The Garbage Game
by Jasmin Malik Chua, Jersey City, USA on 11.15.07
What did you toss into the trash today? New Yorkers discard almost 62,000 tons of trash every day, according to the New York City Department of Sanitation—enough to fill the Empire State Building. Meanwhile, the city spends more than a billion dollars a year to spirit away the detritus of daily living.
In The Garbage Game, produced by The Gotham Gazette, you get to make personal choices about the fate of your trash, whether you decide to compost your kitchen waste, give up bottled water, or choose cloth diapers over disposable ones. Then, you take on the role of a sanitation commissioner and help the Big Apple decide where its trash should go for processing: a landfill, another state—or even another continent. ::The Garbage Game
I played The Gotham Gazette Garbage Game and sent 1,897,871 tons of refuse across 311,649 miles.
Why is NYC always getting grief regarding its garbage disposal? I wonder how much garbage 8 million people living in flyover country generate. I would suspect a LOT more. Big houses and big yards means lots of junk.
Ed,
The game isn't about giving anybody grief, it is about looking closely at a challenge that faces all of us New Yorkers: how do we want the Department of Sanitation to handle our waste?
We didn't look at many numbers that compared NYC waste statistics to national trends and volume but it would be interesting to know how we compare to the rest of the country.
-Amanda
It was a lot of fun. I just wish they talked more about MCdonalds.