New York City endured another brutal summer this year, and you know what that means: a severe urban heat island effect and the omnipresent stench of rotting garbage. Summer in New York makes one acutely aware of the near-constant presence of waste piling up on pavements waiting to be collected and trucked to an out-of-state landfill.
New York is, in fact, widely reported to be the world’s most wasteful city. Wastefulness in this case means New York uses the most energy (“the equivalent of one oil supertanker every 1.5 days”), disposes of the most trash (33m tonnes per year), and uses the most water. The dubious title comes from a study published last spring in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
While the world’s most wasteful city could well be in the consumption-rich US, New York is an unlikely culprit. If the world’s most wasteful city is American, as it very well may be, it’s probably a sprawling sunbelt metropolis like Houston, Atlanta, Tampa, or Phoenix – all of which rate worse than New York on most environmental metrics but weren’t included in that particular study.
Among global megacities, Mexico City generates the most trash after the New York region: 12m tonnes per year. That’s largely a function of relative wealth: the regions have similar population sizes of just over 20 million and 21 million people respectively, but GDP per capita is three times higher in the US.
But waste is a bigger quality of life problem in Mexico. At least the steaming trash in New York is being put out for the sanitation trucks. In 2011, Mexico City closed its largest dump, causing trash to pile up at illegal dumping sites and be left out on the street, highlighting the absence of a comprehensive policy for urban waste collection, disposal and processing. There are signs of hope, though. A number of recycling initiatives have been launched, including one that allows residents to trade in recyclables for vouchers to purchase fresh fruits and vegetables.
The third biggest waste producer among megacities is Tokyo, which is actually impressively austere. Greater Tokyo has more than 50% more residents than Mexico City, but it produces slightly less rubbish. Japan is very densely populated, and so it lacks the space that the US and China have to throw their garbage in landfills. Instead, they have adopted hyper-aggressive recycling programmes to cut down on waste. Tokyo, which strives to be a zero-waste city, is no exception.
So how can Tokyo be rated the third most wasteful city? This is the tricky thing about measuring wastefulness: waste is a byproduct of consumption, and consumption generally tracks with income. “There are some general rules for consumption levels: as income rises, people just cycle through more consumption patterns in general,” says Alex Kovac, a research analyst at the World Resources Institute, an international environmental research organisation. “The wealthier a place is, the more is wasted and thrown.
To read the full story, visit https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/oct/27/which-is-the-worlds-most-wasteful-city.