NYC volunteers help public housing residents recycle

The New York Times published a feature about a group of brave and lovely women who are going door to door in Morningside Heights teaching people living in public housing to recycle. It is amazing to me that so many buildings in so many urban cities do not have recycling programs, considering the large number of residents, the abundance of trash and the potential economic savings.

The typical neighborhood environmentalist is often pictured as young and affluent, the kind of person who can afford a hybrid car and screen-printed hemp fabrics. But at General Grant Houses, a sprawling public housing development off West 125th Street in Manhattan, the eco-conscious are mainly people like Ms. Allen and Sarah Martin, who as leaders of the residents’ association fret as much about backed-up pipes as they do about recycling.

Proselytizing on the issue in housing projects is an enormous challenge but crucial, environmentalists say, given the incentive to cut back on energy and garbage disposal costs and a housing authority’s power to impose recycling rules building by building.

In New York, the incentive may be greatest of all. Only 17 percent of the city’s household waste makes it into recycling bins, and New York has the largest public housing system in the country, with 2,600 buildings, 174,000 apartments and more than 400,000 residents in five boroughs.

Those residents are really the ones who suffer the most from air pollution and other health issues stemming from an overflow of garbage and exhaust from garbage trucks.

“If we could reduce the amount of garbage in our community, it would reduce the diesel in the air,” said Ms. Martin, 72, a former medical assistant and school food preparation manager who wears hoop earrings under a baseball cap.

These women are invaluable to the community and the Earth – teaching residents how to recycle is something the city would just never take on, no matter how necessary such education is. The city, however, is taking steps in other ways.

On other environmental fronts, efforts are under way by the city housing authority to make the apartment units more energy-efficient, using federal stimulus money to replace old boilers, water heaters and appliances. More than two dozen resident “green committees” have also been formed to help with projects like planting trees and recruiting workers for green jobs.

The General Grant Houses recycling program has transformed into a pilot program, backed by city and state financing and the city housing authority plans to expand it to other residential projects.

In the five buildings that are already recycling, the ladies report that each now produces at least 10 fewer bags of trash a day and residents no longer leave mousetraps or car tires in recycling bins (which they did when the city instituted recycling without an education program).

The two women also organize collections of electronic waste, from computers to TV sets, and lead workshops on topics like nontoxic cleaning products. Next on their agenda is finding a way to pay a stipend to resident monitors who will make sure that only recyclables go into the bins.

While they have to plead with the city to fix broken door locks and drafty windows, Ms. Martin said, “recycling we can control.”

If only more people in more buildings in more cities took the time to encourage this kind of movement – I should be inspired, since my building doesn’t offer any type of recycling whatsoever. Shame on them, shame on me!