's one thing we're doing, just pick one for the
Speaker 1: time being. What's one thing we're doing here across the
Speaker 1: country that you'd love to see us stop? First stop doing.
Speaker 5: What allowing companies to manufacture products or packaging that is
Speaker 5: not recycled, for example, styrofoam good call. Part of the
Speaker 5: communication that needs to come out around this is those
Speaker 5: styrophone beads are terrible for the environment. You know what
Speaker 5: else are teleb before you? As a tax bank, Why
Speaker 5: can't we ask all that? New York City we did
Speaker 5: that under the Bloomberg administration. The industry sued, the city countersued.
Speaker 5: But the city has been trying for a really long
Speaker 5: time to ban.
Speaker 1: Styrifise cities at garverrit of plastic Bags.
Speaker 5: Gyriodp plast Bags, And my point of all this has
Speaker 5: always been it's absolutely bad for the environment, but we
Speaker 5: need to make sure that people clearly understand the economic argument.
Speaker 5: Let's take blocks and bags for an example. New York
Speaker 5: City this year will spend twelve million dollars of tax
Speaker 5: payer money landfilling plastic bags.
Speaker 1: So if you're the plastic they can't be recycled, can't
Speaker 1: be recycled.
Speaker 5: They're trying to recycle only if they're absolutely clean and priesteam.
Speaker 1: You can't steam clean them, you can't put them through
Speaker 1: the hot.
Speaker 2: Too expensive to expensive.
Speaker 5: But the point that should be made to the plastic
Speaker 5: bag industry is, hey, we don't need to ban these.
Speaker 5: You can design, manufacture, sell whatever you want, but if
Speaker 5: it's not recyclable, we're not interested in picking up the
Speaker 5: cost of senate to a landfill. And we also need
Speaker 5: to recognize some of the companies like a Patagony and
Speaker 5: some of the other companies out there that have done
Speaker 5: a phenomenal job incorporating recycled material into their products and packaging,
Speaker 5: and make sure we reward and recognize that.
Speaker 1: So close loop partners, you're a fund that you're helping
Speaker 1: to manage. Are they looking for technology to invest in
Speaker 1: to kind of replace styrofoam? Are you looking for people
Speaker 1: that are going to make the next level of packaging?
Speaker 5: All the time, we scour the country and scour the
Speaker 5: world for innovative new materials, innovative technologies. We just invested
Speaker 5: in a company called amp Robotics. It's the first artificial
Speaker 5: intelligence and robotics company and the recycling industry, We've invested
Speaker 5: in a lot of super innovative technologies as well as
Speaker 5: just large facilities to recycle material. So we're always looking
Speaker 5: for innovation and investments.
Speaker 1: Well, I want to wish you the best of luck
Speaker 1: with that, because that's something that everybody's counting on. I mean,
Speaker 1: they really are. I just feel like so a lot
Speaker 1: of people are sitting home thinking what can I do?
Speaker 1: What can I do? When we want to say to people,
Speaker 1: just recycle aggressively, don't give up, keep keep doing that,
Speaker 1: do it properly. Yes, and hopefully over the next few years,
Speaker 1: people like you and the funds you're working with will
Speaker 1: replace styrol and it will and replace plastic bags with
Speaker 1: things that are fully biodegradable and quicks and we will
Speaker 1: get to a place where we can start to reverse
Speaker 1: some of the damage, which we are getting very close
Speaker 1: to the point where we might not be able to
Speaker 1: reverse that. So I'm hoping we will have you come
Speaker 1: on the show in a couple of years and you'll
Speaker 1: have some fresh and good news for us.
Speaker 2: That would be great.
Speaker 5: You want to get into business with me, If you
Speaker 5: want to get into the recycling business, it would be
Speaker 5: great to have you.
Speaker 1: I'll leave it to the professionals, but I'm glad there
Speaker 1: are people like Ron and Pam Alardo in New York
Speaker 1: City making a difference one flush and bottle at a time.
Speaker 1: I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought to you
Speaker 1: by iHeart Radio.