Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City

Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City PDF Author: Robin Nagle
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1466836733
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
America's largest city generates garbage in torrents—11,000 tons from households each day on average. But New Yorkers don't give it much attention. They leave their trash on the curb or drop it in a litter basket, and promptly forget about it. And why not? On a schedule so regular you could almost set your watch by it, someone always comes to take it away. But who, exactly, is that someone? And why is he—or she—so unknown? In Picking Up, the anthropologist Robin Nagle introduces us to the men and women of New York City's Department of Sanitation and makes clear why this small army of uniformed workers is the most important labor force on the streets. Seeking to understand every aspect of the Department's mission, Nagle accompanied crews on their routes, questioned supervisors and commissioners, and listened to story after story about blizzards, hazardous wastes, and the insults of everyday New Yorkers. But the more time she spent with the DSNY, the more Nagle realized that observing wasn't quite enough—so she joined the force herself. Driving the hulking trucks, she obtained an insider's perspective on the complex kinships, arcane rules, and obscure lingo unique to the realm of sanitation workers. Nagle chronicles New York City's four-hundred-year struggle with trash, and traces the city's waste-management efforts from a time when filth overwhelmed the streets to the far more rigorous practices of today, when the Big Apple is as clean as it's ever been. Throughout, Nagle reveals the many unexpected ways in which sanitation workers stand between our seemingly well-ordered lives and the sea of refuse that would otherwise overwhelm us. In the process, she changes the way we understand cities—and ourselves within them.

Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City

Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City PDF Author: Robin Nagle
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1466836733
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Get Book

Book Description
America's largest city generates garbage in torrents—11,000 tons from households each day on average. But New Yorkers don't give it much attention. They leave their trash on the curb or drop it in a litter basket, and promptly forget about it. And why not? On a schedule so regular you could almost set your watch by it, someone always comes to take it away. But who, exactly, is that someone? And why is he—or she—so unknown? In Picking Up, the anthropologist Robin Nagle introduces us to the men and women of New York City's Department of Sanitation and makes clear why this small army of uniformed workers is the most important labor force on the streets. Seeking to understand every aspect of the Department's mission, Nagle accompanied crews on their routes, questioned supervisors and commissioners, and listened to story after story about blizzards, hazardous wastes, and the insults of everyday New Yorkers. But the more time she spent with the DSNY, the more Nagle realized that observing wasn't quite enough—so she joined the force herself. Driving the hulking trucks, she obtained an insider's perspective on the complex kinships, arcane rules, and obscure lingo unique to the realm of sanitation workers. Nagle chronicles New York City's four-hundred-year struggle with trash, and traces the city's waste-management efforts from a time when filth overwhelmed the streets to the far more rigorous practices of today, when the Big Apple is as clean as it's ever been. Throughout, Nagle reveals the many unexpected ways in which sanitation workers stand between our seemingly well-ordered lives and the sea of refuse that would otherwise overwhelm us. In the process, she changes the way we understand cities—and ourselves within them.

The Sanitary City

The Sanitary City PDF Author: Martin V. Melosi
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 608

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Book Description
The authors examines water supply and waste disposal in U.S. cities from Colonial times to the present day.

Garbage In The Cities

Garbage In The Cities PDF Author: Martin V. Melosi
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822972689
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
As recently as the 1880s, most American cities had no effective means of collecting and removing the mountains of garbage, refuse, and manure-over a thousand tons a day in New York City alone-that clogged streets and overwhelmed the senses of residents. In his landmark study, Garbage in the Cities, Martin Melosi offered the first history of efforts begun in the Progressive Era to clean up this mess.Since it was first published, Garbage in the Cities has remained one of the best historical treatments of the subject. This thoroughly revised and updated edition includes two new chapters that expand the discussion of developments since World War I. It also offers a discussion of the reception of the first edition, and an examination of the ways solid waste management has become more federally regulated in the last quarter of the twentieth century.Melosi traces the rise of sanitation engineering, accurately describes the scope and changing nature of the refuse problem in U.S. cities, reveals the sometimes hidden connections between industrialization and pollution, and discusses the social agendas behind many early cleanliness programs. Absolutely essential reading for historians, policy analysts, and sociologists, Garbage in the Cities offers a vibrant and insightful analysis of this fascinating topic.

Sanitation City

Sanitation City PDF Author: JFL
Publisher: JFL
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Welcome to Sanitation City - The city that keeps the world clean! Or, at least, that's what YIN-SED & Co., The Waste Management Company, would lead you to believe. The truth is, in Sanitation City, life is fleeting. Three lowly YIN-SED & Co. employees, Frank, Joe and Steve, know this better than anyone. All they can do to survive in this dystopian world is keep their heads down and stay in their lane. That's until they cross paths with a hard-ass intergalactic android detective (that's a mouthful) known as TIM, who crash landed in Sanitation City on the hunt for an intergalactic fugitive. TIM is forced to enlist the aid of Frank, Joe and Steve in order to track down the fugitive, and the lowly sanitation workers must stick by TIM's side if they wish to survive. The first step towards survival is a journey to the Grand Incinerator! - Get ready to be offended in this raunchy, sci-fi comedy romp!

Municipal Sanitation in the United States

Municipal Sanitation in the United States PDF Author: Charles Value Chapin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Communicable diseases
Languages : en
Pages : 998

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Book Description


Resisting Garbage

Resisting Garbage PDF Author: Lily Baum Pollans
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477323708
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Resisting Garbage presents a new approach to understanding practices of waste removal and recycling in American cities, one that is grounded in the close observation of case studies while being broadly applicable to many American cities today. Most current waste practices in the United States, Lily Baum Pollans argues, prioritize sanitation and efficiency while allowing limited post-consumer recycling as a way to quell consumers’ environmental anxiety. After setting out the contours of this “weak recycling waste regime,” Pollans zooms in on the very different waste management stories of Seattle and Boston over the last forty years. While Boston’s local politics resulted in a waste-export program with minimal recycling, Seattle created new frameworks for thinking about consumption, disposal, and the roles that local governments and ordinary people can play as partners in a project of resource stewardship. By exploring how these two approaches have played out at the national level, Resisting Garbage provides new avenues for evaluating municipal action and fostering practices that will create environmentally meaningful change.

Water and Sanitation in the World's Cities

Water and Sanitation in the World's Cities PDF Author: United Nations Human Settlements Programme
Publisher: Earthscan
ISBN: 1844070034
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
This is surely the most impressive and important publication to come out of the UN system for many years.'Peter Adamson, founder, New Internationalist, and author and researcher of UNICEF's The State of the World's Children from 1980 to 1995. The world's governments agreed at the Millennium Summit to halve, by 2015, the number of people who lack access to safe water. With rapidly growing urban populations the challenge is immense. Water and Sanitation in the World's Cities is a comprehensive and authoritative assessment of the problems and how they can be addressed. This influential publication b.

City-Wide Sanitation: The Urban Sustainability Challenge

City-Wide Sanitation: The Urban Sustainability Challenge PDF Author: Christoph Lüthi
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
ISBN: 2889662551
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
This eBook is a collection of articles from a Frontiers Research Topic. Frontiers Research Topics are very popular trademarks of the Frontiers Journals Series: they are collections of at least ten articles, all centered on a particular subject. With their unique mix of varied contributions from Original Research to Review Articles, Frontiers Research Topics unify the most influential researchers, the latest key findings and historical advances in a hot research area! Find out more on how to host your own Frontiers Research Topic or contribute to one as an author by contacting the Frontiers Editorial Office: frontiersin.org/about/contact.

The Politics of Trash

The Politics of Trash PDF Author: Patricia Strach
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501767003
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
The Politics of Trash explains how municipal trash collection solved odorous urban problems using nongovernmental and often unseemly means. Focusing on the persistent problems of filth and the frustration of generations of reformers unable to clean their cities, Patricia Strach and Kathleen S. Sullivan tell a story of dirty politics and administrative innovation that made rapidly expanding American cities livable. The solutions that professionals recommended to rid cities of overflowing waste cans, litter-filled privies, and animal carcasses were largely ignored by city governments. When the efforts of sanitarians, engineers, and reformers failed, public officials turned to the habits and tools of corruption as well as to gender and racial hierarchies. Corruption often provided the political will for public officials to establish garbage collection programs. Effective waste collection involves translating municipal imperatives into new habits and arrangements in homes and other private spaces. To change domestic habits, officials relied on gender hierarchy to make the women of the white, middle-class households in charge of sanitation. When public and private trash cans overflowed, racial and ethnic prejudices were harnessed to single out scavengers, garbage collectors, and neighborhoods by race. These early informal efforts were slowly incorporated into formal administrative processes that created the public-private sanitation systems that prevail in most American cities today. The Politics of Trash locates these hidden resources of governments to challenge presumptions about the formal mechanisms of governing and recovers the presence of residents at the margins, whose experiences can be as overlooked as garbage collection itself. This consideration of municipal garbage collection reveals how political development often relies on undemocratic means with long-term implications for further inequality. Focusing on the resources that cleaned American cities also shows the tenuous connection between political development and modernization.

Sustainable City in Africa Facing the Challenge of Liquid Sanitation

Sustainable City in Africa Facing the Challenge of Liquid Sanitation PDF Author: Esoh Elamé
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1786308088
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
This book questions the role of liquid sanitation in the development of cities in Africa. The absence of sewerage networks and treatment plants in African cities already submerged by rapid and anarchic urbanization is a major problem. To meet this challenge, it is urgent to rethink urban water governance and impose and enforce sustainable urban planning standards. In other words, sanitation issues must now be placed at the heart of urban planning.