Douglas Washington knows people like him are standing between modern civilization and the abyss. “It’s been rough,” Washington said. “I’ve been in the industry almost 25 years and I’ve never witnessed—I don’t believe anybody has witnessed—anything like this.”
Washington is a sanitation worker in New York City, picking up commercial waste from 6 pm until early in the morning. He is one of thousands of men and women who still go out every day, in the midst of an unprecedented coronavirus outbreak, to haul the city’s dizzying amount of garbage from houses, apartment buildings, and the private businesses that still generate waste.
Washington is worried. He has a 14-year-old with asthma at home in Queens. His fiancée is a nurse. His company, Royal Waste Services, now requires its workers to clock in on paper, instead of using a hand scanner, to combat the spread of Covid-19. Workers no longer hang out at the garage. Industrial cleaner is a constant on the trucks.
“If some of these workers start to get sick, I believe things will get worse than they are,” he said. “When people start seeing trash and garbage build up, the mindset of people, once they start seeing that—it may go another way.”
In the best of times, sanitation workers perform essential and punishing work. A city of almost 9 million people can generate more than 11,000 tons of household trash and 2,000 tons of recycling on an average day.