James' World 2

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In the 1970s, officials in New York City banned in-sink kitchen garbage disposals over concerns about aging sewer systems and discharge of raw organic refuse into nearby rivers. Paper-waste recycling programs dominated conservation efforts at the time, and a green-waste management solution seemed less urgent without the looming specter of climate change. Plus, disposers weren’t an easy sell: the pulverizing devices were noisy and costly to install, their blades the stuff of kitchen-sink horror. (In fact, garbage disposers don’t use blades at all: spinning “lugs” or impellers use centrifugal force to continuously force food particles into a grind ring, which then liquefies the waste and flushes it into the sewer system.)

According to a 1997 Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) report, only about 25 percent of NYC households had a disposer in 1971. Organic waste was “the next big frontier” for the city, explains former First Deputy Mayor of New York City Norman Steisel, who played a key role in the legalization of garbage disposers during the Dinkins administration (1990-1993), and who served as Sanitation Commissioner for many years. Though Steisel recognized that the city was dependent on landfills and emitting sizable greenhouse gases, the city was still sorting out the details of its recycling program.

Steisel encouraged the Department of Sanitation and the DEP to work together, promoting life-cycle studies that showed both the financial and ecological potential of disposers—research that would shape legislation ultimately passed during the Giuliani administration. The city installed more than 200 of the devices in select city apartments for a 21-month trial run; they then compared apartment units that had disposers with disposer-less units in the same building. Careful analyses from this study and others formed the basis of DEP’s report: the projected impact of citywide disposal legalization was minimal, and the Department estimated a $4 million savings in solid waste export costs.

City officials lifted the ban on garbage disposers in 1997. Twenty years later, though, their adoption is slower here than almost anywhere else in the country. Why are New Yorkers so reluctant to install garbage disposers—and what’s at stake if we continue to dispose all of our trash curbside?

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Photo by Dominic Ebenbichler/Reuters.

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