Consider, for a moment, the mind of the litterbug — the mental processes that take place between the last sip of a Dunkin’ matcha latte and the casual toss of the cup onto the sidewalk or street. Is there a thoughtful pause, maybe to scan for witnesses or calculate the effort required to carry the cup to the trash can on the corner? Since everyone agrees that littering is bad, how is it that it remains so persistent?
Litter has a way of permeating the city’s consciousness, like noise or crime, a signal that social norms have broken down.
“If you walk out of your apartment and see litter,” said Joshua Goodman, a deputy commissioner in the Sanitation Department, “your first thought is, ‘No one cares about me.’”
On a blustery Tuesday in November, the photographer Emilie Gia Mẫn Rolland and I combed five distinct neighborhoods in Manhattan — from Washington Heights in the north to Wall Street and the financial district in the south — to gather litter and piece together the stories it tells about the city.
These stories varied by neighborhood. If you walk five blocks and spot only a flier for a handyman and a sticker for Andrew M. Cuomo’s unsuccessful mayoral campaign, chances are that you are on the Upper West Side. If you find a plethora of discarded cannabis packaging … well, you could be anywhere.
Upper West Side
Our first find in the financial district was an orange syringe cap outside a 7-Eleven, next to a sign that said, “Please Do Not Litter.”
Some litter told stories of how a neighborhood recreates. On the Upper West Side, we found a soccer ball orphaned outside an elementary school playground. In Kips Bay — in the East 20s and 30s, home to several hospitals — a cut tennis ball, surely from the base of an aluminum walker.
Litter is inherently less interesting — less intimate — than garbage, the stuff people properly bag up and put out for collection. It is public in a way that garbage is private. The feds will never sift through your litter for incriminating evidence.
Yet much of the city moves according to the demands it creates.
New Yorkers covet their curbside parking spaces as dearly as their children, yet they give those up one or more times per week to allow city street sweepers to pick up litter. Those sweepers, known within the Sanitation Department as mechanical brooms, can collect up to 1,500 pounds of debris, and they typically fill up twice in an eight-hour shift, more during leaf season. The department runs about 450 of them (the liquid they spray is water, to keep the dust down), and still the litter returns. “It’s definitely a Sisyphean task,” Mr. Goodman said.
Kips Bay
In each of the five neighborhoods we visited, litter often sat just feet from one of the 23,000 trash cans managed by the Sanitation Department.
Random clusters seemed like prompts for short stories. In a tree pit on Broadway near West 172nd Street in Washington Heights, two empty bottles of Don Julio tequila sat among red plastic Solo cups, pineapple juice cans and empty bags of chips — a shrine to a night of conviviality or drowned sorrows.
At the other end of Manhattan, across the street from the Four Seasons Hotel in the financial district, three consecutive tree pits held a crushed lube package, an empty tube of mouthwash and a comb. The tale almost writes itself, and shall not be published here.
(Our unscientific findings suggest that sidewalk trees are the main generators of New York’s litter.)
Little Italy’s litter told of population change, with Chinese-language cigarette packs drifting over from adjacent Chinatown.
Little Italy
And of course, there was an Ozempic brochure by the side of a McDonald’s. Too easy.
Joshua Rottman, a psychology professor at Franklin and Marshall College who has studied litter and littering, said that litterbugs most likely operate by habit more than conscious decision-making. “But there’s a lot of unconscious processing that certainly occurs,” he said.
Tossing your Snickers wrapper can be like planting a flag or blasting a radio on the subway, a way of making your mark on an otherwise intractable environment. It is also an act of alchemy (or reverse alchemy): With a single flick of the wrist, you transform that previously neutral scrap of plastic into an aesthetic screech, something others are forced to regard.
“Littering is something that psychologists and economists refer to as a public goods dilemma,” Mr. Rottman said. “Even though it’s to everybody’s advantage to retain the cleanliness of a public area, it is generally easier for any single individual to litter.” The inevitable result of this tension, then, is one errant Snickers wrapper and a lot of people feeling that order has broken down, that the center has not held.
The fight against litter might seem democratic, but it is not. The New York City Department of Sanitation, which hauls away 24 million pounds of garbage a day from neighborhoods rich and poor, takes little responsibility for sidewalk litter. Instead, building owners are required to maintain their sidewalks and the first 18 inches of the street.
Like so much in New York, this plays out as inequality.
On the Upper West Side and in the financial district, wealthy neighborhoods with robust business alliances, we found sidewalks almost free of debris. Instead, there were uniformed workers from private organizations wheeling trash cans and picking up any litter on their route. These teams worked for the Downtown Alliance, which manages the Downtown-Lower Manhattan Business Improvement District, or for the Doe Fund, a group that shelters and employs homeless New Yorkers. Various business improvement districts pay the organization up to $3.5 million a year for cleaning up their streets.
In Washington Heights, the business improvement district also cleaned the sidewalks, but had a harder time keeping up. Since the neighborhood has a vibrant street life and a tradition of sidewalk socializing, litter was heavier here and tended to stick around longer than in the other areas.
Washington Heights
Litter also tends to beget more litter.
In an often-cited 1990 psychology experiment, researchers placed handbills on the windshields of cars in a parking garage and observed whether the drivers threw them on the pavement or held onto them. If the garage was already littered, they found, people were more likely to follow suit.
Then the researchers added a wrinkle: A colleague walked toward the subject and tossed a paper onto the ground. That’s when things got interesting.
As you might expect, in a messy garage, seeing another person litter made people even more likely to litter themselves. But if the garage was clean, people who saw a person litter were less likely to litter than those who did not.
So: A messy environment encourages people to litter, but a single errant paper in an otherwise clean space makes people extra conscious of the general disapproval of littering, and less likely to litter themselves.
Other experiments have found that the nearer the garbage can, the more likely people are to use it, suggesting a simple solution to litter: more garbage cans.
Financial District
And yet Japan famously has almost no litter, despite having very few public trash cans. In 2018, New York’s Sanitation Department tried to reduce litter in Central Harlem by removing 223 trash baskets, which were being overstuffed with household garbage. New York, it turned out, is not Tokyo. Without receptacles, people just piled their trash on the sidewalk.
As with politics, all littering is local.
Some patterns held from neighborhood to neighborhood. Packaging from cannabis prerolls outnumbered that for vapes or edibles, and Corona bottle caps outnumbered all other brews. Outside the numerous Dunkin’ shops we passed, sidewalks were uniformly spotless; everywhere else, it seemed, Dunkin’ litter ruled.
In a city with eight million stories, those told by litter are among the most ephemeral. But still, some have legs. On a Saturday morning a few weeks ago, Glenn Baldwin, a general superintendent with the Sanitation Department, was with a crew who found a human body wrapped in plastic. As they stood over it, the body stirred. Life!
“Must’ve been some Friday night,” Mr. Baldwin said.
John Leland is a reporter covering life in New York City for The Times.
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