January 16, 2024 • 39 mins
As we prepare to launch our fourth season at iHeartRadio, we’re revisiting some of host Alec Baldwin’s favorite episodes from the archives. In this episode, Alec digs into the minds behind the processing of the 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater, 16 million pounds of trash and eight million pounds of recyclables that New York City produces every day. Pam Elardo is the former Deputy Commissioner of New York City's Department of Environmental Protection, leading the city's Bureau of Wastewater Treatment. Ron Gonen was New York City's first "Recycling Czar" and now thinks about the problems of waste-management from the perspective of a businessman: he's the CEO of a major investment fund looking for the Next Big Idea in recycling. Pam and Ron walk Alec through what happens from the moment people flush the toilet or toss out their coffee-cup -- and they talk about the big-picture environmental impact of our choices. And since this is Here's the Thing, Alec also learns the incredible life stories each one brings to the job -- from Pam's persistence in the face of the sexism that discouraged women engineers of her generation, to Ron's luck stumbling into the home of a prominent environmentalist while doing housework to make ends meet for his family as a kid.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, it's Alec Baldwin here. Before we launch our next
season of Here's the Thing at iHeartRadio in January, I
thought i'd play some of my favorite shows from the archives.
Next up is Pam Alardo, former Deputy Commissioner of the
Bureau of Wastewater Treatment in New York City. I enjoyed
(00:21):
talking with her about what happens to all the water
that goes down the drain in New York. Also joining
us is Ron Gonan, former Deputy Commissioner of Sanitation, Recycling
and Sustainability aka New York City's first recycling Czar. Enjoy
my conversation with Pam Alardo and Ron Gonan. This is
(00:45):
Alec Baldwin, and you were listening to Here's the Thing
from iHeart Radio. Think about how much waste you generate
every day. The advil bottle, the styrofoam tray for your chicken,
the chicken bone, the toilet, paper tissues, and paper towels
you consume. We're about to get dirty here, so think
(01:06):
of the human waste too. Now multiply that by eight
point five million for all of New York City. That's
one point three billion gallons of wastewater every day. Sixteen
million pounds of trash eight million pounds of recyclables every.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Day of every week.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
Today you'll hear from two of the best people tackling
all that waste after the break. New York City's first
recyclings are but first. Pam Alardo a big name in sewage.
Since last year, she's led New York City's Bureau of
Wastewater Treatment. Mayor Deblasio poached her from Seattle, where she
spearheaded an unprecedented upgrade of that city's wastewater treatment infrastructure.
(01:54):
Why'd you leave Seattle to come here?
Speaker 3 (01:56):
Great question?
Speaker 4 (01:56):
Do you ever look at your life as an older
person and you kind of look at your life as
a third party? Like that wasn't me. But I'm observing
it right, And there's a few things that are foreshadowing.
Like I my both my brothers at one time another
lived in Manhattan, and so I would visit New York frequently, Yeah,
a couple once or twice a year, and I would come,
(02:17):
I would land, I would have a great time.
Speaker 3 (02:18):
I'd be thinking about Holy Cow.
Speaker 4 (02:20):
I can't imagine what it'd be like to work in
New York City with just think about all the pipes
under the street.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
It's crazy. And I would take a tour on the Hudson.
Speaker 4 (02:29):
I would see one of the treatment plants is on
the Hudson up by Harlem, be like, wow, that's a
treatment plant.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
It's huge.
Speaker 4 (02:35):
And then I would get on a plane and I
would fly back to Seattle and go, oh my god,
I don't have any problems here.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
This is easy. There's there's no comparison.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
You know.
Speaker 4 (02:43):
And in Seattle I did great and I plateaued at
the top of my game.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
In the wastewater world.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
There would you one of the Killiman Jarro of wastewater Treatments.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Yeah, yeah you.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
Are, Yeah, the kill him and Jaro of waste Mount Everest.
Speaker 4 (02:54):
Maybe because you know, I used to work in the pall,
so that's kind of where I got my appreciation for
the value of wastewater. In Peace Corps experience. Actually, children
don't make it to their fifth birthdays or their twelfth
birthdays often because of the amount of disease that's out there.
And that's you know, it makes me take my job
seriously because we do save lives every day people, you know,
(03:17):
controlling sanitation, controlling disease that comes from sanitation, that's not
handled properly is what we do and it's the fundamental
reason why we enjoy the quality of life we have.
Fact in point, British Medical Journal did a study in
two thousand and seven about They interviewed hundreds of doctors
what is the biggest medical breakthrough in the laste hundred
(03:38):
and fifty years? What came on top sanitation. It's responsible
for extending lives. It's the biggest reason why, really we
have the kind of quality of healthcare throughout the world,
and living in places where that didn't exist. Talking to
parents whose children died because of dysentery or other diseases
that come from lack of wastewater, you know, that's what
(04:01):
makes me passionate about this stuff. My goal in life
is that everyone should know what happens after they flush
the toilet. Yes, because it is a communal social responsibility,
environmental environmental, public health, and people don't want to think
about it.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
They want it to go away and be gone.
Speaker 4 (04:18):
And we have the luxury in this country for it
to be taken for granted, and it's because we do
such a great job.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
So by and large, are the systems generally in principle
in terms of science and so for that engineering, are
they the same in all major cities where what happens
to water that goes down a sink, down, a shower,
a bathtub, a toilet, It all pretty much just managed
the same way.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
There's there's a variety of technologies. I mean they're that's
a good one.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
Uh.
Speaker 4 (04:44):
Let me just talk about what happens from the beginning
to the end that might be. So let's say you
use your toilet. It goes down out of your house
and then into a local collection line, so there might
be one down your street, and that'll dump into a
larger collection system, which is a larger pipe you just
called it interceptor, and that eventually will take it to
a wastewater treatment plant. And New York City, for example,
(05:06):
we have fourteen wastewater treatment plants. We have ninety six
pumping station big.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
So the pumping stations continue to force the material and
the liquid and everything whatever's down there down toward.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
The train plant. So we at the tream plant.
Speaker 4 (05:18):
Moving water is expensive and going by gravity is always cheaper.
So where there's a hill, we take advantage of the hill,
but at some lower points we always have to elevate
it and get it back to gravity, so we can
flow it to the treatment plants. Very expensive the pumping system.
So when it gets to the treatment plant, the first
step there is a screen. There are bar screens are
about half to three quarter inch spacing, and they collect
(05:40):
trash things that people should not be flushing on the
toilet like wipes, baby wipes, facial wipes, dental floss.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
All that stuff gets it gets stuck, get stuck.
Speaker 4 (05:49):
And if it weren't trapped there, it's actually on the way.
It messes up a lot of the pumping systems because
we have so much of this material, So we take
it out there. We spend about seven million dollars a
year just in land filling the trash to people flush.
And then it goes to some kind of grit removal
to move remove like sand and chunks of rock, and
(06:11):
then to a primary sedimentation basin that allow solids, in
organic solids for the most part that are suspended to
settle onto the bottom. And it also has skimmers on
the top that takes grease off the top. So that
goes to a solid treatment system. And then the next step,
and this is the fascinating world of biology. The next
step we use a community of bacteria that actually digests
(06:34):
the suspended organic material and clean the water.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
Via that method, you're bringing things in that it will consume.
Speaker 4 (06:40):
It is food, right, And from there it goes to
another settling tank where we settle out the biomass that
just consumed all this organic matter. But the water that
comes out of the final settling tank gets disinfection basically
household bleached to take any particular pathogens out, and that
gets either discharged to receiving water or in some cases
(07:00):
in some cities they're able to polish a little bit
more easy for irrigation purposes, especially in the arid Southwest.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
And you said, what happens to it here?
Speaker 3 (07:08):
What happens to here?
Speaker 4 (07:09):
It gets discharged deeply into the surrounding water bodies after
getting cleaned up. You might have noticed. And I'm taking
credit for this, and all the people who work in
the Bureau of Wastewater Treatment can eighteen hundred people. We
take credit for the whales coming back because because of
the work that they do twenty four to seven and
the experience and skill those whales have been able to
(07:30):
come back into as.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
Ort of is discharged deep into the neighboring waters, it's
that clean, very clean. And what about the solids? Where
were human waste solids? Where does that salid?
Speaker 4 (07:40):
So the solids are basically the bacteria that's settled out
as well as the solids we collected in the primary basins,
and that gets thickened and then it goes to a
anaerobic treatment process.
Speaker 3 (07:53):
So if you're in Brooklyn and you.
Speaker 4 (07:55):
See those big eggs shaped metal eggs, those are actually
digesters and those are heated to ninety eight degrees and
within that we're using an anaerobic bacteria, so bacteria that
live without oxygen, and they'll digest those solids even more.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
And then that is a valuable fertilizer product. So it's
a very viable product.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
So who sells it?
Speaker 3 (08:15):
It's called bioslids.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
Now in New York's biosolize. Yes, I'm thinking of like
a conveyor belt, like a giant brownie is coming off there.
Where does it go?
Speaker 3 (08:24):
Every day?
Speaker 4 (08:25):
About fourteen hundred wet tons we create of biosolids. Now,
it's no only great because it's a great resource that
we don't want to waste, but it returns carbon to
the soil and you actually can run a wastewater treatment
plant at carbon neutral because of all the carbon benefit,
we have the sequestration benefit from that bioslids product.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
Now, another thing I think that occurs to me is
that there's auto mechanics, and there's places where work is
being done and chemicals of every fashion are being used
to clean parts and cleaning solvents and motor oil just
to pick one industry. I'm not even talking about, you know,
PCBs up the Hudson from ge and the fifty, that
(09:05):
kind of thing going into the Hudson River. I'm talking
about right here in New York in restaurants. Every time
somebody washes their hair, and every time somebody dyes their
hair in a beauty salon. All this stuff is going
down the drain. What's the process that removes all those chemicals?
Speaker 4 (09:20):
So some of those chemicals break down very easily. They're
biodegraded quickly within the plant. They respond to the biological
conditions within the wastewater plant, and you won't find traces
of it in the effluent. Some of them break down
into different types of chemicals, pharmaceuticals, right, you'll get you know,
people have chemotherapy. You know that waste from their bodies
(09:41):
might even end up in the treatm plant system, and
you can't get all that no, and so there are microcontaminants.
So there is some studies about potentially ecological impacts from
some of those micro pollutants. We don't see that in
the scale of New York City. The water bodies here
are well flushing. If a wastewater chili charging to a
small lake, for example, you're going to have much stricter
(10:04):
standards on that end.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
You know, it's interesting. I'm a strong environmentalist.
Speaker 4 (10:10):
I have been my entire life since third grade, as
a matter of fact, and I care about trying to
do the best we can by nature and get us
back to nature the best we can. We live in
a world that's got plastics and papers and also so
many things. We're really we're really doing a fantastic job
and eliminating the risk to the environment into health. And
(10:33):
as monitoring and chemistry gets better, we can get down
to lower and lower concentrations and we're going to learn
a lot more about ways that we can make it better.
But today we're just miles ahead of where we've been.
Speaker 3 (10:45):
And when I'm.
Speaker 1 (10:45):
Safe to say that it's been about environmentalism for you, Yeah,
and an environmental environmental work.
Speaker 4 (10:50):
I became an environmentalist in third grade and I'm still environmentalist.
It kills me now that some environmental groups think I'm
a polluter. I'm a very practical environmentalist. We've we're spending
public money. We've got to be good to the dollar
and make sure that we're doing the most effective way.
There's not an unlimited amount of money.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
What would you say, what's the Mercedes Benz, what's the
Rolls Royce of? For lack of a better way of
putting of wastewater management around the world? Who has a
Mercedes over us?
Speaker 4 (11:17):
So let me Wastewater treatment, like many things, is an evolution, right.
The Cadillac version depends on the situation you're in now.
Back when everybody were farmers and people did not live
in concentrated cities, it didn't matter that people pooped in
the field. Use pitler trenes, maybe, no big deal. As
(11:40):
we started to get closer together, we started to evolve
techniques for dealing with they well, they had collection systems,
and prior to the nineteen thirties in New York City
and prior to probably the nineteen fifties, and even the
nineteen seventies and the rest of the world. The whole
driver towards wastewater treatment was to get it from people.
(12:00):
So they put a pipe in the ground and you
got it to the nearest water body, and that was
totally fine. But when the cities got bigger and people
were more concentrated, we said, look, we got to start
training it. First treatment plants in New York City were
Coney Island, Jamaica Bay, places where people were record from
at the beach right, And that's what drove those early
early investments around the turn of the last century and
(12:22):
the very first treatment plants, and that was just primary
treatment systems. After more and more people started using treatment
or using wastewater and conglomerting in large groups, the Federal
EPA said nineteen seventy two, everyone's going to do the
secondary treatment part, which is that biological system.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
And so that's now the standard to United States.
Speaker 4 (12:44):
Some places are treating to the extent where they can
drink it directly. And then is Singapore, and they what
they do is they do everything it just described, add
additional filtration and then a reverse osmosis, which is very
very fine filtration to create drinkable water. The city has
(13:04):
strict difficult a lot of difficulties, strict limitations on the
amount of water that can come to their city freshwater,
so they create water.
Speaker 1 (13:12):
Yeah, but you started your education in nineteen seventy nine.
Not a lot of women were doing this kind of work,
were they.
Speaker 4 (13:18):
I think I was like the first quote wave of
women in engineering, which the wave has never grown.
Speaker 3 (13:25):
I think it's kind of fat.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
You know.
Speaker 4 (13:27):
My high school advisor, who was advising about college, told
me I can't be an engineer because that was a
man's job. Flat out told me that. And my response was,
I'm not going to listen to you. If you told
that to one hundred girls, there might be eighty of
them who said, oh, okay, no, you know what I'm saying,
and that you know.
Speaker 3 (13:46):
That's too bad.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
You went to college.
Speaker 4 (13:47):
I went to college, my undergraduate Northwestern University, got a
chemical engineering degree back in nineteen eighty three. You're in
the technology building, the engineering building. You can't find a
woman's bathroom. You got to go to where the secretaries.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
That you know it was. It was frustrating.
Speaker 4 (14:03):
You know, the forms all started out mister period than blank.
It wasn't like you get to choose. I'm like, come on,
you can update this stuff. They're like, oh, we don't
want to waste paper. I don't care, you know, so
stuff like that. It wold and some of the older
professors are just their minds were blown. But you know,
I just had the calling and I what I did,
I think was imprinted in third grade.
Speaker 3 (14:24):
To be honest, what was it about it.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
That intrigued you? Just the problem solving them?
Speaker 4 (14:28):
No, in third grade, I had a student teacher, you know,
probably I was probably eight, so this person was twenty
twenty two, taught us about environmental science.
Speaker 3 (14:38):
Changed my life that day forward.
Speaker 4 (14:41):
I said, I want to learn this, I want to
know about I want to fight polluters. I want to
make the world a clean, healthy place. That commercial with
the people throwing trash on the ground and there's a
Native American person standing here.
Speaker 3 (14:53):
I mean, that was what I was all about.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
Well, that's the difference in New York to me now.
I mean I got my first home here in nineteen
seventy nine, and in the years that I've lived in
New York, New York is a lot dirtier, and New
Yorkers are a lot dirtier. How does New York strike
you when you got here and you saw the amount
of stuff going into those screens compared to Seattle.
Speaker 4 (15:13):
I've noticed things like there's a trash can sitting on
the corner. Somebody walks by throws their plastic bottle on
the street. I don't get that. I do notice too.
I have a dog. I pick up my dog poop.
I put it in a plastic A lot of people
don't do that, right.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
I want to do a video for you. I want
to do a video for the Department of Sanitation Wastewater Management.
Alec wants you to know when you flush the toilet,
let's keep the diapers, coloss of your read and the condoms.
Let's okay, let's be an equal opportunity. Fingerpoint to hear.
It's the tampoons in the cons.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
They don't break down.
Speaker 4 (15:50):
Poop, pee, puke, toilet paper, four piece that's all we
want to see.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
What's hi. I'm Alec Baldwin here with the four reminding
you of the four p poop, pee, puke and paper.
Speaker 4 (16:02):
I think the more people know what happens after they flush,
the more people are gonna respect what they put down
their toilet and the more the less they're gonna want
to litter. And that's why I really appreciate talking with you,
and I'm so glad you have this interest. It's just
over the top interesting. You're taking pool water and making
it clean.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
New York City's Deputy Commissioner for Wastewater Management, Pam Alardo,
a woman so passionate about her job that we had
to interrupt the interview.
Speaker 3 (16:31):
I'm hitting the table.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
Don't mash your hands in the table. I think it
even says here that you are from an Italian Catholic
factory town. Are you an Italian Catholic? Yes, absolutely right, Well,
then sub pounding on the table and the Italian Catholics too,
you can help it. Waste management, with all its implications
for our health and the health of the planet, is
(16:52):
still about politics. Like everything else. We can't fix the
problem if we don't elect leaders who devote their resources
and enforce the rules. And nobody, nobody was better at
gaming that system and getting us to vote his way
than Ed Rollins, Ronald Reagan's brilliant and controversial campaign manager.
When Democrats go out and say I want you to
(17:14):
turn out your churches, your bus drivers all the rest
of it. We go out and say, here's the payday
you would normally get. Just you know, don't turn your
vote out. I know the game. I know how to
make it work. And part of the reason I know
the game is I was trained as a Democrat. More
from Ed Rollins at Here's Thething dot org after the Break.
New York City's original recyclings are former Deputy Commissioner for
(17:37):
Sustainability and Recycling Ron Gonan. By'm Alec Baldwin and you
were listening to Here's the Thing. Ron Gonan is a
capitalist even a hippie could love. In two thousand and four,
he founded a recycling startup that grewed be worth hundreds
(18:01):
of millions of dollars. Now he runs a group of
investment funds dedicated to new ideas in recycling. In between
those two jobs, he was hand picked by Mayor Bloomberg
to be the city's first recycling czar. But when he
walked into the studio, he didn't look like someone who
could have had all that on his resume. You're so young,
(18:21):
I mean, how old were you? Ten years old and
work for the Bloomberg administration.
Speaker 5 (18:24):
I joined the administration around was thirty seven. I'm about
to turn forty three.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
Okay, But Gonan got a very early start. As a kid,
he cleaned houses and babysit to help his mom out
with the bills. One day, he ended up in the
house of one of the pioneers of the sustainability movement,
architect Paul Mocked.
Speaker 5 (18:43):
I met Paul Mocked when I was in seventh grade.
Probably the most important thing that happened to me in
my will tell me about this. I grew up with
a single mom, lower middle class neighborhood in Philly, got
a sports scholarship, financial light opportunity to go to a
great private school called Germantown Academy. But needed to get
a job because I needed to earn someone for my tuition,
and started working for Paul and his wife.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
This is the late eighties.
Speaker 5 (19:05):
Early nineties, and I was doing everything from babysitting to housework.
But he would talk to me about what he was
doing over dinner. He gave me a book called Cradle
to Cradle, the first book around circular economy. He would
talk to me about these issues. I was really I
was blessed to be around someone like that. So oftentimes
people will come to me and say how do you
start these ventures and say, I've been thinking about this
(19:27):
stuff for twenty twenty five years.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
And the first recycling company was what.
Speaker 5 (19:32):
A friend from high school approached me with a concept
of could we pay people for recycling? And that's what
I ultimately became Recycle Bank. I ended up building the
business model and developing the software for my first recycling company.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
I'm a recycling I'm not going to say nut but
I take it very seriously. And even if recycling it's
just an exercise, people want to believe they can participate
to make things better. I'm like, don't discourage that, but
is it just an exercise or it's not.
Speaker 5 (19:59):
As far as you're concerned, it's absolutely not just an exercise.
Recycling has tremendous environmental value in terms of resource protection.
It also has tremendous economic value to you as a taxpayer,
and that's part of the message that oftentimes doesn't get out.
So I appreciate that you have great spirit behind recycling.
You should keep that, but also feel good about the
(20:20):
fact that you're doing something really important for the environment
and something really important for your city.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
When those bags of recyclables hit the street, where do
they go?
Speaker 5 (20:28):
All of the metal, plastic, and glass goes to a
recycling facility in Brooklyn called SIMS Metal Management. They actually
have a phenomenal education program there, so I highly recommend
folks to go to see the SIMS facility. And they
also get fifty percent of the paper. The other fifty
percent of the paper goes to Pratt Recycling out in
Staten Island, and that paper then goes over to a
(20:50):
mill right next door that Pratt owns and has turned
into pizza boxes that then get resold right back into
the New York City economy.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
The box that it comes in was your New York Times.
Could be was you were a New Yorker magazine a
couple a couple months ago, could be that's amazing.
Speaker 5 (21:03):
Could BET's let's break it down to brass economics. If
you threw that paper in the garbage, the city would
be paying one hundred dollars a ton to export it
to a landfill. If you put it in your recycling bin,
the city will get paid a minimum of ten dollars
a ton, So there's one hundred and ten dollars swing there.
Then it will go over to a New York City
business and employees. People in New York City turn it
(21:24):
into a pizza box.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
What's the stuff the city collects and what don't they collect?
What are some of the biggest misconceptions.
Speaker 5 (21:29):
So for recycling, the city collects dry paper and cardboard,
aluminum and metal, all glass, an all rigid plastic like
a Fiji bottle, exactly, So any plastic that's rigid goes
into the city's recycling program. A plastic a plastic that's
flexible like a bag or plastic wrapping, does not.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
You mean, so like a cup from Starbucks can go
in there.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
A paper cup from Starbucks can go in there.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
There's not a plastic cup.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
No, a plastic cup can because a plastic cups has.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
Rigidity too, correct, So any formed plastic like cups so forth,
the city will take that exactly well, and the city
exempts those businesses from doing their recycling themselves. Well, Starbucks
is not obligated to recycle.
Speaker 5 (22:09):
So the city currently collects all residential recycling, so they
collect from every home in the city, not the businesses.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
Not the businesses.
Speaker 5 (22:17):
The businesses are responsible to contract for their own waste
and recycling collection independently.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
Does Starbucks recycle.
Speaker 5 (22:25):
They that's a so so right, So they're not obligated to.
They technically are obligated. What the city is working on
is a better enforcement system to make sure that everyone
actually is recycling. One of the challenges in New York
City sometimes you have so many businesses, the enforcement cost
of checking on every business is very expensive.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
Starbucks could be doing a better job.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
We're the recycling bins on the street, I don't see
very I've seen some of them by Washington Square Park.
Speaker 5 (22:50):
Work live, especially in Manhattan. If you just look around,
you'll see there the metallic looking bins with a green
top and a blue top, and the blue top is
for your metal, glass and plastic, and the green top
is for your paper.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
Talk to me about a timeline to your knowledge about
this movement over the last fifty years or forty years,
I mean, before you got started with Bloomberg, What was recycling?
What was the dawn of recycling in this country? And
is there somebody who's the mother or father of that
to your knowledge?
Speaker 2 (23:21):
Sure, it's a good question.
Speaker 5 (23:22):
So up until the early nineteen hundreds, Americans didn't waste
things because there wasn't that much packaging recycling really became
necessary when a lot of packaging came along. Now, up
until the nineteen thirties and forties, in New York City,
Department of Sanitation legally collected everything, including all of our
bodily waste and whatever waste there was, and just dumped
(23:44):
it in the East River. At the Department Sanitation, we
literally have pictures of our trucks lined up on the
East River dumping garbage, dumping garbage in there. Then you
started seeing more and more consumption come along and more
and more packaging. With World War Two, however, there was
such a huge need for raw resources that America did
an amazing job recycling up until and during.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
This part of the war, effort exactly waste exactly.
Speaker 5 (24:11):
Post World War Two, you actually saw a major divergence
between what was what York was doing where they were
very poor in the fifties, sixties and seventies, They were
rebuilding their economies and countries and they had very little land,
so recycling was critical to their economy to what you
saw in America in the fifties and sixties and seventies,
which is people moved out to the suburbs, there was
no collection infrastructure, the concept of more and more and
(24:34):
more as a status symbol became very important to people,
and recycling took a back seat. And then you saw
an emergence of it again in the nineteen eighties and
nineties and through today.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
We're taking a break. Stay with us now. When you
started with Bloomberg, which was in twenty twelve, I believe
he had been in office for how long by then
(25:07):
he'd been nine years? He was there already there for
quite a while. And give some insight into what made
him want to hire a recycling czar, What did he
see and what pressures you think were brought on him
to take this to another level.
Speaker 5 (25:24):
He had a deputy mayor named Cass Holloway, who, when
he came in too be deputy mayor, looked around and said,
New York City taxpayer spent four hundred million dollars a
year exporting waste to out of state landfills. We have
recycling companies in New York City that will pay the
city for that material. What is going on here? I
(25:44):
want to get someone in here who can fix this system.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
Turn it into a business exactly.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
And that's what I was brought in to do.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
Why do you think Bloomberg chose you.
Speaker 5 (25:55):
People associate me with being very left progressive but had
some successes as an entrepreneur, and the waste guys were
comfortable with me. So I sort of fit everybody's everybody's criteria.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
And how did you start?
Speaker 5 (26:08):
Infrastructure and communication? So in infrastructure, we started rolling out
containers all over the streets to make sure that there's
infrastructure collect material. But people would also see recycling bins.
We made sure that all rigid plastics could be accepted,
so people didn't have to worry about can I put
this in? Connect put that in? That was the first
thing we did. The next thing we did was start
(26:28):
focusing on food waste and organics, because food waste represents
about forty percent of what we landfill, and we started
rolling out a curbside organics program. There's about two hundred
and fifty thousand homes in New York City today that
get their food waste collected separately. The city will be
citywide with the program within two years, and all New
York City public schools now separate out their food waste.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
Is it safe to say, therefore, that you would discourage
people from putting their compostables in their organics into the
garbage disposal.
Speaker 5 (26:57):
That's not bad. That's actually much much better than putting
in the garbage. But there's something even better that we
could be doing, which is collecting the food waste separately
and turning it into clean natural gas locally, which the
city started doing on the Bloomberg is now expanding.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
Describe how that happened. You take that, you collect that
bround bin and it goes where.
Speaker 5 (27:16):
There's a process called anaerobic digestion. Anaerobic digestion converts food
waste into gas. If MIMX goes into yours, where there's
one anaerobic digester right now in the city, which is
at the wastewater treatment facility out in Green Point, all
the food waste goes there and it gets put through
the anaerobic digester.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
The gas is generated and right.
Speaker 5 (27:35):
Now it's pumped right into the grid. Ten twenty years
from now, people are going to look back and scratch
their head and say, let me get this straight. New
York City was spending two hundred million dollars a year
to pay to export food waste to out of state landfills.
That can't be possible because what we do with it
today is we use it to generate fuel for our
(27:56):
city vehicles and gas for our homes.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
That's what they do. What were people thinking, is that
where they do?
Speaker 5 (28:00):
Yeah, well, today it's generating gas that's going into the grid.
I'll give you a forecast. Ten years from now, New
York City will be picking up food wasts, driving it
to the anaerobic digester, dumping it going ten feet away,
and refilling their gas tank from the gas that was
generating from the food waste that they dropped off the
day before.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
You think it'll become a break even proposition or better
or you always be losing money on that.
Speaker 5 (28:23):
Probably you'll always be making The city will be making
hundreds of millions of dollars off of it, because right
now the city is spending two hundred million dollars a
year to export.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
It to land stuff just doing the organics exactly.
Speaker 5 (28:35):
So if you don't make any money on the process,
you don't make any money on the sale of the gas,
you've saved yourself two hundred million dollars.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
Now, when you have ten thousand restaurants or whatever it is,
you're always hearing different figures twelve thousand and fifteen thousand.
I don't even know anymore. What do you need to
do to get them to comply? How do you do it?
Is it a law you make? I'm sure they're going
to fight like hell against that, aren't that? There's no
law now that for there's a law that forced them
to separate their organics.
Speaker 5 (29:03):
That the Bloomberg administration passed legislation that the Blas administration
is now continuing that by certain years, all food service
generators in New York City, by law, are banned from
sending that food waste to landfill. This year it came
into practice with all large food service generators that the stadiums,
(29:23):
that's the universities, that's the large kitchens. The great news
is there are some restaurants in New York City that
recognize that they can run their business more efficiently if
they can send their food waste to an anaerobic digestor
rather than paying to send it to landfill. And we
had some great, great restaurant owners or early adopters who said, hey,
(29:45):
we want to do this, Prademanje. You will see a
compost bin right in every single process.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
So has it been It's been successful. It's been successful.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
What do you think we're not doing that. We should
do what's the next level for recycling.
Speaker 5 (30:00):
Great news about recycling is the money is there because
we're already spending it sticking the stuff in a hole.
So there's a lot of opportunity the Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania,
South Carolina, and Ohio. But there's a senator, Senator Casey
in Pennsylvania that he's trying desperately to get legislation passed
(30:20):
to enable Pennsylvania to stop the importation of garbage. He
runs into you can't legislate against interstate commerce. But New
York City's got a big problem if other states say
we don't want your trucks, we don't.
Speaker 2 (30:33):
Want your garbage.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
Does the city have a plan for that?
Speaker 5 (30:35):
No, the only plan for that is recycle. Right, eighty
percent of what's in the New York City waste stream
can be recycled. Anybody who talks about recycling doesn't work.
We shouldn't be recycling. They're living in an alternate universe.
Speaker 1 (30:48):
So why are they saying that? You think obviously there's
a business interest involved. What business interests are they representing?
Speaker 2 (30:53):
What they say that, there's a few interests.
Speaker 5 (30:54):
There's the landfill business, interest, Right, there's the interest of
the companies that export this out of the city, and
then you've got some political interests of folks that like
to pupoo anything to do with the environment. But they're
all living in an alternate universe because if you don't
recycle where you plan and to put the stuff.
Speaker 1 (31:12):
How has Deblasio done in terms of upholding this process
that Bloomberg installed.
Speaker 5 (31:20):
He's done a good job that most of the credit
goes to the sanitation commissioner, Commissioner Garcia. She was the
chief operating officer of Deep under Bloomberg, and Deblasio, to
his credit, brought her over to become the sanitation commissioner,
and she's done a fantastic job continuing the programs or
developed on the bloomberginistration and implementing her own programs.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
Someone told me that dumpster divers as people call them,
people who are going into the waste stream and taking
out recyclables for their own use to claim the money,
is hurting the city's program. Correct. Correct, The city's relying
on that stuff being available to them to monetize this
whole thing.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
Correct.
Speaker 5 (31:58):
That's one of the cure things about people saying that
recycling doesn't work. In fact, the city Sanitation department has
fifty sanitation police scouring the city trying to stop people
from you stealing recycles.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
People are opening garbage bags in front of my apartment
on those nights that stuffs put up there Monday night
or whatever it is.
Speaker 5 (32:18):
One caveat to that is that it's actually not waste
pickers anymore or homeless people going around. That's what it
still appears to be, but in fact it's organized. So
if you were to follow those guys for a couple
of blocks, you'll see that they end up at a
very large truck with.
Speaker 2 (32:34):
About there had a union, they got a union.
Speaker 5 (32:35):
Now they're coming in from Jersey, they're coming in from Westchester,
and they fan people out. They go cut bags, take
the material, put it in their trucks, and they drive
it out of the city and sell it. And that's
a major problem for the City of New York for
two reasons. One is that's revenue that's supposed.
Speaker 2 (32:49):
To go to the city.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
Number one relying on that, yeah.
Speaker 5 (32:51):
Number two is it impacts our ability to do reporting
and understand how successful the program is because the numbers
end up going down and then people will say, oh, see,
recycling's not working in Park Slope or the Upper west Side.
The numbers are low. It's like, no, no, actually it's
working incredibly well.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
Someone's stealing all the procts know to go there right now?
Do you believe if they if everything went went I mean,
I mean, I know this is a fantasy, but let's
play it out anyway, and that is that restaurants and
delis markets, Starbucks type of takeout places and everything where
there's a big, big flow of recyclable heart plastics and
so forth like that. Let's say they all participated in
(33:28):
the program better and everybody was more conscientious and people
recycled properly, and we didn't have the bad commingling, and
let's say everything got better. Could the city handle that flow?
Speaker 5 (33:41):
The city could absolutely handle that flow. Under the Bloomberg administration,
a lot of money was invested in the infrastructure around recycling.
All that being said, the most important thing today is
what you're referring to, which is people need to get
the message that when you throw paper, metal, gloss and
plastic in the garbage, which that costs the city money.
(34:02):
And I'm not interested in subsidizing your laziness.
Speaker 2 (34:05):
You you don't want to put it in the.
Speaker 5 (34:06):
Recycling but no problem, but you got to You got
to pay the tab Number one. Number two is if
you see somebody just throw something on the street, you got.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
To say something. Uh.
Speaker 5 (34:17):
And that's that's a really critical part of actually making
this better is there's a lot of more money that
needs to be spent, there's a lot of innovation that
needs to come into place, but the messaging also needs
to change, and the expectation of people needs to change.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
Give me an example of some city around the world
where how they're handling their recyclables is commendable.
Speaker 5 (34:35):
Almost any German or Scandinavian city, And what are they
doing that we're not doing?
Speaker 2 (34:41):
Everybody recycles.
Speaker 5 (34:44):
I was meeting with a government official in the Netherlands
and I said to him, how much do you find
somebody when they put something in the recycling bin that
shouldn't be put in there? They put something in the
garbage that's recyclable, so we have no fines, So well,
what do you do when they don't do it correctly?
Speaker 2 (35:00):
Why wouldn't they do it correctly?
Speaker 5 (35:02):
And that's how culturally different we are, is there to
your point? There's that expectation around civics that if you've
been asked to do something for the betterment of your
community society, you do it. So if you look at
communities in Scandinavia, they're doing a great job. In the
United States, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco doing a pretty good job.
New York City and a lot of neighborhoods doing a
(35:23):
great job actually, and a lot of neighborhoods in New
York City.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
What's one thing we're doing, just pick one for the
time being. What's one thing we're doing here across the
country that you'd love to see us stop? First stop doing.
Speaker 5 (35:36):
What allowing companies to manufacture products or packaging that is
not recycled, for example, styrofoam good call. Part of the
communication that needs to come out around this is those
styrophone beads are terrible for the environment. You know what
else are teleb before you? As a tax bank, Why
(35:58):
can't we ask all that? New York City we did
that under the Bloomberg administration. The industry sued, the city countersued.
But the city has been trying for a really long
time to ban.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
Styrifise cities at garverrit of plastic Bags.
Speaker 5 (36:11):
Gyriodp plast Bags, And my point of all this has
always been it's absolutely bad for the environment, but we
need to make sure that people clearly understand the economic argument.
Let's take blocks and bags for an example. New York
City this year will spend twelve million dollars of tax
payer money landfilling plastic bags.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
So if you're the plastic they can't be recycled, can't
be recycled.
Speaker 5 (36:29):
They're trying to recycle only if they're absolutely clean and priesteam.
Speaker 1 (36:32):
You can't steam clean them, you can't put them through
the hot.
Speaker 2 (36:34):
Too expensive to expensive.
Speaker 5 (36:36):
But the point that should be made to the plastic
bag industry is, hey, we don't need to ban these.
You can design, manufacture, sell whatever you want, but if
it's not recyclable, we're not interested in picking up the
cost of senate to a landfill. And we also need
to recognize some of the companies like a Patagony and
some of the other companies out there that have done
a phenomenal job incorporating recycled material into their products and packaging,
(36:59):
and make sure we reward and recognize that.
Speaker 1 (37:01):
So close loop partners, you're a fund that you're helping
to manage. Are they looking for technology to invest in
to kind of replace styrofoam? Are you looking for people
that are going to make the next level of packaging?
Speaker 5 (37:13):
All the time, we scour the country and scour the
world for innovative new materials, innovative technologies. We just invested
in a company called amp Robotics. It's the first artificial
intelligence and robotics company and the recycling industry, We've invested
in a lot of super innovative technologies as well as
just large facilities to recycle material. So we're always looking
(37:36):
for innovation and investments.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
Well, I want to wish you the best of luck
with that, because that's something that everybody's counting on. I mean,
they really are. I just feel like so a lot
of people are sitting home thinking what can I do?
What can I do? When we want to say to people,
just recycle aggressively, don't give up, keep keep doing that,
do it properly. Yes, and hopefully over the next few years,
people like you and the funds you're working with will
(37:59):
replace styrol and it will and replace plastic bags with
things that are fully biodegradable and quicks and we will
get to a place where we can start to reverse
some of the damage, which we are getting very close
to the point where we might not be able to
reverse that. So I'm hoping we will have you come
on the show in a couple of years and you'll
have some fresh and good news for us.
Speaker 2 (38:20):
That would be great.
Speaker 5 (38:23):
You want to get into business with me, If you
want to get into the recycling business, it would be
great to have you.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
I'll leave it to the professionals, but I'm glad there
are people like Ron and Pam Alardo in New York
City making a difference one flush and bottle at a time.
I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought to you
by iHeart Radio.
Hey, it's Alec Baldwin here. Before we launch our next
season of Here's the Thing at iHeartRadio in January, I
thought i'd play some of my favorite shows from the archives.
Next up is Pam Alardo, former Deputy Commissioner of the
Bureau of Wastewater Treatment in New York City. I enjoyed
(00:21):
talking with her about what happens to all the water
that goes down the drain in New York. Also joining
us is Ron Gonan, former Deputy Commissioner of Sanitation, Recycling
and Sustainability aka New York City's first recycling Czar. Enjoy
my conversation with Pam Alardo and Ron Gonan. This is
(00:45):
Alec Baldwin, and you were listening to Here's the Thing
from iHeart Radio. Think about how much waste you generate
every day. The advil bottle, the styrofoam tray for your chicken,
the chicken bone, the toilet, paper tissues, and paper towels
you consume. We're about to get dirty here, so think
(01:06):
of the human waste too. Now multiply that by eight
point five million for all of New York City. That's
one point three billion gallons of wastewater every day. Sixteen
million pounds of trash eight million pounds of recyclables every.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Day of every week.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
Today you'll hear from two of the best people tackling
all that waste after the break. New York City's first
recyclings are but first. Pam Alardo a big name in sewage.
Since last year, she's led New York City's Bureau of
Wastewater Treatment. Mayor Deblasio poached her from Seattle, where she
spearheaded an unprecedented upgrade of that city's wastewater treatment infrastructure.
(01:54):
Why'd you leave Seattle to come here?
Speaker 3 (01:56):
Great question?
Speaker 4 (01:56):
Do you ever look at your life as an older
person and you kind of look at your life as
a third party? Like that wasn't me. But I'm observing
it right, And there's a few things that are foreshadowing.
Like I my both my brothers at one time another
lived in Manhattan, and so I would visit New York frequently, Yeah,
a couple once or twice a year, and I would come,
(02:17):
I would land, I would have a great time.
Speaker 3 (02:18):
I'd be thinking about Holy Cow.
Speaker 4 (02:20):
I can't imagine what it'd be like to work in
New York City with just think about all the pipes
under the street.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
It's crazy. And I would take a tour on the Hudson.
Speaker 4 (02:29):
I would see one of the treatment plants is on
the Hudson up by Harlem, be like, wow, that's a
treatment plant.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
It's huge.
Speaker 4 (02:35):
And then I would get on a plane and I
would fly back to Seattle and go, oh my god,
I don't have any problems here.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
This is easy. There's there's no comparison.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
You know.
Speaker 4 (02:43):
And in Seattle I did great and I plateaued at
the top of my game.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
In the wastewater world.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
There would you one of the Killiman Jarro of wastewater Treatments.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Yeah, yeah you.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
Are, Yeah, the kill him and Jaro of waste Mount Everest.
Speaker 4 (02:54):
Maybe because you know, I used to work in the pall,
so that's kind of where I got my appreciation for
the value of wastewater. In Peace Corps experience. Actually, children
don't make it to their fifth birthdays or their twelfth
birthdays often because of the amount of disease that's out there.
And that's you know, it makes me take my job
seriously because we do save lives every day people, you know,
(03:17):
controlling sanitation, controlling disease that comes from sanitation, that's not
handled properly is what we do and it's the fundamental
reason why we enjoy the quality of life we have.
Fact in point, British Medical Journal did a study in
two thousand and seven about They interviewed hundreds of doctors
what is the biggest medical breakthrough in the laste hundred
(03:38):
and fifty years? What came on top sanitation. It's responsible
for extending lives. It's the biggest reason why, really we
have the kind of quality of healthcare throughout the world,
and living in places where that didn't exist. Talking to
parents whose children died because of dysentery or other diseases
that come from lack of wastewater, you know, that's what
(04:01):
makes me passionate about this stuff. My goal in life
is that everyone should know what happens after they flush
the toilet. Yes, because it is a communal social responsibility,
environmental environmental, public health, and people don't want to think
about it.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
They want it to go away and be gone.
Speaker 4 (04:18):
And we have the luxury in this country for it
to be taken for granted, and it's because we do
such a great job.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
So by and large, are the systems generally in principle
in terms of science and so for that engineering, are
they the same in all major cities where what happens
to water that goes down a sink, down, a shower,
a bathtub, a toilet, It all pretty much just managed
the same way.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
There's there's a variety of technologies. I mean they're that's
a good one.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
Uh.
Speaker 4 (04:44):
Let me just talk about what happens from the beginning
to the end that might be. So let's say you
use your toilet. It goes down out of your house
and then into a local collection line, so there might
be one down your street, and that'll dump into a
larger collection system, which is a larger pipe you just
called it interceptor, and that eventually will take it to
a wastewater treatment plant. And New York City, for example,
(05:06):
we have fourteen wastewater treatment plants. We have ninety six
pumping station big.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
So the pumping stations continue to force the material and
the liquid and everything whatever's down there down toward.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
The train plant. So we at the tream plant.
Speaker 4 (05:18):
Moving water is expensive and going by gravity is always cheaper.
So where there's a hill, we take advantage of the hill,
but at some lower points we always have to elevate
it and get it back to gravity, so we can
flow it to the treatment plants. Very expensive the pumping system.
So when it gets to the treatment plant, the first
step there is a screen. There are bar screens are
about half to three quarter inch spacing, and they collect
(05:40):
trash things that people should not be flushing on the
toilet like wipes, baby wipes, facial wipes, dental floss.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
All that stuff gets it gets stuck, get stuck.
Speaker 4 (05:49):
And if it weren't trapped there, it's actually on the way.
It messes up a lot of the pumping systems because
we have so much of this material, So we take
it out there. We spend about seven million dollars a
year just in land filling the trash to people flush.
And then it goes to some kind of grit removal
to move remove like sand and chunks of rock, and
(06:11):
then to a primary sedimentation basin that allow solids, in
organic solids for the most part that are suspended to
settle onto the bottom. And it also has skimmers on
the top that takes grease off the top. So that
goes to a solid treatment system. And then the next step,
and this is the fascinating world of biology. The next
step we use a community of bacteria that actually digests
(06:34):
the suspended organic material and clean the water.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
Via that method, you're bringing things in that it will consume.
Speaker 4 (06:40):
It is food, right, And from there it goes to
another settling tank where we settle out the biomass that
just consumed all this organic matter. But the water that
comes out of the final settling tank gets disinfection basically
household bleached to take any particular pathogens out, and that
gets either discharged to receiving water or in some cases
(07:00):
in some cities they're able to polish a little bit
more easy for irrigation purposes, especially in the arid Southwest.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
And you said, what happens to it here?
Speaker 3 (07:08):
What happens to here?
Speaker 4 (07:09):
It gets discharged deeply into the surrounding water bodies after
getting cleaned up. You might have noticed. And I'm taking
credit for this, and all the people who work in
the Bureau of Wastewater Treatment can eighteen hundred people. We
take credit for the whales coming back because because of
the work that they do twenty four to seven and
the experience and skill those whales have been able to
(07:30):
come back into as.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
Ort of is discharged deep into the neighboring waters, it's
that clean, very clean. And what about the solids? Where
were human waste solids? Where does that salid?
Speaker 4 (07:40):
So the solids are basically the bacteria that's settled out
as well as the solids we collected in the primary basins,
and that gets thickened and then it goes to a
anaerobic treatment process.
Speaker 3 (07:53):
So if you're in Brooklyn and you.
Speaker 4 (07:55):
See those big eggs shaped metal eggs, those are actually
digesters and those are heated to ninety eight degrees and
within that we're using an anaerobic bacteria, so bacteria that
live without oxygen, and they'll digest those solids even more.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
And then that is a valuable fertilizer product. So it's
a very viable product.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
So who sells it?
Speaker 3 (08:15):
It's called bioslids.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
Now in New York's biosolize. Yes, I'm thinking of like
a conveyor belt, like a giant brownie is coming off there.
Where does it go?
Speaker 3 (08:24):
Every day?
Speaker 4 (08:25):
About fourteen hundred wet tons we create of biosolids. Now,
it's no only great because it's a great resource that
we don't want to waste, but it returns carbon to
the soil and you actually can run a wastewater treatment
plant at carbon neutral because of all the carbon benefit,
we have the sequestration benefit from that bioslids product.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
Now, another thing I think that occurs to me is
that there's auto mechanics, and there's places where work is
being done and chemicals of every fashion are being used
to clean parts and cleaning solvents and motor oil just
to pick one industry. I'm not even talking about, you know,
PCBs up the Hudson from ge and the fifty, that
(09:05):
kind of thing going into the Hudson River. I'm talking
about right here in New York in restaurants. Every time
somebody washes their hair, and every time somebody dyes their
hair in a beauty salon. All this stuff is going
down the drain. What's the process that removes all those chemicals?
Speaker 4 (09:20):
So some of those chemicals break down very easily. They're
biodegraded quickly within the plant. They respond to the biological
conditions within the wastewater plant, and you won't find traces
of it in the effluent. Some of them break down
into different types of chemicals, pharmaceuticals, right, you'll get you know,
people have chemotherapy. You know that waste from their bodies
(09:41):
might even end up in the treatm plant system, and
you can't get all that no, and so there are microcontaminants.
So there is some studies about potentially ecological impacts from
some of those micro pollutants. We don't see that in
the scale of New York City. The water bodies here
are well flushing. If a wastewater chili charging to a
small lake, for example, you're going to have much stricter
(10:04):
standards on that end.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
You know, it's interesting. I'm a strong environmentalist.
Speaker 4 (10:10):
I have been my entire life since third grade, as
a matter of fact, and I care about trying to
do the best we can by nature and get us
back to nature the best we can. We live in
a world that's got plastics and papers and also so
many things. We're really we're really doing a fantastic job
and eliminating the risk to the environment into health. And
(10:33):
as monitoring and chemistry gets better, we can get down
to lower and lower concentrations and we're going to learn
a lot more about ways that we can make it better.
But today we're just miles ahead of where we've been.
Speaker 3 (10:45):
And when I'm.
Speaker 1 (10:45):
Safe to say that it's been about environmentalism for you, Yeah,
and an environmental environmental work.
Speaker 4 (10:50):
I became an environmentalist in third grade and I'm still environmentalist.
It kills me now that some environmental groups think I'm
a polluter. I'm a very practical environmentalist. We've we're spending
public money. We've got to be good to the dollar
and make sure that we're doing the most effective way.
There's not an unlimited amount of money.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
What would you say, what's the Mercedes Benz, what's the
Rolls Royce of? For lack of a better way of
putting of wastewater management around the world? Who has a
Mercedes over us?
Speaker 4 (11:17):
So let me Wastewater treatment, like many things, is an evolution, right.
The Cadillac version depends on the situation you're in now.
Back when everybody were farmers and people did not live
in concentrated cities, it didn't matter that people pooped in
the field. Use pitler trenes, maybe, no big deal. As
(11:40):
we started to get closer together, we started to evolve
techniques for dealing with they well, they had collection systems,
and prior to the nineteen thirties in New York City
and prior to probably the nineteen fifties, and even the
nineteen seventies and the rest of the world. The whole
driver towards wastewater treatment was to get it from people.
(12:00):
So they put a pipe in the ground and you
got it to the nearest water body, and that was
totally fine. But when the cities got bigger and people
were more concentrated, we said, look, we got to start
training it. First treatment plants in New York City were
Coney Island, Jamaica Bay, places where people were record from
at the beach right, And that's what drove those early
early investments around the turn of the last century and
(12:22):
the very first treatment plants, and that was just primary
treatment systems. After more and more people started using treatment
or using wastewater and conglomerting in large groups, the Federal
EPA said nineteen seventy two, everyone's going to do the
secondary treatment part, which is that biological system.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
And so that's now the standard to United States.
Speaker 4 (12:44):
Some places are treating to the extent where they can
drink it directly. And then is Singapore, and they what
they do is they do everything it just described, add
additional filtration and then a reverse osmosis, which is very
very fine filtration to create drinkable water. The city has
(13:04):
strict difficult a lot of difficulties, strict limitations on the
amount of water that can come to their city freshwater,
so they create water.
Speaker 1 (13:12):
Yeah, but you started your education in nineteen seventy nine.
Not a lot of women were doing this kind of work,
were they.
Speaker 4 (13:18):
I think I was like the first quote wave of
women in engineering, which the wave has never grown.
Speaker 3 (13:25):
I think it's kind of fat.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
You know.
Speaker 4 (13:27):
My high school advisor, who was advising about college, told
me I can't be an engineer because that was a
man's job. Flat out told me that. And my response was,
I'm not going to listen to you. If you told
that to one hundred girls, there might be eighty of
them who said, oh, okay, no, you know what I'm saying,
and that you know.
Speaker 3 (13:46):
That's too bad.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
You went to college.
Speaker 4 (13:47):
I went to college, my undergraduate Northwestern University, got a
chemical engineering degree back in nineteen eighty three. You're in
the technology building, the engineering building. You can't find a
woman's bathroom. You got to go to where the secretaries.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
That you know it was. It was frustrating.
Speaker 4 (14:03):
You know, the forms all started out mister period than blank.
It wasn't like you get to choose. I'm like, come on,
you can update this stuff. They're like, oh, we don't
want to waste paper. I don't care, you know, so
stuff like that. It wold and some of the older
professors are just their minds were blown. But you know,
I just had the calling and I what I did,
I think was imprinted in third grade.
Speaker 3 (14:24):
To be honest, what was it about it.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
That intrigued you? Just the problem solving them?
Speaker 4 (14:28):
No, in third grade, I had a student teacher, you know,
probably I was probably eight, so this person was twenty
twenty two, taught us about environmental science.
Speaker 3 (14:38):
Changed my life that day forward.
Speaker 4 (14:41):
I said, I want to learn this, I want to
know about I want to fight polluters. I want to
make the world a clean, healthy place. That commercial with
the people throwing trash on the ground and there's a
Native American person standing here.
Speaker 3 (14:53):
I mean, that was what I was all about.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
Well, that's the difference in New York to me now.
I mean I got my first home here in nineteen
seventy nine, and in the years that I've lived in
New York, New York is a lot dirtier, and New
Yorkers are a lot dirtier. How does New York strike
you when you got here and you saw the amount
of stuff going into those screens compared to Seattle.
Speaker 4 (15:13):
I've noticed things like there's a trash can sitting on
the corner. Somebody walks by throws their plastic bottle on
the street. I don't get that. I do notice too.
I have a dog. I pick up my dog poop.
I put it in a plastic A lot of people
don't do that, right.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
I want to do a video for you. I want
to do a video for the Department of Sanitation Wastewater Management.
Alec wants you to know when you flush the toilet,
let's keep the diapers, coloss of your read and the condoms.
Let's okay, let's be an equal opportunity. Fingerpoint to hear.
It's the tampoons in the cons.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
They don't break down.
Speaker 4 (15:50):
Poop, pee, puke, toilet paper, four piece that's all we
want to see.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
What's hi. I'm Alec Baldwin here with the four reminding
you of the four p poop, pee, puke and paper.
Speaker 4 (16:02):
I think the more people know what happens after they flush,
the more people are gonna respect what they put down
their toilet and the more the less they're gonna want
to litter. And that's why I really appreciate talking with you,
and I'm so glad you have this interest. It's just
over the top interesting. You're taking pool water and making
it clean.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
New York City's Deputy Commissioner for Wastewater Management, Pam Alardo,
a woman so passionate about her job that we had
to interrupt the interview.
Speaker 3 (16:31):
I'm hitting the table.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
Don't mash your hands in the table. I think it
even says here that you are from an Italian Catholic
factory town. Are you an Italian Catholic? Yes, absolutely right, Well,
then sub pounding on the table and the Italian Catholics too,
you can help it. Waste management, with all its implications
for our health and the health of the planet, is
(16:52):
still about politics. Like everything else. We can't fix the
problem if we don't elect leaders who devote their resources
and enforce the rules. And nobody, nobody was better at
gaming that system and getting us to vote his way
than Ed Rollins, Ronald Reagan's brilliant and controversial campaign manager.
When Democrats go out and say I want you to
(17:14):
turn out your churches, your bus drivers all the rest
of it. We go out and say, here's the payday
you would normally get. Just you know, don't turn your
vote out. I know the game. I know how to
make it work. And part of the reason I know
the game is I was trained as a Democrat. More
from Ed Rollins at Here's Thething dot org after the Break.
New York City's original recyclings are former Deputy Commissioner for
(17:37):
Sustainability and Recycling Ron Gonan. By'm Alec Baldwin and you
were listening to Here's the Thing. Ron Gonan is a
capitalist even a hippie could love. In two thousand and four,
he founded a recycling startup that grewed be worth hundreds
(18:01):
of millions of dollars. Now he runs a group of
investment funds dedicated to new ideas in recycling. In between
those two jobs, he was hand picked by Mayor Bloomberg
to be the city's first recycling czar. But when he
walked into the studio, he didn't look like someone who
could have had all that on his resume. You're so young,
(18:21):
I mean, how old were you? Ten years old and
work for the Bloomberg administration.
Speaker 5 (18:24):
I joined the administration around was thirty seven. I'm about
to turn forty three.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
Okay, But Gonan got a very early start. As a kid,
he cleaned houses and babysit to help his mom out
with the bills. One day, he ended up in the
house of one of the pioneers of the sustainability movement,
architect Paul Mocked.
Speaker 5 (18:43):
I met Paul Mocked when I was in seventh grade.
Probably the most important thing that happened to me in
my will tell me about this. I grew up with
a single mom, lower middle class neighborhood in Philly, got
a sports scholarship, financial light opportunity to go to a
great private school called Germantown Academy. But needed to get
a job because I needed to earn someone for my tuition,
and started working for Paul and his wife.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
This is the late eighties.
Speaker 5 (19:05):
Early nineties, and I was doing everything from babysitting to housework.
But he would talk to me about what he was
doing over dinner. He gave me a book called Cradle
to Cradle, the first book around circular economy. He would
talk to me about these issues. I was really I
was blessed to be around someone like that. So oftentimes
people will come to me and say how do you
start these ventures and say, I've been thinking about this
(19:27):
stuff for twenty twenty five years.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
And the first recycling company was what.
Speaker 5 (19:32):
A friend from high school approached me with a concept
of could we pay people for recycling? And that's what
I ultimately became Recycle Bank. I ended up building the
business model and developing the software for my first recycling company.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
I'm a recycling I'm not going to say nut but
I take it very seriously. And even if recycling it's
just an exercise, people want to believe they can participate
to make things better. I'm like, don't discourage that, but
is it just an exercise or it's not.
Speaker 5 (19:59):
As far as you're concerned, it's absolutely not just an exercise.
Recycling has tremendous environmental value in terms of resource protection.
It also has tremendous economic value to you as a taxpayer,
and that's part of the message that oftentimes doesn't get out.
So I appreciate that you have great spirit behind recycling.
You should keep that, but also feel good about the
(20:20):
fact that you're doing something really important for the environment
and something really important for your city.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
When those bags of recyclables hit the street, where do
they go?
Speaker 5 (20:28):
All of the metal, plastic, and glass goes to a
recycling facility in Brooklyn called SIMS Metal Management. They actually
have a phenomenal education program there, so I highly recommend
folks to go to see the SIMS facility. And they
also get fifty percent of the paper. The other fifty
percent of the paper goes to Pratt Recycling out in
Staten Island, and that paper then goes over to a
(20:50):
mill right next door that Pratt owns and has turned
into pizza boxes that then get resold right back into
the New York City economy.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
The box that it comes in was your New York Times.
Could be was you were a New Yorker magazine a
couple a couple months ago, could be that's amazing.
Speaker 5 (21:03):
Could BET's let's break it down to brass economics. If
you threw that paper in the garbage, the city would
be paying one hundred dollars a ton to export it
to a landfill. If you put it in your recycling bin,
the city will get paid a minimum of ten dollars
a ton, So there's one hundred and ten dollars swing there.
Then it will go over to a New York City
business and employees. People in New York City turn it
(21:24):
into a pizza box.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
What's the stuff the city collects and what don't they collect?
What are some of the biggest misconceptions.
Speaker 5 (21:29):
So for recycling, the city collects dry paper and cardboard,
aluminum and metal, all glass, an all rigid plastic like
a Fiji bottle, exactly, So any plastic that's rigid goes
into the city's recycling program. A plastic a plastic that's
flexible like a bag or plastic wrapping, does not.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
You mean, so like a cup from Starbucks can go
in there.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
A paper cup from Starbucks can go in there.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
There's not a plastic cup.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
No, a plastic cup can because a plastic cups has.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
Rigidity too, correct, So any formed plastic like cups so forth,
the city will take that exactly well, and the city
exempts those businesses from doing their recycling themselves. Well, Starbucks
is not obligated to recycle.
Speaker 5 (22:09):
So the city currently collects all residential recycling, so they
collect from every home in the city, not the businesses.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
Not the businesses.
Speaker 5 (22:17):
The businesses are responsible to contract for their own waste
and recycling collection independently.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
Does Starbucks recycle.
Speaker 5 (22:25):
They that's a so so right, So they're not obligated to.
They technically are obligated. What the city is working on
is a better enforcement system to make sure that everyone
actually is recycling. One of the challenges in New York
City sometimes you have so many businesses, the enforcement cost
of checking on every business is very expensive.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
Starbucks could be doing a better job.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
We're the recycling bins on the street, I don't see
very I've seen some of them by Washington Square Park.
Speaker 5 (22:50):
Work live, especially in Manhattan. If you just look around,
you'll see there the metallic looking bins with a green
top and a blue top, and the blue top is
for your metal, glass and plastic, and the green top
is for your paper.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
Talk to me about a timeline to your knowledge about
this movement over the last fifty years or forty years,
I mean, before you got started with Bloomberg, What was recycling?
What was the dawn of recycling in this country? And
is there somebody who's the mother or father of that
to your knowledge?
Speaker 2 (23:21):
Sure, it's a good question.
Speaker 5 (23:22):
So up until the early nineteen hundreds, Americans didn't waste
things because there wasn't that much packaging recycling really became
necessary when a lot of packaging came along. Now, up
until the nineteen thirties and forties, in New York City,
Department of Sanitation legally collected everything, including all of our
bodily waste and whatever waste there was, and just dumped
(23:44):
it in the East River. At the Department Sanitation, we
literally have pictures of our trucks lined up on the
East River dumping garbage, dumping garbage in there. Then you
started seeing more and more consumption come along and more
and more packaging. With World War Two, however, there was
such a huge need for raw resources that America did
an amazing job recycling up until and during.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
This part of the war, effort exactly waste exactly.
Speaker 5 (24:11):
Post World War Two, you actually saw a major divergence
between what was what York was doing where they were
very poor in the fifties, sixties and seventies, They were
rebuilding their economies and countries and they had very little land,
so recycling was critical to their economy to what you
saw in America in the fifties and sixties and seventies,
which is people moved out to the suburbs, there was
no collection infrastructure, the concept of more and more and
(24:34):
more as a status symbol became very important to people,
and recycling took a back seat. And then you saw
an emergence of it again in the nineteen eighties and
nineties and through today.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
We're taking a break. Stay with us now. When you
started with Bloomberg, which was in twenty twelve, I believe
he had been in office for how long by then
(25:07):
he'd been nine years? He was there already there for
quite a while. And give some insight into what made
him want to hire a recycling czar, What did he
see and what pressures you think were brought on him
to take this to another level.
Speaker 5 (25:24):
He had a deputy mayor named Cass Holloway, who, when
he came in too be deputy mayor, looked around and said,
New York City taxpayer spent four hundred million dollars a
year exporting waste to out of state landfills. We have
recycling companies in New York City that will pay the
city for that material. What is going on here? I
(25:44):
want to get someone in here who can fix this system.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
Turn it into a business exactly.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
And that's what I was brought in to do.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
Why do you think Bloomberg chose you.
Speaker 5 (25:55):
People associate me with being very left progressive but had
some successes as an entrepreneur, and the waste guys were
comfortable with me. So I sort of fit everybody's everybody's criteria.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
And how did you start?
Speaker 5 (26:08):
Infrastructure and communication? So in infrastructure, we started rolling out
containers all over the streets to make sure that there's
infrastructure collect material. But people would also see recycling bins.
We made sure that all rigid plastics could be accepted,
so people didn't have to worry about can I put
this in? Connect put that in? That was the first
thing we did. The next thing we did was start
(26:28):
focusing on food waste and organics, because food waste represents
about forty percent of what we landfill, and we started
rolling out a curbside organics program. There's about two hundred
and fifty thousand homes in New York City today that
get their food waste collected separately. The city will be
citywide with the program within two years, and all New
York City public schools now separate out their food waste.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
Is it safe to say, therefore, that you would discourage
people from putting their compostables in their organics into the
garbage disposal.
Speaker 5 (26:57):
That's not bad. That's actually much much better than putting
in the garbage. But there's something even better that we
could be doing, which is collecting the food waste separately
and turning it into clean natural gas locally, which the
city started doing on the Bloomberg is now expanding.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
Describe how that happened. You take that, you collect that
bround bin and it goes where.
Speaker 5 (27:16):
There's a process called anaerobic digestion. Anaerobic digestion converts food
waste into gas. If MIMX goes into yours, where there's
one anaerobic digester right now in the city, which is
at the wastewater treatment facility out in Green Point, all
the food waste goes there and it gets put through
the anaerobic digester.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
The gas is generated and right.
Speaker 5 (27:35):
Now it's pumped right into the grid. Ten twenty years
from now, people are going to look back and scratch
their head and say, let me get this straight. New
York City was spending two hundred million dollars a year
to pay to export food waste to out of state landfills.
That can't be possible because what we do with it
today is we use it to generate fuel for our
(27:56):
city vehicles and gas for our homes.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
That's what they do. What were people thinking, is that
where they do?
Speaker 5 (28:00):
Yeah, well, today it's generating gas that's going into the grid.
I'll give you a forecast. Ten years from now, New
York City will be picking up food wasts, driving it
to the anaerobic digester, dumping it going ten feet away,
and refilling their gas tank from the gas that was
generating from the food waste that they dropped off the
day before.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
You think it'll become a break even proposition or better
or you always be losing money on that.
Speaker 5 (28:23):
Probably you'll always be making The city will be making
hundreds of millions of dollars off of it, because right
now the city is spending two hundred million dollars a
year to export.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
It to land stuff just doing the organics exactly.
Speaker 5 (28:35):
So if you don't make any money on the process,
you don't make any money on the sale of the gas,
you've saved yourself two hundred million dollars.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
Now, when you have ten thousand restaurants or whatever it is,
you're always hearing different figures twelve thousand and fifteen thousand.
I don't even know anymore. What do you need to
do to get them to comply? How do you do it?
Is it a law you make? I'm sure they're going
to fight like hell against that, aren't that? There's no
law now that for there's a law that forced them
to separate their organics.
Speaker 5 (29:03):
That the Bloomberg administration passed legislation that the Blas administration
is now continuing that by certain years, all food service
generators in New York City, by law, are banned from
sending that food waste to landfill. This year it came
into practice with all large food service generators that the stadiums,
(29:23):
that's the universities, that's the large kitchens. The great news
is there are some restaurants in New York City that
recognize that they can run their business more efficiently if
they can send their food waste to an anaerobic digestor
rather than paying to send it to landfill. And we
had some great, great restaurant owners or early adopters who said, hey,
(29:45):
we want to do this, Prademanje. You will see a
compost bin right in every single process.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
So has it been It's been successful. It's been successful.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
What do you think we're not doing that. We should
do what's the next level for recycling.
Speaker 5 (30:00):
Great news about recycling is the money is there because
we're already spending it sticking the stuff in a hole.
So there's a lot of opportunity the Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania,
South Carolina, and Ohio. But there's a senator, Senator Casey
in Pennsylvania that he's trying desperately to get legislation passed
(30:20):
to enable Pennsylvania to stop the importation of garbage. He
runs into you can't legislate against interstate commerce. But New
York City's got a big problem if other states say
we don't want your trucks, we don't.
Speaker 2 (30:33):
Want your garbage.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
Does the city have a plan for that?
Speaker 5 (30:35):
No, the only plan for that is recycle. Right, eighty
percent of what's in the New York City waste stream
can be recycled. Anybody who talks about recycling doesn't work.
We shouldn't be recycling. They're living in an alternate universe.
Speaker 1 (30:48):
So why are they saying that? You think obviously there's
a business interest involved. What business interests are they representing?
Speaker 2 (30:53):
What they say that, there's a few interests.
Speaker 5 (30:54):
There's the landfill business, interest, Right, there's the interest of
the companies that export this out of the city, and
then you've got some political interests of folks that like
to pupoo anything to do with the environment. But they're
all living in an alternate universe because if you don't
recycle where you plan and to put the stuff.
Speaker 1 (31:12):
How has Deblasio done in terms of upholding this process
that Bloomberg installed.
Speaker 5 (31:20):
He's done a good job that most of the credit
goes to the sanitation commissioner, Commissioner Garcia. She was the
chief operating officer of Deep under Bloomberg, and Deblasio, to
his credit, brought her over to become the sanitation commissioner,
and she's done a fantastic job continuing the programs or
developed on the bloomberginistration and implementing her own programs.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
Someone told me that dumpster divers as people call them,
people who are going into the waste stream and taking
out recyclables for their own use to claim the money,
is hurting the city's program. Correct. Correct, The city's relying
on that stuff being available to them to monetize this
whole thing.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
Correct.
Speaker 5 (31:58):
That's one of the cure things about people saying that
recycling doesn't work. In fact, the city Sanitation department has
fifty sanitation police scouring the city trying to stop people
from you stealing recycles.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
People are opening garbage bags in front of my apartment
on those nights that stuffs put up there Monday night
or whatever it is.
Speaker 5 (32:18):
One caveat to that is that it's actually not waste
pickers anymore or homeless people going around. That's what it
still appears to be, but in fact it's organized. So
if you were to follow those guys for a couple
of blocks, you'll see that they end up at a
very large truck with.
Speaker 2 (32:34):
About there had a union, they got a union.
Speaker 5 (32:35):
Now they're coming in from Jersey, they're coming in from Westchester,
and they fan people out. They go cut bags, take
the material, put it in their trucks, and they drive
it out of the city and sell it. And that's
a major problem for the City of New York for
two reasons. One is that's revenue that's supposed.
Speaker 2 (32:49):
To go to the city.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
Number one relying on that, yeah.
Speaker 5 (32:51):
Number two is it impacts our ability to do reporting
and understand how successful the program is because the numbers
end up going down and then people will say, oh, see,
recycling's not working in Park Slope or the Upper west Side.
The numbers are low. It's like, no, no, actually it's
working incredibly well.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
Someone's stealing all the procts know to go there right now?
Do you believe if they if everything went went I mean,
I mean, I know this is a fantasy, but let's
play it out anyway, and that is that restaurants and
delis markets, Starbucks type of takeout places and everything where
there's a big, big flow of recyclable heart plastics and
so forth like that. Let's say they all participated in
(33:28):
the program better and everybody was more conscientious and people
recycled properly, and we didn't have the bad commingling, and
let's say everything got better. Could the city handle that flow?
Speaker 5 (33:41):
The city could absolutely handle that flow. Under the Bloomberg administration,
a lot of money was invested in the infrastructure around recycling.
All that being said, the most important thing today is
what you're referring to, which is people need to get
the message that when you throw paper, metal, gloss and
plastic in the garbage, which that costs the city money.
(34:02):
And I'm not interested in subsidizing your laziness.
Speaker 2 (34:05):
You you don't want to put it in the.
Speaker 5 (34:06):
Recycling but no problem, but you got to You got
to pay the tab Number one. Number two is if
you see somebody just throw something on the street, you got.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
To say something. Uh.
Speaker 5 (34:17):
And that's that's a really critical part of actually making
this better is there's a lot of more money that
needs to be spent, there's a lot of innovation that
needs to come into place, but the messaging also needs
to change, and the expectation of people needs to change.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
Give me an example of some city around the world
where how they're handling their recyclables is commendable.
Speaker 5 (34:35):
Almost any German or Scandinavian city, And what are they
doing that we're not doing?
Speaker 2 (34:41):
Everybody recycles.
Speaker 5 (34:44):
I was meeting with a government official in the Netherlands
and I said to him, how much do you find
somebody when they put something in the recycling bin that
shouldn't be put in there? They put something in the
garbage that's recyclable, so we have no fines, So well,
what do you do when they don't do it correctly?
Speaker 2 (35:00):
Why wouldn't they do it correctly?
Speaker 5 (35:02):
And that's how culturally different we are, is there to
your point? There's that expectation around civics that if you've
been asked to do something for the betterment of your
community society, you do it. So if you look at
communities in Scandinavia, they're doing a great job. In the
United States, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco doing a pretty good job.
New York City and a lot of neighborhoods doing a
(35:23):
great job actually, and a lot of neighborhoods in New
York City.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
What's one thing we're doing, just pick one for the
time being. What's one thing we're doing here across the
country that you'd love to see us stop? First stop doing.
Speaker 5 (35:36):
What allowing companies to manufacture products or packaging that is
not recycled, for example, styrofoam good call. Part of the
communication that needs to come out around this is those
styrophone beads are terrible for the environment. You know what
else are teleb before you? As a tax bank, Why
(35:58):
can't we ask all that? New York City we did
that under the Bloomberg administration. The industry sued, the city countersued.
But the city has been trying for a really long
time to ban.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
Styrifise cities at garverrit of plastic Bags.
Speaker 5 (36:11):
Gyriodp plast Bags, And my point of all this has
always been it's absolutely bad for the environment, but we
need to make sure that people clearly understand the economic argument.
Let's take blocks and bags for an example. New York
City this year will spend twelve million dollars of tax
payer money landfilling plastic bags.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
So if you're the plastic they can't be recycled, can't
be recycled.
Speaker 5 (36:29):
They're trying to recycle only if they're absolutely clean and priesteam.
Speaker 1 (36:32):
You can't steam clean them, you can't put them through
the hot.
Speaker 2 (36:34):
Too expensive to expensive.
Speaker 5 (36:36):
But the point that should be made to the plastic
bag industry is, hey, we don't need to ban these.
You can design, manufacture, sell whatever you want, but if
it's not recyclable, we're not interested in picking up the
cost of senate to a landfill. And we also need
to recognize some of the companies like a Patagony and
some of the other companies out there that have done
a phenomenal job incorporating recycled material into their products and packaging,
(36:59):
and make sure we reward and recognize that.
Speaker 1 (37:01):
So close loop partners, you're a fund that you're helping
to manage. Are they looking for technology to invest in
to kind of replace styrofoam? Are you looking for people
that are going to make the next level of packaging?
Speaker 5 (37:13):
All the time, we scour the country and scour the
world for innovative new materials, innovative technologies. We just invested
in a company called amp Robotics. It's the first artificial
intelligence and robotics company and the recycling industry, We've invested
in a lot of super innovative technologies as well as
just large facilities to recycle material. So we're always looking
(37:36):
for innovation and investments.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
Well, I want to wish you the best of luck
with that, because that's something that everybody's counting on. I mean,
they really are. I just feel like so a lot
of people are sitting home thinking what can I do?
What can I do? When we want to say to people,
just recycle aggressively, don't give up, keep keep doing that,
do it properly. Yes, and hopefully over the next few years,
people like you and the funds you're working with will
(37:59):
replace styrol and it will and replace plastic bags with
things that are fully biodegradable and quicks and we will
get to a place where we can start to reverse
some of the damage, which we are getting very close
to the point where we might not be able to
reverse that. So I'm hoping we will have you come
on the show in a couple of years and you'll
have some fresh and good news for us.
Speaker 2 (38:20):
That would be great.
Speaker 5 (38:23):
You want to get into business with me, If you
want to get into the recycling business, it would be
great to have you.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
I'll leave it to the professionals, but I'm glad there
are people like Ron and Pam Alardo in New York
City making a difference one flush and bottle at a time.
I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought to you
by iHeart Radio.
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