Taming the ‘Wild West’ of New York’s Dangerous Private Trash Trucks

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/15/nyregion/nyc-garbage.html

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Department of Sanitation trucks collect New Yorkers’ residential trash and recycling, each one covering a compact route. But picking up garbage from businesses is a more chaotic and dangerous process, one that New York City is trying to change.

Each business, whether a bodega or an office tower, hires one of dozens of private hauling companies, whose hundreds of trucks crisscross the city, with multiple vehicles visiting the same blocks. Their routes form serpentine itineraries that, some lawmakers and residents say, increase traffic and push overworked drivers to speed and cut corners to keep their jobs.

But now, a new law — the most sweeping overhaul of commercial garbage hauling in 30 years — is set to sharply increase city control, reversing decades of policies that effectively left companies competing to offer clients the lowest prices with little regulation.

Six years of efforts to change the ad hoc system came to a head late last year, when Mayor Bill de Blasio signed the legislation.

Commercial trash makes up more than half of New York’s garbage. The city will be carved into 20 commercial waste zones, with just three companies working in each, essentially forcing trucks to drive more efficient routes.

Haulers must obtain licenses from the city to operate by following rules aimed at reducing traffic deaths, greenhouse gas emissions and environmental and labor violations.

It will take at least three years to phase in the system. But for now, advocates for reform say, private garbage trucks remain among the most dangerous vehicles on the streets. Since Mr. de Blasio signed the bill three months ago, the trucks have killed two pedestrians. One ran over a 67-year-old woman crossing a street in Brooklyn, dragging her body and severing it in two.

The drivers, usually paid by the shift and rushing to finish routes that can stretch 80 to 100 miles, were involved in 73 serious accidents in New York from 2016 to 2018, a city study found. Between 2010 and 2017, private garbage trucks killed 43 people, according to city data.

By contrast, until a city-owned garbage truck killed a boy in December, the last fatal accident involving a Sanitation Department vehicle was in 2014.

Before dawn one recent morning in Brooklyn, harried garbage crews could be seen careening onto sidewalks, running red lights and backing across intersections.

In the two hours that The New York Times spent tailing trucks at random with a union activist, a dozen of the privately-owned 20-ton vehicles each appeared to violate at least one traffic or safety rule.

“It’s the Wild West out here,” said the activist, Sean T. Campbell, a career garbageman and Teamsters union president.

The law also aims to address climate change. The private trucks drive a total of about 28 million miles each year. By halving those miles and requiring cleaner vehicles, haulers’ carbon emissions could be cut by more than half.

The changes, supporters say, should also ease traffic and the stench from transfer stations, the way-station dumps where commercial trucks take waste to be sorted and reloaded into the larger vehicles that take it out of the city.

The rules will force haulers to use stations that comply with health and safety standards, and create incentives to ship waste by rail and barge, not through low-income neighborhoods.

But some industry groups have criticized the changes, saying they will burden local businesses with higher trash-collection prices and put smaller haulers out of business. They contend that safety violations are exceptions.

“This misguided law will destroy dozens of local companies, many with 50 years or more of service, and displace hundreds of workers — mostly people of color,” said Kendall Christiansen, president of New Yorkers for Responsible Waste Management, an organization that represents commercial haulers.

In a joint statement, chambers of commerce for all five boroughs said the plan “limits competition, restricts consumer choice, and will only serve to harm the small businesses that drive New York City’s economy.”

Regulating garbage has been a challenge for New York City, fraught with corruption and mafia ties for at least a century, said Robin Nagle, the Department of Sanitation’s in-house anthropologist.

“Because garbage is an out-of-sight, out-of-mind issue for the majority of us, it’s not hard to then decide to do dirty things with it, no pun intended,” she said.

The system stems from changes made decades ago. In 1957, the city stopped collecting commercial garbage, forcing businesses to pay for private collection and supersizing the carters that had previously served only industrial areas.

In the 1990s, prosecutors broke up what they called a mafia cartel in commercial carting. New companies entered the market, many of them nonunion; Teamster representation of garbage collectors and drivers declined from nearly 100 percent to less than half.

The changes also swept away the unwritten rules of mafia turf — that only certain companies could work in certain neighborhoods. Now that any client could hire any hauler, it became common for multiple trucks to serve the same block, and for any given truck’s route to be much longer. What ensued, advocates of the new law say, was haulers cutting corners to offer clients the cheapest prices.

“We replaced the old mafia with a corporate mafia,” said Mr. Campbell, president of Teamsters Local 813, which represents 1,200 commercial sanitation workers.

About six years ago, environmental, labor and street-safety groups — all concerned about the pickup process — began to form a coalition.

Then, a particularly egregious case drew wider attention to the issue: In 2017, Mouctar Diallo, 21, was found dead on a Bronx street.

Workers with the hauler Sanitation Salvage said an apparently homeless man had jumped on their truck and fallen off. In fact, Mr. Diallo, an immigrant, had been working on the truck off the books — a common industry practice, workers said.

“This is one of the hardest jobs in the world,” Mr. Campbell said. “These companies are drawing on people who need the job — immigrants, formerly incarcerated, young black men without a lot of opportunities — people they know are not going to risk their job to complain.”

After the details about Mr. Diallo’s death emerged, the driver in the case continued to work until, six months later, he struck and killed Leo Clarke, 72, who was walking with a cane in the Bronx. The driver was eventually stripped of his commercial license.

John Rojas, a former collector for Salvation Salvage, said working conditions had endangered his life and had caused muscle spasms that curl his hands into the shape of a C.

“When my hands are relaxed, I’m like the Lego man,” he said.

Mr. Rojas said that like Mr. Diallo, he worked off the books for a maximum of $80 a night, carrying 80-pound bags six days a week. Sometimes, he started at 6 p.m. and arrived home at 1 p.m. the next day.

Sanitation Salvage, whose license was suspended after an investigation by ProPublica in 2018, has ceased operations.

By then, neighborhood groups were taking action, especially in Brooklyn’s East Williamsburg, in Southeast Queens and in the South Bronx.

They monitored trucks and dumps, and measured air quality with cellphones. In East Williamsburg, CleanUp North Brooklyn sued the owners of a transfer station in 2017, accusing the site of creating a nuisance with odors and traffic.

Then, in 2018, the city reduced the amount of waste that could be dumped at stations in heavily burdened areas — a precursor to the new law championed by City Councilman Antonio Reynoso of Brooklyn.

Jen Chantrtanapichate, who lives near a transfer station in East Williamsburg and helped coordinate activists there, said her neighbors keep their children inside, away from the trucks.

“The street gets covered with garbage juice,” she said.

The new rules require haulers to consider transfer stations’ locations and environmental records and to replace half of their trucks with cleaner ones within 20 years.

They also encourage recycling and composting, as well as “micro-haulers” — businesses owned primarily by women and people of color that use low- or no-emissions vehicles to pick up organic waste.

Mr. Campbell, the union activist, said some workers fear the law could put their employers, especially those with poor safety records, out of business.

But others welcome it. Lamont Mays, 52, was working in Manhattan’s Chinatown on a recent night for the hauler Action Carting. He and a co-worker moved in a kind of dance, advancing a few yards down the street, loading bags, backing up to dumpsters and moving on.

Mr. Mays said he had been working his relatively compact route for decades, holding on to it to avoid the kind of sprawling itinerary that exhausts his colleagues.

“Why should it hurt?” he said of the law. “It’s going to help, so they won’t be so spread out,” referring to the routes.

“It’s a good job,” he added, saying the work allowed him to support a family. “The young guys today, they have trouble finding a job like that.”

OK McCausland contributed reporting.