More SWMP Gas

In our discussions with council insiders about the total disregard of the potential cost of the city's SWMP we were told that this was no accident. As one staffer said, "This was all about social justice and that objective overrode any concerns about costs." (See today's good piece in the Gotham Gazette by Tom Angotti)

If true, than all of us got snookered. We did because the city has not done very much to get to the root cause of the transfer station siting issue: the problem of commercial waste and the existence of clusters of private transfer stations in certain communities of color. As we have said before, no one is going to voluntarily divert commercial garbage from its current transfer station destinations and send it to the city managed facilities.

When confronted with the one possible source of relief-the use of food waste disposers to remove putrescibles and enhance recycling-the council blinked and authorized DEP to do a study to see if a pilot program for disposers would be feasible. This is pusillanimous even for the council, and it mirrors the same attitude of the anti-business, anti-common sense Zero Waste Coalition. In fact the whole issue of waste reduction was, as Angotti points out, simply ignored in all the misplaced euphoria.

The likelihood is that all of this effort will be for naught and in two years when the plan falls apart and the mayor's on the way out, the council will simply deny paternity of the politically correct, environmentally unsound SWMP. In the meantime, as the Post reports today, expect more community outrage as the more of the solid waste charade is exposed to a gullible public.