Life Along the Curb: Inside the Department of Sanitation of New York

Keeping New York clean has always been a daunting challenge. The city generates close to 40,000 tons of garbage every day—and yet New Yorkers are not buried by their waste. Who picks up all that trash? Who sweeps the streets? How is the work organized? And where do all those discards all go?

Drawing on several years of ethnographic and archival research as well as her own experiences as a municipal sanitation worker, anthropologist Robin Nagle explores some of the political, infrastructural, economic and cultural complexities that shape the dynamics of solid waste management in North America’s largest city.

Followed by a screening of the 2015 short documentary film, “One Man’s Trash” (17 mins) by NYU student Kelly Adams, which focuses on NYC Department of Sanitation veteran Nelson Molina, who has created a museum of “Treasures in the Trash” in a sanitation garage in East Harlem.

This lecture is part of our “Garbage and the City” series, produced by The New York Academy of Medicine in collaboration with the Museum of the City of New York and ARCHIVE Global and supported by a grant from the New York Council for the Humanities.