Sprol

The ships in one of the world’s most active ports make a nice image in this shot of the Upper New York Bay.

Waters this close to New York City and New Jersey we expect to be polluted, and of course they are, with coliform bacteria and high nitrogen runoff leading to huge algae blooms that choke out animals and more complex species of plants. Trending upwards.

Did you know that they used to farm oysters in New York harbor? It’s not safe for people to eat oysters caught there now.

By some standards the water quality might be better than in 1883, when this cartoon was published in response to several large ships running aground on harbor debris.

People thought about water quality in those days in terms of big things, things you could see. Things you could crash a ship into.

Now, we’re concerned mostly with tiny things. Things you need a gas chromatogram and a stable power supply to see.

Things that crash into you.

Inbound: Automobiles. Fuel Supertanker. Container Ships. Outbound: Garbage. Battleship (upper right). From this height, the pattern on the pier is made up of thouands of new cars awaiting shipment at the Auto Terminal.

Cities concentrate populations and make it more efficient to distribute resources like food, energy, and information. New York is a big city, although number twelve in the most populous cities in the world. It’s still the biggest city in the United States, which for lots of people is good enough.

As we’ve shown, the surrounding megalopolis moves a huge amount of passengers and cargo through this vicinity on rails, roads, and by air, but putting things in a boat on the water remains one of the most efficient ways to move stuff around.

It probably always will be.

One of the things they move a lot of is New York City’s twenty thousand tons of garbage, baked fresh each day. That’s almost fifteen billion pounds of garbage per year. Mountains of garbage, day in and day out. Most efficiently moved by barge. You’d think that they would move most of it that way.

Since the Fresh Kills landfill closed, there’s really been nowhere to send it. Which amounts to sending it everywhere. Mostly by truck.

Remember that garbage barge from 1987? Fodder for late night TV comedy for over 6,000 miles.

That barge held 3,200 tons, or less than a day’s worth of trash in 1987.

Since then, it’s been over 18 years. 6,654 days. A thousand flotillas of barges. My free giveaway calculator goes into scientific notation.

It’s got to go somewhere.

The city was trying to build a barge handling facility in Staten Island, but the residents there are opposed. One community in Ohio was offered $600,000 per year in order to allow a landfill within their jurisdiction.

One third of all that garbage that has to be moved, then burned, buried, or both, is paper. It’s half of all municipal waste.

To make a ton of paper requires seventeen full grown trees. Thousands of gallons of water, of toxic chlorine. A ton of coal. You can get about 7,000 daily newspapers from a ton of paper.

The New York Times claimed a daily circulation of 1,136,433 newspapers in March of 2005. At that rate, that’s 2,754 trees per day. More than one million trees a year.

Pulped.

Shouts out to Aaron, Matt, John, Ian, Doug, and The Anonymice.