Closing Rikers Island as a jail offers an opportunity to change aspects of New York’s waste management infrastructure and potentially rethink expanding the city’s role in overseeing it.
By Robert Lange, written for WasteDive
The following is a guest piece by Robert Lange, former director of the New York City Department of Sanitation’s recycling program. He retired from the agency in 2016 after more than 20 years.
The closure of Rikers Island as a jail provides an opportunity to not only change aspects of New York’s waste management infrastructure but also to potentially rethink expanding the city’s role in overseeing it.
While I agree with the majority of the sentiments expressed in a number of recent opinion pieces and legislative proposals regarding the future potential uses of Rikers Island as a center of sustainability and green energy production, following the closure of the jail facility, I believe these proposals fall short of accomplishing their expressed goals.
Having worked in bureaucracies for over three decades I know firsthand that merely having good ideas or passing legislation is insufficient grounds for being able to bring those ideas and goals into practical reality. This is especially true in a place like New York, where there are always numerous and powerful special interests groups with opposing viewpoints.
Assuming Rikers Island will in fact be vacated by the Department of Correction in the not too distant future, and the effort is not abandoned by a future mayoral administration and new City Council, accomplishing the various ideas that have been floated thus far will require fundamental changes to portions of the city’s existing operational bureaucracy.
For example, several of the suggested future uses assume that certain waste streams in New York, such as biosolids and municipal solid waste (MSW), can be easily combined at the site. While from a theoretical standpoint this may be true, the reality is not all of those waste streams are controlled by a single entity. In fact, they are controlled by several different city agencies and in some cases, the private sector. City agencies may all ultimately report and answer to the same administration, but they frequently possess very different agendas.
If the Rikers closure opens up discussions about fundamentally overhauling all of New York’s collection, processing, recycling and disposal of waste then a citywide waste management authority would be needed to oversee it. The passage of local flow control legislation would also be integral to creating this authority.
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