Not okay. (duckumu, twitter)

Thus far, the protests against Citi Bike have largely amounted to a war of words and symbolic acts of protest—with the possible exception of flyers pasted on the Fort Greene stations decrying corporate branding in a historic district, critics have kept their attacks verbal and refrained from physically defacing or destroying the racks or bikes.

That's the way it should be—everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, and fortunately, today there are more than enough forums and platforms for people to express those opinions. And, assuming that we're now moving out of the general whining about things you can't change stage and into examining how the program is actually working stage, criticism is important. Provided that it is thoughtful and directed to actual, fixable issues, it can help officials to remedy glitches, introduce improvements and just generally make the program better and more palatable for everyone.

Not helpful or classy? Telling the world how much you hate bike share by dumping the garbage from your building all over the racks and bikes. Which is what residents at 150 Joralemon Street in Brooklyn Heights did this weekend, according to the New York Post.

First of all, the move is simply ineffective and redundant—the co-op is already suing and we doubt that the city will be moved to reward such a rude and immature act by pulling out the bikes and racks. But perhaps the most offensive thing is that the co-op is angry because the bike rack occupies the space where their super used to put the garbage out. Not lost parking spaces, not a beloved sidewalk vendor, not a community bike rack, but the spot where they put their trash. Now they have to put it out down the block. What a terrible inconvenience!

“They have to place garbage at a tree about 30 feet from racks, and the recycling pile started about 15 feet from racks all the way mid through the rack,” resident Anneke Berkem told The Post, adding that, “We feel this is not the right spot. There are other places in the neighborhood."

She also told The Post that she had never been so inconvenienced in her 17 years of living in the neighborhood. Really?

Covering Citibikes in trash is a smug, sadistic act that benefits no one save residents who take pleasure from the discomfort and unhappiness of others—in this case sanitation workers and bike share users. Sanitation workers are, after all, the ones tasked with cleaning the garbage from the bikes. And if they fail to clean the bikes fast enough, program participants will be forced to sort through trash to get to the now-dirty bikes. Residents of the co-op are offended by having to look at a bike rack? Try having someone bury your means of transportation in trash out of spite.

Co-op resident Nina Hackler told The Post: “There just isn’t enough room. Something has to give—and this time, it’s the bikes.”

Anyone with that attitude doesn't belong in New York City. Comprising, accommodating other people and things, handling disputes without resorting to throwing garbage at things you don't like—those are essential requirements for being able to live in this or any other city. Anyone who can't deal with the inconveniences of sharing space with 8 million other people in a civilized way should seriously consider leaving. Especially when those inconveniences are as miniscule as having your super drag the trash a little way down the block. We hope that 150 Joralemon will be slammed with the biggest ticket that the Department of Sanitation gives out. Maybe the next time they'll consider displaying at least a modicum of the civility that other New Yorkers have. Comparing the DOT to the Taliban in a public forum, as one opponent did, could hardly be called taking the high road, but it looks like the height of classiness in comparison to this co-op's actions.

Upper East Side residents talk trash.

Something stinks on the Upper East Side.

According to DNAinfo, Upper East Side residents are fed up with the way the Clermont, a luxury apartment building at 444 East 82^nd Street, dumps its trash.

Building staff faced a trash tribunal at a Community Board 8 Environment and Sanitation Committee meeting last week. Residents, board members and sanitation department representatives gathered to talk trash—blaming the Clermont for the huge, messy heap of garbage bags they said often block the sidewalk on York Avenue near 81^st Street. One area resident called the garbage an “eyesore” and “an outrage.”

We completely agree with New York City's garbage collection system being gross, but how, exactly is it an outrage? Is not the sidewalk trash bag heaping system observed throughout the city?

Abraham Rill, a manager at the Clermont who attended the meeting, dismissed the complaints as rubbish, and refused to acknowledge the claim that the Clermont’s trash is any more offensive than that of neighboring buildings. Rill suggested that all garbage is unsightly, no matter where or how it’s dumped.

So why, exactly, has the Clermont been singled out? Is it really that much worse than other buildings?

The Observer reached out to the Department of Sanitation's community liaison Iggy Terranova to help us sift through the refuse. Mr. Terranova confirmed that the accumulation outside the Clermont is large, but explained trash piles of that magnitude are not unusual for New York. In a city of 8 million people, there is bound to be a lot of garbage—and a lot of complaints.

The Clermont has faced several sanitation sanctions in the past—the Department of Housing Preservation & Development has registered three violations for big piles of refuse that had been stored in the building’s private courtyard. According to HPD’s website, at least one of these violations yet to be resolved.

Though the heaps are irritating to residents and passersby, perhaps it’s time for them to take their bellyaching to the curb. After all, trash is trash, no matter how you stack it.

Does litter stop if it doesn't stop here? (Stephen Nessen/WNYC)

You can take away the garbage cans but can you take away the garbage? The MTA, in expanding its no trash can pilot program last month claimed that the program would make subway stations trash can, and thereby trash, free. But Upper East Side residents, who have been left holding the coffee cup/apple core/dirty napkins, say that the policy has done just the opposite.

In a recent survey conducted by Council member Jessica Lappin's office, 66 percent of 218 respondents said that they'd noticed more trash at the 57th Street F Train station since the garbage cans went away. But even people who hadn't slipped on any banana peels in the last 30 days thought the removal was a bad idea—93 percent of 515 respondents.

When the expansion of the pilot program from two stations to ten was announced at the end of August, naysayers pointed to the piles of cleverly stashed trash being left under benches and behind pillars at the can-less stations. And now, Upper East Siders claim that there is a growing mountain of evidence—literally, heaps of it—that prove the program isn't working.

“As you might expect, taking away the trash cans doesn't mean people magically stop producing garbage. In particular, we hearing that the amount of litter at the 57th Street Station has gone up since the bins were removed,” said Ms. Lappin in a release about the survey. “The MTA should toss out this plan and put the garbage cans back.”

In response to the survey, the MTA wrote in an email to The Observer that the first two stations in the pilot do show initial positive results and that the new stations are being "closely monitored and the results will be analyzed to determine where removing trash cans works best and whether to continue the program in the future."

In Ms. Lappin's survey, 28 percent of respondents did say that the amount of trash in the station had remained basically the same, which would seem to prove the MTA's point: that people will take their trash with them if there's no place to throw it. Or, at least, the kind of people who conscientiously seek out garbage cans will be inclined to take their trash with them, thereby reducing the rat population and trash pickup. Although it's anyone's guess how crafty subway riders might be getting at hiding their trash, or how much might be ending up on the tracks, conveniently compacted by the trains.

The PATH trains and the London Underground have both eliminated garbage cans, allegedly without disastrous results, (although a reader pointed out that the London Underground only removed the cans, not the trash bags) but where does the garbage go? The removal of trash cans at the two pilot locations in Flushing, Queens and Greenwich Village has not lead to a greater burden for the street level trash cans handled by the city's Sanitation Department, according to The New York Times.

Unless New York City residents can eliminate the kind of packaging and disposable goods that are garbage's raw material, it does have to go somewhere. And New Yorkers, who tend to walk a lot and haul their belongings on their backs and shoulders through crowded streets, can't exactly be blamed for not wanting to hang onto their would-be refuse. When the expansion of the program was announced, at least one subway newsstand vendor admitted he'd been accepting trash from confused riders.

Still, MTA chair Joseph Lhota has been extremely optimistic. When the expansion was announced in August he urged rides, via The New York Times, to treat the subway “as you would treat your home.”

Of course, we would never throw trash on the floor at home. But then, we have trash cans.

kvelsey@observer.com

"Household refuse collections dropped 5.5 percent, from 54,205 to 51,250 tons per week, between fiscal 2005 and 2008. Recycling pickups fell 7.1 percent during that period, from 11,983 to 11,133 tons a week. Some of the decrease can be explained by the switch from glass to lighter plastics, by reductions in packaging materials, and by the decline in discarded newspapers and magazines."  

As the piece indicates, this is happening while the city's population has been growing by 30,000 to 50,000 people per year. Seifman indicates that; "Nationally, residential waste collections increased from 250.4 million tons in 2005 to 254.2 million tons in 2006, before dropping slightly to 254.1 million tons in 2007."

Another way to analyze our waste issue is to measure the amount of garbage produced by each person per year. In 1960, the entire country produced about 88.1 million tons of waste. By 1980 this had grown to 151.6 million tons and by 2000 it had grown to 239 million tons of waste produced each year. At the same time, our population was growing.  When John F. Kennedy was elected President in 1960 we were a nation of about 180 million people.  The America that elected Ronald Reagan President in 1980 had 227 million people, and the country that handed the keys over to George W. Bush in 2000 was up to 281 million garbage producing humans. Our population is now a little over 300 million. 

While the American population keeps growing, in recent years, we have managed to reduce the amount of garbage each of us individually tosses away. In 1960, on average, each of us threw out 2.5 pounds of garbage per day. That grew to 3 pounds by 1970 and peaked at 3¼ ponds a day in 1980. By 2000, the amount of garbage we tossed went down to 2.6 pounds per day and in 2007 we returned to the 1960 level of waste at 2.5 pounds per day.  All of these data come from EPA's "Municipal Solid Waste in the United States: 2007 Facts and Figures". I don't know about you, but I can't wait for the 2008 version to come out.

What does all of this mean? We are getting more efficient and relatively less wasteful. We are still the most wasteful society in the world, producing more waste per person than any other place on the planet. But we are getting a little better at paying attention to this critical determinant of sustainability.

Here in New York City, the cost of waste disposal is growing. As Seifman indicates in his story, we are now up to $100 dollars a ton. As I have written before, this is not a cost that is going to come down.  In April, 2008, I described our waste system this way:

"It is hard to imagine a more environmentally damaging waste-management system than the one we have in New York. Actually, it's not so hard to imagine, if you look back and remember the time when we dumped our garbage into the ocean, or used incinerators in the basements of apartment buildings to burn garbage at night.

Today, we collect garbage with trucks that use high-polluting diesel fuel and then dump that garbage onto the floor of waste transfer stations that are typically located in poor neighborhoods. We then scoop the garbage up off the floor and load it onto large trucks that also burn high-polluting diesel fuel and ship it to landfills and waste to energy incinerators located away from New York City."  

In July of 2008 I posted a piece on some alternatives waste management technologies that my students had researched and have long been studied and advocated by my Columbia colleague, Professor Nicholas Themelis.  Garbage is inevitable, and we need to do a better job of discarding it.  The technology of waste management is improving and New York City's government is much better at managing complicated facilities than it once was. We should burn garbage as a fuel and we should learn to use the waste that remains after burning as a construction material. But we should also reduce the amount of waste we produce in the first place.

It's clear that we have started to do this already, even if we're not sure how we've managed to do it.  My guess about what is going on is that we are benefiting from greater consciousness about waste. Fifty years ago our garbage was completely invisible. Today it is just mostly invisible-but some people notice it. When manufacturers look to cut costs, they look at packaging to see if they could do more with less.  When people go to the store, they reject bags if they have something else to carry their stuff with.  People carry their own water containers and bit by bit we are making progress.

Public policy can help and should be developed to reduce waste. Food waste should be separated from other waste for either composting or it's urban version- anaerobic digestion (a mechanical facility that processes food waste for reuse). More and more goods should be sold with recycling deposits.  All beverage containers, not just carbonated ones, should require deposits. We require deposits on tires, we could do it with laptops, ipods, TVs and cell phones. The tax code should be used to provide incentives for corporations to manufacture items that can be easily remanufactured after their useful life is over. While charging people by the garbage can for pickup is difficult in a city dominated by apartments, some type of financial incentive or penalty is needed to encourage waste reduction and recycling by individual New Yorkers.  Let's be creative and invent a way to do this.

In the long run, a truly sustainable economy requires what industrial ecologists call "closed systems". Every input into the system must be put to use. Like the way my grandparents cooked a chicken-every part of that bird had to be used for something-nothing was wasted. While I do not think that zero waste will ever be realistic, we could probably do a lot better than tossing away 250 million tons of garbage every year.

It's a clip taken earlier this week of Felder demonstrating some legislative dexterity. He offers a minor tweak to the rules for ticketing homeowners with dirty property by directing that the tickets only be issued during hours more convenient for residents. Then he says the entire thing should be scrapped because ticketing homeowners doesn't encourage them to keep their property clean.

A little something for everyone. What's not to like?