The more people you have, the more garbage they produce – except, it seems, in New York City.
In a mystery that has baffled even the city’s veteran sanitation commissioner, the amount of residential garbage collected here is dropping even as the population is growing.
“I keep looking at that and keep scratching my head trying to figure it out,” said Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty.
“People say it’s the economy, but this has been going on for a couple of years.”
Household refuse collections dropped 5.5 percent, from 54,205 to 51,250 tons per week, between fiscal 2005 and 2008.
Recycling pickups fell 7.1 percent during that period, from 11,983 to 11,133 tons a week.
Some of the decrease can be explained by the switch from glass to lighter plastics, by reductions in packaging materials, and by the decline in discarded newspapers and magazines.
But Doherty said those factors still wouldn’t account for the decline.
“How can New York City be growing and our tonnage is going down?” he asked. “The fact of the matter is that’s what’s happening. It’s amazing.”
The city’s population is growing by 30,000 to 50,000 a year and stood at 8,310,212 as of July 1, 2007, according to the Department of City Planning.
One theory making the rounds is that there’s less residential food waste now because of a law enacted in 1997 permitting kitchen sink disposals.
But Eric Goldstein, of the Natural Resources Defense Council, dismisses that argument, saying the number of disposals is “relatively small.”
“It’s a bit of a mystery,” he concluded of the tumbling trash loads.
Nationally, residential waste collections increased from 250.4 million tons in 2005 to 254.2 million tons in 2006, before dropping slightly to 254.1 million tons in 2007.
Unlike just about everything else in this crippled economy, a decline in this particular industry is good news.
The city spends about $100 a ton to dispose of residential garbage and is currently paying $57 a ton to get rid of most recyclables.