Epic Trash Party Accomplished
Epic Trash Party Accomplished
If you were there, you know. If you weren't, you missed out on so much I don't know if you'll ever recover from the FOMO (actually you will, just come to the next civics party)
This post appeared on some other, now-retired Substacks. I have ported it to MNY in very lightly edited fashion.
A Wild Success
Maximum New York and Fractal threw a trash party this past weekend.
It was on the first Saturday in January.
It was overcast, 40 degrees, and it started at 11am.
And it was a wildly successful, fun event.
We had 30+ attendees, and we picked up over 2,000 pounds of trash in less than two hours—a transformational amount. So you might be wondering, what’s next? Where do we go from here? Those are the interesting questions, but it’s worth lingering a little longer on what we did exactly, and why. It was not merely “pick up trash and put in bag.” Our event was preceded by a month of planning, and not just for the event itself, but for the long road ahead to transform the area’s trash ecosystem.
Trash Typology
Not all trash is created equal. It accumulates at different rates, has different effects on human psychology, and requires different amounts of effort to remedy. Explicitly acknowledging this is vital, because it has implications for the level of service an area needs to stay clean, and how much work needs to be done to achieve that.
For example, coffee cups and food wrappers can accumulate at any time, any place. They’re light and casual, easy to spot clean, and it doesn’t matter how many times you clean a stretch of sidewalk in our area (particularly by the Morgan L stop), there will soon be a piece of casual litter there again.1 An air conditioner that’s whipped out of a car window can accumulate just as casually, but not nearly as often.
In contrast, the street tree beds of our area collect trash slowly over time, frog-in-boiling-pot style—eventually they become so monstrous that people just accept them as lamentable parts of their environment. Not only were some of ours overgrown with weeds that needed to be pulled, but those weeds were full of trash. And the soil beneath them, for inches, was layer after layer of trash, rat-king style. Even worse, natural detritus (leaves, soil, weeds, etc) from the tree beds crept out onto the sidewalks themselves, reducing their usable surface by as much as 50%. If you want to clear this kind of trash, you need a lot of time and effort, not to mention an atypically agentic psychology that can overcome the burden of an environment written off by everyone else.
When one of our work crews cleared a tree bed, several neighbors commented that it had been that way for nine months, and how happy they were to see it fixed. There’s two lessons there: (1) if you dredge a trashy tree bed once, you never have to do it again, you just have to maintain it, and (2) anyone could have cleaned that tree bed, but they didn’t. Someone has to be a first mover to get everyone else to join in!
In our area, the speed of a trash’s accumulation is often inversely correlated with the psychological toll it takes on residents (how they feel about the trash, whether they address it). Food packaging is both ignored and picked up easily, although it is absolutely the annoying low-level Pokémon in the grass that just won’t leave you alone.
The slowly accumulating trashy tree pits, on the other hand, are devastating. People feel powerless to remedy them, and they make an area look dead and depleted. It takes a lot of personal agency to clear them up—but your reward is that they don’t magically respawn the next second like casual litter.
The Psychology of Explicit Goal Setting
If you want to achieve something, it’s often not enough to outline the final goal you want to achieve. You also need to have the time horizon necessary to achieve that goal in mind, along with the maintenance and work required along that time horizon.
Doing this explicitly is vital to achieving the goal itself, because it makes your mind and emotions more resilient against inevitable setbacks. Not doing this (or leaving it in the inexplicit, hazy unconscious) leaves you vulnerable to instant burnout and sharp pangs of frustration.
I’ll give you examples with trash pickup. I’ve been to tons of them around the city.2
Let’s say you pick up a stretch of sidewalk. It’s pristine, beautiful, and looks exactly the way you’ve always wanted. You go up to your apartment and come back down an hour later to get a coffee—only to find that there is new litter on your sidewalk.
Many people will feel extremely mad and frustrated, and their prior feelings of elation will slingshot down into nihilism and despair: “Why do I even bother?? Why does nobody care?? [rage]”
Here’s what I say to these people: did you really expect your sidewalk to stay clean after your pickup? Did you do what’s required to keep it perpetually clean? If your answer to either is “yes,” you’re engaging in delusion. Of course one trash pickup won’t achieve either of those things, but that’s OK. Your one cleanup is a vital step toward the longer-term goal of installing a trash system that keeps litter off the ground (a mixture of trash cans, volunteers, social norms, and business partnerships). You can achieve your long-term goal—just keep taking the next step.
If you explicitly calibrate your actions to their reasonable effects, and see them on a continuum of maintenance toward a larger goal, then the small setbacks don’t really hurt that much. For example, right after we did our large cleanup this past Saturday, not only did a paper plate instantly materialize by our subway station (and then coffee cups, etc), but two days later someone threw the shell of a stereo system in front of the western gates of our local park.3
My initial reaction was a small bit of frustration, naturally, but it dissipated quickly. We haven’t yet gotten the trash system into place to prevent and quickly address these kinds of things, but we will. And our pickup itself did marvelous things that cannot be undone by new litter, like dredging tree beds, making the area look much nicer for a while, changing social norms, and showing neighbors (many of whom stopped to talk to us and inquire how they could join the next time) that someone has taken the initiative for our public realm.
Further: when fully predictable setbacks happen (and they are often fully predictable), it’s important to draw upon a deep well of New York City history—of the people who came before us, who accomplished the kinds of things we hope to accomplish. Their successes, while seemingly effortless from the outside, are nonetheless alloyed with repeated failures. If they soldiered on, we certainly can too!4 Large achievement is not accomplished in one fell swoop—it’s accomplished by the people who stick around with patience, passion, and persistence.5
Partnerships, Resources, and Planning
Our trash party was successful because of good partnerships, efficient use of resources, and good planning.
Partnerships
The Department of Sanitation loaned us rakes, shovels, brooms, gloves, and trash bags—and then they came and picked up all the trash we collected. Sey Coffee provided us with delicious beverages, especially welcome for physical, outdoor labor. Roberta’s Pizza provided us with unrivaled pizza to enjoy after our work, and in celebration of it. And, while they weren’t an explicit co-sponsor of the event, Partiful provided excellent invite and attendee management infrastructure.
I also emailed our city council member’s office and invited them to the trash party—and one of the office staffers came! (They really do care, if you’re the type of person who thinks they don’t.) Our council member, Jennifer Gutiérrez, will also be having a town hall about sanitation on January 23rd. Comment here or DM me on Twitter if you want to go.6
Finally, the two event co-sponsors, Fractal and Maximum New York, were the double strands of a most vital DNA. MNY provides civic technical knowledge (for example, how do you borrow equipment from the Department of Sanitation), and Fractal provides social reach (how do you get 30 people to show up to an epic trash party). Both of these things are required for an enjoyable civic event: they are a machine and its electricity, a hand and its glove, a beating heart and its blood.
Resources
In total, we spent $350 for this event, but most of that is for durable equipment that we’ll be using well into the future, so the actual event cost will be much lower as the equipment cost is amortized across more future uses. We didn’t apply for any grants, we (I, and the founders of Fractal, Andrew and Priya) just spent the money efficiently and got the job done.
As I mentioned, Sanitation loaned us a lot of equipment. We also provided a lot of equipment that we owned personally: we used our own folding table, speakers, clipboards, printed out maps (from my printer), speaker, tripod, phones for video, and even a coat rack we hauled out to the sidewalk. If you want to throw a similar event, you and your friends likely have a lot of necessary items already laying around.
Planning
This event didn’t just magically come together. As I mentioned, it was a month in the making. We took time to get event cosponsors, partner with Sanitation (which brought our event cost down, and ensured timely pick-up of our collected trash), gather equipment, get a place to store it, and plan the sequence and logistics of the event itself.
We identified a specific geographic area, and used a zoned approach that was flexible depending on the number of attendees we had. The beginning of the event was kicked off with a detailed—but expeditious and entertaining—overview of instructions to participants, everyone got a paper map of the area to be cleaned if they wanted, and we managed the event in a planned, but adaptable, manner.
Excelsior!
Cathedrals are built brick by brick. Great cities are built the same way.
If you want a better present and future for New York—if you’re the type of person who dreams of a new golden age and a city on a hill—know that those things are the direct product of events like our trash party. And there will certainly be more to come—even more effective and fun than our event this weekend, and across more policy domains than trash.
The motto of New York State is “excelsior,” or “ever upward.” Let us make it so.
We’re fixing this, it’s just not fixed yet. We need to get trash cans and other things installed first.
*Old man voice*: “I’ve been goin to trash pick-ups since before the war!”
I was immediately reminded of an incident from 1979, in the early days of Central Park’s rescue from its late-twentieth-century destitution. These excerpts are pulled from Saving Central Park, from Chapter Eight, “Learning Curve”:
“Probably the most glaring symptom of the park’s neglect in 1980 was the estimated fifty thousand square feet of graffiti covering every conceivable hard surface…Its removal would be an enormous task. We therefore had to learn what technology might prove effective and raise funds in order to hire and train a crew for this purpose.” (124-125)
A journal entry from Saturday, May 19, 1979:
“The enterprising concessionaire we have selected to open what he has named the Ice Cream Café beside the Model Boat Basin has found a chemical solvent to remove graffiti, something I had noticed yesterday evening when I took my favorite stroll home from the office and stopped to watch the water gather in the last daylight. It was a gratifying surprise to see that the small building at the south end of the pond, a dollhouse-like Robert Moses whimsy, was no longer covered with ‘Ziggy’ and ‘Crunch’ tags. Impressed with this counteroffensive on vandalism, I suggested to [the Parks Department’s head of maintenance and operations in Central Park] that we stop by and take a look, thinking that maybe the Parks Department could put in a purchase order for this miracle product that we could use elsewhere. Alas! Overnight every surface of the little building—the brick walls on the sides and back, and the newly painted, green, roll-down door over the counter (paint color selected by me and paint purchased by the Conservancy)—was emblazoned with graffiti. Yes, ‘emblazoned’ is the right word, ‘Blazer’ being the most prominent culprit. Who the hell is he? How could he have done it for heaven’s sake at night and in the rain?” (125)
Tough times come for us all, even the people who built all the greatest parts of New York City that we love today.
These are the “three P’s” outlined by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, the first Central Park Administrator and founding president of the Central Park Conservancy.
It’ll be on Monday, January 23, 6:00-8:00pm, at the Central Baptist Church on 260 Knickerbocker Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11237. Most people’s internal reaction to these kinds of events, if they find out about them at all, is like “why would I go to this, I’m busy and it seems boring, none of my friends are going, I don’t see how it accomplishes anything.” And all of these things are true—going to these events likely won’t accomplish anything if you don’t have any goals, or don’t understand how the government works. It will be boring if you don’t get friends or other interested parties to go with you. But drop me a line if you want to feel differently. Drop me a line if you want to love public meetings the way Leslie Knope loves public meetings.