Omar Freilla

Sitting on 20 Years of Trash

The biggest job creation opportunity you never heard of is sitting on the desk of NYC Council Speaker Christine Quinn. What her priorities will be as Mayor Bloomberg awaits the Council's vote on his 20-year trash plan is anybody's guess. If handled correctly, Quinn could pull off what her predecessor's election-season ego prevented. She could turn the Mayor's trash plan into a blueprint for a new wave of job creation - the kind of stuff that makes landfills and incinerators look ever so eighties.

Bloomberg's Comprehensive Solid Waste Management Plan is anything but comprehensive and doesn't offer much in terms of growing the economy. Awarding a long-term recycling contract to the Hugo Neu Corp. (now Sims Hugo Neu Co.) and championing water-based export as an alternative to trucks are critically important initiatives. But what's missing is the other half of the equation, reducing what there is to export in the first place.

At 50,000 tons a day, garbage is perhaps NYC's biggest export product. For New Yorkers it's an economic drain. For multinational trash cartels like Waste Management, it's a cash cow easily milked. But it doesn't have to be this way. Green Worker Cooperatives and over 40 other groups, under the banner of the NYC Zero Waste Campaign, have been clamoring for the City to adopt "zero-waste" as its 20-year goal and to implement the recommendations of the coalition's alternative trash plan, "Reaching for Zero."

According to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, reuse and the manufacture of goods from recyclables can create several hundred more jobs for every one job in disposal. These "green-collar" jobs are an untapped opportunity for the City to create thousands of jobs that can actually support families. It would be a crime if the Mayor and the Council let this opportunity slip away.

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Posted at 5:30 AM, Jan 24, 2006 in Economic Opportunity | Environmental Justice
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