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The administration's new waste-management plan represents an important step in the right direction. It deserves to be approved. But it also deserves to be improved in a number of strategic ways that will make it truly cost-effective in the long run. Getting control of the facilities where our waste will ultimately be disposed of is the most critical of these strategic objectives.
Since the Fresh Kills landfill closed in 2001, New York, for the first time in its history, has depended on facilities in other states for the disposal of most of the 50,000 tons of solid waste it produces every day. The quarter of this material that the city's Sanitation Department collects is handed off to a highly organized private waste-disposal industry, in which a handful of firms own most of the country's available landfill capacity.
The per-ton fee charged by these not-so-benevolent oligopolists has increased, since the city started shipping garbage out of town in 1997, from $54 to $75 per ton—40 percent in seven years--while the fees paid by private businesses have increased by 50 percent. This steady climb, which affects not just New Yorkers but all our neighbors on the eastern seaboard who share access to the same landfills we use, is projected to continue in the decades ahead. To keep up with increase in cost, the city would have to lay off 300 or so full-time municipal workers every year.
If the sellers' market we blindly walked into with the unplanned closure of Fresh Kills were not enough, the severely tried patience of government officials in other states—New York State exports more refuse to place in landfills out-of-state than it puts in those within its own capacious boundaries—will further decrease our options. In 2002, Pennsylvania (which accepts roughly half of our waste) imposed a $4 per ton tax on all waste entering its landfills; in 2004 Governor Edward Rendell proposed increasing that tax by another $5 per ton.
After the announcement of Fresh Kills' impending closure, Virginia passed a law forbidding the import of out-of-state waste. That law was promptly struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, as all such prior attempts had been, as a violation of the constitution's interstate commerce clause. But the failure of local initiatives does not preclude the eventual passage of some federal measure to limit the interstate shipment of waste, something that Congress in the last decades has seriously considered doing.
Moreover, there are perfectly legal means of excluding other states' waste—all that is required is having the public sector assume control over landfills, as Rhode Island and Delaware have done, or promulgating regulations that restrict the development of new landfill capacity, as South Carolina has. While it is not likely that New York's access to out-of-state landfills will be completely closed in the foreseeable future, it is inevitable that over time the export window will be narrowed. And equally inevitably, this will mean that disposal prices will increase even further.
The only viable long-term solution to this problem—as a compelling report (in pdf format) issued last week by City Comptroller Bill Thompson makes clear—is to develop or procure public waste disposal capacity, preferably in New York State, but wherever it is available on a cost-effective basis and easily accessible by the barges or railcars that impose much lower environmental and economic costs than trucks do.
And while some of this must be landfills (since there will always be some waste that cannot be managed in any other way), we also should use waste-to-energy facilities, which produce fewer adverse environmental impacts do landfills and are more cost-effective. (This is why the portion of the administration's recently released plan (in pdf format) that involves a long-term government-to-government contract for continued access to the Newark incinerator that already processes much of Manhattan's waste is a particularly good idea.)
While we are developing or procuring this publicly controlled waste-disposal capacity, there are other immediate steps we should be taking to reduce the volume of waste we must export and the cost of transporting it to its remote disposal locations.
One of these steps, as the comptroller's report makes clear, is using the city's contracting leverage to directly procure transportation services from the railroads. This is critically important for two reasons. First, if it does not do it, the city will inevitably pay much more—including a significant commission to the waste-industry middleman—than it would pay by negotiating a per-ton-mile transportation-services contract itself. Secondly, the logistical difficulties involved with contracting with the railroads represent a barrier that would exclude many smaller landfill operators, whose bids are essential if we are to enjoy a semblance of free-market competition.
The other thing we should do immediately is develop fair economic incentives for reducing the volume of waste that New Yorkers generate. (We should not try to reduce our waste volumes by using in-sink garbage disposals, either for residences or businesses, since this only increases public-sector costs and adverse environmental impacts.)
The single most effective way to do reduce garbage, as the experience of thousands of U.S. cities demonstrates, is by “metering” waste. Rather than having their waste-management costs buried within the city's general tax structure, New Yorkers would get an upfront deduction on their property-tax bills and would instead pay for having their waste removed by buying special bags or tags or paying on some other volume-based basis. Conscientious householders would thus save money relative to their current hidden tax payments and would no longer have to subsidize the wasteful habits of their neighbors.
Benjamin Miller, author of Fat of the Land: Garbage in New York, the Last Two Hundred Years (Four Walls Eight Windows, 2000), is a senior fellow at the CUNY Institute for Urban Systems.
New Garbage Plan
The major effect of the city's latest Solid Waste Management Plan, announced at a press conference this month by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Department of Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty, is to cut down on truck traffic through the city.
The city seeks to "retool" at least half of the eight "marine transfer stations" that have been largely idle since the closing of Fresh Kills landfill. Trucks have been shipping the garbage to out-of-state landfills since then. Now, sea-going vessels (and railroad cars) will do the shipping. Bloomberg estimated the elimination of at least 625 truck trips daily. "This would result in close to three million fewer truck miles on city streets."
Of course, this is not exactly comprehensive; the mayor's office has yet to find a way to reduce the city's mammoth residential trash load, currently averaging 12,000 tons a day. But the plan would at least reduce fuel consumption and truck-borne exhaust, two environmentally deleterious side-effects of the current trash-exporting system.
For more on this, see The Mayor's New Garbage Plan.
The Flood Next Time
Last month's torrential rains have once again reminded New Yorkers that while hurricanes generally do the bulk of their damage in places like Florida and North Carolina, they can still wreak plenty of havoc this far north. Remnants of Hurricane Ivan managed to shut down a dozen subway lines when flooding tunnels in Brooklyn and Manhattan imperiled the electrified third rail. On Sept. 28, remnants of Hurricane Jeanne disrupted service in a similar fashion out in Queens.
Such flooding leads to the natural question: What would it be like if New York City bore the brunt of the hurricane as opposed to the tail end?
Don't laugh. Two hurricanes hit the city in the 19th century and flooding from the lone 20th Century hurricane, the so-called Great Storm of 1938, killed more than 200 people on Long Island and parts of New England. According to Queens College geology professor Nicholas Coch, an expert on historical weather patterns, the city averages one major tropical cyclone a century.
"In the south they get a lot of hurricanes so it's easy to predict," says Coch. "Up here it's less predictable, so the more historical data we can gather, the better idea we have."
While the region may not have as many storms as Florida or North Carolina, those that do make it this far north pack a punch. Coch says the two hurricanes that hit the city in the 19th century most likely would have qualified as category two storms in terms of wind speed (96 to 110 miles per hour) but delivered broad regional damage equivalent to a category three storm.
"[Northern lattitude hurricanes] tend to have a larger wind field, move faster, and create very high surges."
Coch says the angled New York-New Jersey coastline tends to funnel storm energy onto local beaches and harbors. In the case of the city, the Verrazano Narrows acts like a meteorological megaphone, amplifying whatever storm waves make it through. In the 1821 hurricane, water level readings at the Battery showed a 13 foot rise in a single hour. "That was at low tide," Coch notes. "If the storm had hit during high tide, things would have been a lot worse."
New Yorkers who face down a hurricane in the 21st century might not be so lucky, even at low tide. Vivien Gornitz, a Columbia research scientist, studies sea level rise. Currently, she sees local waterways rising at a rate of 2.5 millimeters per year, 50 percent higher than the worldwide average. She expects that rate to accelerate in the coming decades as global warming draws more water out of mountain glaciers and polar pack ice and transfers it to the world's oceans.
"Whatever surge you'd see [in a future hurricane] would be superimposed on a higher sea level," says Gornitz. "With various levels of sea level rise, what we now consider 100 year storms could occur more often."
Put another way, the kind of local flooding that residents and insurance companies could pass off as a once-in-a-lifetime event may soon become a once-a-decade occurrence. Worst case models show a 10 foot rise in sea level, enough to cover the streets of Coney Island, Midland Beach, and Chinatown, hitting with a frequency of once every 5.5 years by 2080, assuming no change in coastal defenses.
Admittedly, 2080 is a long way off. Barring a major hurricane, Gornitz says the effects of climate change will look a lot like last month: Small storms will pack a bigger punch, resulting in more commuter and homeowner hassles and, over the long haul, readjusted flood insurance premiums, zoning and building-code changes designed to limit New Yorkers' flood exposure.
"I don't think it's going to be a sudden calamity," says Gornitz. "It's just going to magnify what we're already seeing."
With all of our focus on the war in Iraq, the upcoming elections, and the administration's ever-vacillating orange and yellow terror alerts, we New Yorkers may not be putting a mundane topic such as pollution very high on our list of worries. But while the problem may not grab our attention like a war, persistent environmental hazards in places like the Bronx are taking the lives of our children just the same.
Policymakers have the power to address these problems, but often seem to lack the will to. In Congress, we need to maintain tough standards and fund research to find technological solutions to environmental problems, while also tackling systemic issues such as access to health care.
The numbers are disturbing: New Yorkers suffer from the worst rates of asthma in the country, with over 10 percent of schoolchildren and more than 6 percent of the total population affected by the chronic respiratory disease. New York, along with Chicago, leads the nation in asthma deaths. Conditions are especially bad in the South Bronx, where 20 to 25 percent of schoolchildren suffer from asthma. Children in the area are hospitalized for asthma at a rate 250 percent higher than the rate for children in the rest of New York City, and 1000 percent higher than the rate for children in New York State as a whole.
South Bronx residents also cope with abnormally high rates of other respiratory illnesses, infant mortality, and immune deficiency disorders, while living in unhealthy conditions and having poorer access to healthcare.
Several local factors contribute to the pollution behind the respiratory illness epidemic. The South Bronx, besides being surrounded by highly trafficked highways, is home to a disproportionate share of the city's waste transfer stations. It is also a center of industrial activity. As a result, diesel trucks are omnipresent, creating dangerous levels of air pollution. The pollution from these trucks has been specifically linked to severe asthma attacks.
In low-income communities, health problems can quickly turn into social ones: Asthma, for example, is the number one cause of student absenteeism in New York City schools.
Since 1998, New York University, with cooperation from the local community, has conducted the South Bronx Environmental Health and Policy Study. The study, which I secured funding for, analyzes the environmental and public health effects associated with living near pollution sources, including waste transfer stations and major expressways.
So far, the study has observed the following:
• Hourly concentrations of diesel exhaust are higher at all of the South Bronx sites that have been tested than at the sites tested in Manhattan.
• Street level air sampling, using the study's mobile van laboratory, reveals that the concentrations of nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and carbon monoxide are substantially higher than samples taken from rooftop monitoring sites. Air pollution is often more severe closer to the ground, and so it is important that it be studied where people actually are (on the ground), rather than just on rooftops, where it has traditionally been measured.
• Levels of most pollutants in the South Bronx are below U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standards, with the exceptions of ozone and particulate matter.
• There is a strong association between zip codes with high asthma rates and those with a high number of industrial facilities, such as the waste transfer stations that are found all across the South Bronx.
The study is still underway. Its findings will help local policymakers better understand the relationship between air pollution and public health in the South Bronx. A series of papers written during the study are available at http://www.house.gov/serrano. Future research will examine demographic variables such as property values, poverty, and median household income to see what kinds of people are more likely to live close to dangerous waste transfer stations.
Students have already helped to disseminate the findings of the air pollution study to community leaders and residents and will continue to do so. These young people are participants in a program for high-school students from the South Bronx that gives them a chance to work with scientists and policy experts in public health and environmental science and to explore career opportunities in these areas.
The findings of the South Bronx Environmental Health and Policy Study underscores how poor people bear a disproportionate share of the burden of our city's air-borne disease. Much needs to be done to address this injustice.
The first step is to enforce the clean air regulations that we already have in place. Unfortunately, the Bush administration has been working to systematically relax the tough standards of the Clean Air Act. While Democrats and some moderate Republicans have tried to challenge the administration in Congress, the Republican leadership of the House and Senate has refused to allow for the tough oversight that our citizens so desperately want and need.
In the most urban of American cities, our children must have access to open spaces where they can play and enjoy nature. But while parks make children's lives healthier and more fun, we should also pursue technological solutions to environmental challenges. Through policy initiatives, government can encourage the private sector to explore these possibilities. Using alternative, cleaner-burning fuels can go a long way in reducing the air pollution that afflicts our communities.
Alternative fuel technology development can also help to create jobs as innovative, more environmentally friendly companies provide economic growth and cleaner products. One of the great myths of our day holds that environmental protection and economic growth are incongruous. The Center for Sustainable Energy at Bronx Community College, which I helped fund, works to dispel that myth, showing the connection between growth and protection through education, training, and community engagement.
Congress needs to do more to combat the devastating effects of air pollution on the health of Americans. To that end, I have sponsored legislation to provide tax credits to businesses that use clean-fuel vehicles in high pollution areas. I have also co-sponsored the "Clean Smokestacks Act of 2003" that would amend the Clean Air Act to require the reduction of emissions from electric power plants. Unfortunately, the Republican Congressional leadership has not allowed these bills to advance through the House.
These are the sorts of measures we need to help reduce the environmental problems in places like the South Bronx. But from Boise to Brooklyn, asthma and other respiratory diseases would not be so damaging if we had universal health care in our country. Disadvantaged Americans are paying for our nation's disparities with their health and their lives. If asthmatics received proper preventative health care, they would be able to better manage their asthma and get access to the medication they so desperately need. Government needs to do more to expand access to health care and to encourage people to use the services already available.
As it stands now, many of our kids only get their asthma treated when it becomes so bad that they have to go to the emergency room. Studies have consistently shown that the amount we pay for emergency room visits costs more than it would to provide better preventive care. For these reasons, as well as in the interests of basic social justice, we must continue to fight to build an America that is not the only industrialized nation in the world without universal health coverage.
The challenges ahead of us are myriad and daunting. But if we truly believe in an America of equal opportunity, we must work to reduce the glaring environmental and health disparities that continue to afflict our needy communities.
José E. Serrano, a Democrat, represents the 16th Congressional District. He serves on the House Appropriations Committee and is a member of the Children's Environmental Health Caucus.
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