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