A Plan to Ship Garbage, but No Destination
By MICHAEL COOPER
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said yesterday that the city would stop
hauling its trash out of state one truck at a time and instead adapt
dormant waterfront stations in each borough so garbage could be taken
off trucks, packed into containers and floated away by barge.Mr. Bloomberg called his plan for disposing of the roughly 11,000
tons of residential trash generated by New Yorkers each day a
"conceptual outline," and it raised at least as many questions as it
answered. The mayor could not say how much it would cost, and he left
one of the thorniest questions unanswered: where the trash would go.Since the Giuliani administration shut down the city's only
operating landfill, Fresh Kills in Staten Island, last year, the city
has used trucks to haul its waste to incinerators and landfills out of
state.
But Mr. Bloomberg said that his plan, which he made a priority of his
second hundred days in office, was prepared with two overarching goals
in mind: reducing the current truck traffic that clogs the city's
streets, damages its roads and pollutes its air and relies on land-based
trash-transfer stations, and giving the city more options to keep its
waste disposal costs steady in the future.
"We are not going to continue to give our kids lung diseases, no
matter what the cost is," the mayor said at City Hall as he announced
the plan. "That's the bottom line."
His plan calls for taking eight existing waterfront stations in
Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens that were once used for
sending barges of trash to Fresh Kills and rebuilding them to accept
garbage from trucks, compact it, pack it into sealed containers and load
them on barges. A ninth station would be built on Staten Island that
could be used, for a change, for outgoing trash. The barges would be
unloaded at nearby ports, and the containers placed on ships or trains. ..... Such containers, which are roughly 20 feet long and 8 feet wide, are used for rail and sea freight around the world. Nearby ports could compete to take the containers off the barges and put them on either trains or ships. From there they could be transported to landfills anywhere in the country, or
the world, that would take them.
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Pollution is a fact of life even though Jingy seems to think she/he/it has figured out how not to pollute. :roll: It is up to all of us to help out by limiting as much as possible. I choose to recycle some household garbage and incinerate the rest here where I live verses doing it the liberal way and hauling it to someone elses backyard even if that backyard in states far away or in another country and dumping it so it blows around where I can't see it, smell it or have it causing health problems for my family. :roll: LIBERALS :roll: