The trash collection process in any sprawling metropolis is a coordinated effort, but in NYC, the current system is built upon decades of learning what has worked, and what hasn't (anyone ever hear about the 1981 sanitation workers strike?). If you want to learn more about why the streets don't fill with garbage or who cleans your streets, join the Museum of the City of New York and the New York Academy of Medicine for the final talk in a series called Garbage and the City this Monday 8/17 at 6:30pm.
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| NYC Garbage Truck circa 1929; image credit: The New York Academy of Medicine Committee on Public Health archive |
Robin Nagle, author of Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City, is the anthropologist-in-residence with New York's Department of Sanitation. She will be giving a talk entitled Life Along the Curb: Inside the Department of Sanitation of New York at the Museum of the City of New York (1220 Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street) covering what it takes for the city to deal with the 40,000 tons of garbage produced here every day.
At 8:00 pm, the 2015 short documentary film, "One Man's Trash" (17 mins), will be screened. NYU student Kelly Adams filmed NYC Department of Sanitation employee Nelson Molina, who develops a unique relationship to the objects that fill the garbage bags lining the streets. He has created a collection of found objects in a sanitation garage in East Harlem, which he refers to as a museum of “Treasures in the Trash.”
Deets:
- What: Life Along the Curb: Inside the Department of Sanitation of New York lecture
- Where: Museum of the City of New York, 1220 Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street
- When: Monday 8/17 6:30 to 8:30 pm
- Cost: FREE, but register here
