Sunday Compost program, NurtureBK, corner of Flatbush and Parkside, November 002021
OBSERVING THE LONG LIVES OF NYC'S MATERIAL STREAM
Project supported by a Tishman Environment and Design Center Faculty Grant, TEDC, The New School
In collaboration with the Department of Sanitation New York (DSNY)
SPRING 002022
As we go about our diverse urban lives, New Yorkers take up and remix the stuff of the cosmos. The materials that compose plastics, metals, solid waste, compost and road salt flow into NYC from our planet’s deep past. DSNY workers drive through NYC on machines made of metals forged in supernovae. Someone in Manhattan tosses an item into a public trash can and vibrant geological consequences unleash. Someone in Brooklyn drops compost at their local community garden, shaping NYC’s biosphere in 2100. DSNY attends to the cosmic stuff that affords New Yorkers’ lives.
OBSERVING THE LONG LIVES is a series of observational practices that make vast scales of planetary change sensible and meaningful at a human scale through an in-depth engagement with the materials most commonly handled by the Department of Sanitation New York (DSNY).
The observations focus attention upon the geo-cosmo origins of NYC’s material stream (metal, plastic, compost, road salt and solid waste) and the pivotal moments of exchange that occur when a New Yorker comes into contact with these materials—and then chooses what will happen to them next. Their choices unleash vibrant, shimmering consequences for the city’s and the planet’s biosphere and geologic futures. Their choices also shape the daily lives of countless New Yorkers today in highly unequal ways (storage/handling/proximity to waste).
The project offers embodied experiences of daily urban life as being nested within planetary scales and forces of materiality. Doing so, it aims to deepen collective abilities to experience how our everyday lives are deeply interconnected with one another, with non-human beings, and with the geologic.
The observations also emphasizes the geologic effect of materials in urban centers as one core component of social/environmental justice. What happens (pedagogically and practically, on the ground) when we use a geo-cosmological frame to reconsider what we typically call “waste”? What happens when we use such a frame to rethink actions that last for the brief moment it takes to toss something into the trash—yet have power to transform commonplace, everyday objects for deep futures and with vibrant geologic consequences?
Aesthetic encounters with these questions can be wonder-filled and empowering when we fully embody our choices and their long-term consequences for our shared urban futures.
Directly observing how we already live intimately with the materials and forces of deep time, and experiencing how our lives are made possible by the stuff of the cosmos and those who attend to it, can inspire a sense of meaning and belonging to the local + geo/cosmological — even as we live in the midst of immense environmental challenges.
PROJECT COLLABORATORS AND PRESENTERS:
Student researcher Eva Cass + Sustainable Systems students, Spring 2022, Parsons, The New School for Design
Presentations during the SPRING 2022 semester were offered by:
PLASTIC and METAL:
artist and researcher Nina Elder
Kara Napolitano, Education And Outreach Coordinator at Sims Municipal Recycling
ROAD SALT and SOLID WASTE:
DSNY staff and employees: special thanks to Maggie Lee, Carmelo Freda, Nick Caputo and Nicole Doz
Ashley Frenkel, Community Engagement Coordinator, Freshkills Park Alliance
COMPOST/ORGANICS:
Anneliese Zausner-Mannes, co-founder of Nurture BK/Flatbush, Brooklyn
OBSERVATIONS:
from observing the long lives of plastics, smudge studio 002022
Plastic is a deep time traveler. The majority of synthetic plastics that we use today are derived from crude oil (a fossil fuel). Very specific conditions are required in order for oil to form, and most of the oil we use today started forming 66 to 252 million years ago during the Mesozoic era.
Oil formation began in ancient shallow Mesozoic oceans when microscopic organic matter such as phytoplankton, zooplankton and algae thrived in warm shallow waters. As the organisms died, they floated to the bottom of the ocean and mixed with the clay-like material that made up the ocean beds of the era. The clay enveloped the dead organic matter, preventing it from decomposing. As millions of years passed, the mud layers were compressed and became a sedimentary rock known as organic shale. When exposed to the precise temperatures (90-160 degrees Celsius) and pressure (1-2 miles below the surface of the earth), this rock became oil shale — and oil escaped from the shale and rose toward the water above, creating an oil reservoir.
Pause to consider the plastic you handle most often in your daily life and the processes that enabled its creation in ancient seas over 66 million years ago.
Since most plastic can last indefinitely, and will likely "live" longer than humans. Consider the pivotal moment when plastic leaves your hands and is released into an unknown future.
from observing the long lives of organics, smudge studio 002022
Organic materials are the outcomes of long, cosmological processes. All of the plants we eat have been fueled by the sun, a giant star, 93,000,000 miles away from Earth, via photosynthesis — a process that evolved over eons of evolutionary time.
When we’re done with plant material, organic “waste” can become fuel for more food and plants on Earth, or it can become landfill. When organic materials are trapped beneath the soil at a landfill, in a dark, oxygen-starved space, they create methane. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that heats up the planet (a greenhouse gas about 56 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period). When food “waste” becomes compost rather than landfill, the resulting soil can naturally absorb and “fix” nitrogen, helping keep plants and soil healthy — decreasing the impacts of climate change. Compost replenishes and stabilizes soil, helping to boost and sustain food production in the future. It can also help pull carbon out of the atmosphere, helping to tackle global warming, and replace polluting chemical fertilizers, protecting public health.
Consider the organic materials you handle each day and the long process that enabled their creation, which began with the forming of the Sun, 4.6 billion years ago. What happens to the organic materials that you use today shapes the biosphere and climates on Earth hundreds of years into the future.
from observing the long lives of metals, smudge studio 002022
All metals, including aluminum, are deep time travelers. Aluminum is made in the nuclear fires of large, heavy stars.
Large stars burn hot and fast, becoming red supergiants that successively create heavier and heavier elements. Convection brings the elements, such as aluminum, to the star’s surface. From there, strong stellar winds disperse the elements into space. Some later arrive on planets like Earth.
Today, aluminum is the third most abundant element in our planet’s crust, behind oxygen and silicon.
Consider an aluminum can and the complex processes that enabled its creation billions of years ago, the mountains it was extracted from, and the elaborate processes that humans have invented so that you can use it today.
Metal has many possible futures here on Earth. Aluminum can be recycled almost endlessly. Depending on your actions, an aluminum can might be recycled, reused, touched by many other human hands, or sent to a landfill.
from observing the long lives of things, smudge studio 002022
The Department of Sanitation (DSNY) employs nearly 10,000 people and is the world’s largest sanitation department. It collects more than 10,500 tons of residential and institutional garbage and 1,760 tons of recyclables – each day.
Imagine a DSNY employee in 2032, picking up something you tossed into the trash today. What kinds of materials might they be handling. What you would like to offer or say to the sanitation employee picking up these materials for you. What you would like to say to the people who handle these materials when they reach a landfill. Or to the earth itself. Or to the people living in the neighborhood near an incinerator that might dispose of these materials for you. How might you ensure that the staff and employees of DSNY don't have to handle so much accumulating material — as waste?
from observing the long lives of DSNY road salt, smudge studio 002022
In addition to collecting, recycling and disposing of waste, cleaning streets and vacant lots — the Department of Sanitation (DSNY) also clears the roads of snow and ice.
The primary material used to clear snow covered city streets is road salt. Most road salt found in NYC has been transported over 4,500 miles to New York by International Salt, the City’s supplier of road salt. The salt was exploded from eight-to-ten million year old Miocene salt beds in the Tarapacá Salt Flat in Chile’s Atacama desert—the driest desert on Earth (50 times drier than Death Valley).
Up to 320,000 tons of Chilean desert are heaped into piles each year at 42 storage facilities scattered throughout New York City. When winter snows accumulate, the mounds of road salt begin to disappear. There are 700 salt spreaders and 2,000 sanitation trucks deployed to salt and clear more than 19,000 lane-miles of city streets each snowfall.
New York City road salt is a Miocene material-become-Anthropocene-flow. Mined, traded, shipped, and then spread across thousands of miles of roadways in a matter of months, these tons of crystallized geologic time will mix with fresh snow and quietly dissolve in melt water on their way to sewer drains before most New Yorkers get a glimpse of them.
While pouring tons of salt on roads makes winter driving safer, it also has damaging environmental and health consequences. As snow and ice melt on roads, the salt washes into soil, lakes and streams, in some cases contaminating drinking water reservoirs and wells. It also can endanger wildlife in freshwater ecosystems and corrode vehicles and bridges.
Consider the planetary-wide systems impact, ramifying into deep futures, that road salt sets into motion.