One of The New Yorker's signature cartoons from its early, Roaring Twenties period was Ralph Barton's "The Sort of Thing That Brings Joy To The Ashman's Black Heart."
There, in the pre-dawn hours of an apartment building courtyard, a bug-eyed, sadistic hell-hound of an ash collector (this, from the day when garbage was incinerated down in the cellar) is hurling the parade of sooty, emptied cans -- bang, clatter and boom -- deep into the courtyard, simply ecstatic to wake up the entire block.
Barton, who was afflicted by depression and later died by suicide, was making a bleak statement concerning one of the enduring realities of big-city life: dealing with garbage is foul business. Not for nothing that Tony Soprano's day job was "waste management consultant."
With the world urbanizing at a rapid pace, one need not be a Manhattanite to know the misery of waking up prematurely to the roar of the collection truck, the spume of its exhaust as it rumbles through the neighborhood, and the banging of tossed emptied cans (now, at least, thankfully no longer metal).
So it's with a small measure of optimism that one reads help is perhaps on the way, in the form of a new generation of waste collection vehicle using quieter and much cleaner hybrid engines fueled by compressed natural gas rather than the diesel beasts currently plying our neighborhoods in the morning.
Miami has been leading the way in the transition, and, while the transition costs are substantial, the operational and maintenance savings make for a reasonably quick payback. And there are immediate environmental benefits of CNG over diesel, not just locally, but in terms of carbon emissions, globally too.
Lancaster leadership take note: we should be pressing our trash haulers to bring the dirty business of collection into the 21st Century.
Of course, it's still up to each of us to consume less, waste less, compost and recycle more, and otherwise clean-up after ourselves. But a cleaner and quieter truck wouldn't hurt either.
Of course, it's still up to each of us to consume less, waste less, compost and recycle more, and otherwise clean-up after ourselves. But a cleaner and quieter truck wouldn't hurt either.
UPDATE: Lancaster City Director of Public Works Charlotte Katzenmoyer tells us: "We already require this under our current contract with Penn Waste. They are required to replace trucks out until their entire fleet will be CNG by the end of their five year contract. We allowed this phased replacement because some newer trucks might not need replacing until after several years. The city is also working to replace our fleet with CNG as we replace vehicles and we will use the LCSWMA fueling station for fueling purposes."
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