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Curb Appeal
Topics: Operations-Service DeliverySociety-Public OpinionGovernment and Politics-Government AdministrationGovernment and Politics-Local Government
Curb Appeal
Topics: Operations-Service DeliverySociety-Public OpinionGovernment and Politics-Government AdministrationGovernment and Politics-Local Government
Curb Appeal
Jessica Tisch (JD/MBA 2008) has a problem. And she couldn’t be happier about it.
It’s a chilly February morning in Lower Manhattan, and Tisch, who was appointed commissioner of the Department of Sanitation (DSNY) last April, has only hours to pivot the world’s largest municipal-waste agency from trash collection to snow removal.
If the forecast is correct, DSNY will have to clear 5 to 6 inches from 6,500 miles of city streets—a task that involves fitting plows to 2,000 garbage trucks and salt spreaders while continuing to collect the 24 million pounds of residential waste that New Yorkers produce daily.
Tisch held a conference call with her operations chiefs at 5 a.m., and by 8 a.m. she was on the phone with Mayor Eric Adams while parked outside a DSNY facility. Striding into a garage the size of a football field to inspect the fleet, she was all smiles as she shook hands with supervisors and chatted with workers in green jumpsuits. She then sped over to DSNY headquarters, just a few blocks north of City Hall, to discuss the details of the agency’s emergency snow response with her executive team. “Don’t screw it up,” Tisch deadpanned before cracking a broad grin, eliciting peals of laughter from the burly men sporting crew cuts and gold DSNY shields who had gathered around her conference table. (The agency employs approximately 7,500 uniformed workers and 2,500 civilian staffers.)
“I really like the modernizing piece of it,” Tisch says of working in municipal services. “Not modernizing for the sake of modernizing, but modernizing for the sake of delivering better service to our customers.”
Not screwing things up is pretty much her mandate. Tisch was sworn into office at a challenging time: The coronavirus pandemic devastated DSNY’s workforce and required massive budget cuts that eviscerated core services such as street sweeping and litter-bin collection. The results were both predictable and unpleasant: a “visibly filthier” city, to use Tisch’s phrase, and an exploding rat problem.
The funding and services have been restored but the department is still dealing with the aftermath. And the most visible signs of New York’s garbage problems—rats dragging slices of pizza along subway platforms and bags of trash left curbside for hours on end—are just the tip of the rubbish pile.
Although New York aims to send zero waste to landfill by 2030, the city’s diversion rate—the amount of waste that it recycles and composts—has for years lingered below 18 percent, a fraction of what some other major American cities have achieved. And DSNY has been slow to adopt tools such as rat-proof containers and real-time analytics that could improve the quality of service it provides and make the city cleaner, safer, and healthier. “We haven’t really changed the way we collect trash in decades,” Tisch says.
She aims to fix that. Over the past year, Tisch has leveraged a combination of administrative and technological solutions to address problems such as vermin and illegal dumping. She has expanded the use of data analytics and plans to implement citywide, curbside composting over the next 20 months. And she is exploring the idea of collecting residential trash in the kind of large communal containers used in some European cities—a move that would transform the way solid waste is managed in the Big Apple.
“I think you have with her a very creative and innovative public servant,” says Steven A. Cohen, an authority on waste management in New York City who is the former director of the Research Program on Sustainability Policy and Management at Columbia University’s Earth Institute.
The road ahead will not be smooth. “You’re talking about the most important and complex city in the world,” says John Macomber, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School who studies public infrastructure, climate adaptation, and the future of cities. New York’s size and density, the Byzantine nature of its bureaucracy, and the number of entrenched interests at play can frustrate even modest efforts to alter the status quo.
Yet none of that appears to faze Tisch any more than did her first snow day.
In her previous roles as New York’s chief information officer and head of information technology at NYPD, Tisch learned to deliver essential services in fresh and innovative ways. And to her mind, sanitation is the most essential service of all. As she points out, the average New Yorker can go an entire lifetime without needing the help of the fire department. But city residents depend on sanitation every single day—to empty the litter bins, sweep and plow the streets, pick up the trash and recycling, and more.
“If we don’t do our job for one day, pretty much everyone notices,” she says. “If we don’t do it for two or three days, it’s a public health crisis.”
“I don’t like jobs where you just think,” says Tisch. “My whole career has been doing, with thinking behind it. I couldn’t do just a thinking job.”
Tisch could certainly have chosen an easier path.
If her last name seems familiar, that is because her father, James Tisch, is president and CEO of Loews Corporation, the multibillion-dollar conglomerate founded by her grandfather, Laurence Tisch. The company’s holdings extend from hotels to oil and gas, and the Tisch name graces hospitals, museums, and art galleries across New York City.
Tisch’s parents instilled in her and her two brothers a staunch work ethic—“they didn’t care what we did, but everyone had to work hard,” she says—and her mother offered a model of public service, serving as chancellor of the Board of Regents, New York State’s governing body for education. But when Tisch left Harvard with a brace of degrees (she attended Harvard College as well as Harvard Law and HBS), her sole plan was to pass the bar exam and get a job.
A friend introduced her to the deputy commissioner of counterterrorism at the NYPD, and she soon found herself working for the department as a terrorism analyst, studying patterns of terrorist activity beyond the city itself. She also discovered that government service was her calling. “Once I started, I never wanted to stop,” she says.
Tisch spent 11 years at the NYPD, focusing mostly on tech and ultimately becoming the department’s deputy commissioner for information technology. She moved New York’s Finest from paper logs to digital apps and implemented tools like ShotSpotter, an audio gunshot-detection system, and the Domain Awareness System, a video surveillance platform that uses machine learning to detect potential threats.
In December 2019, Tisch was appointed commissioner of what is now known as the Office of Technology and Innovation. Almost immediately, her remit expanded from managing New York City’s technology infrastructure to building its contact-tracing platform and vaccine-finder websites.
Throughout, says Tisch, she tried to deliver municipal services differently.
“I really like the modernizing piece of it,” she says. “Not modernizing for the sake of modernizing, but modernizing for the sake of delivering better service to our customers.”
From that perspective, the sanitation department Tisch inherited had plenty of opportunities for improvement. The agency’s immediate predecessor, the Department of Street Cleaning, was founded in 1881 to deal with almost unimaginable filth: By the mid-19th century, New York’s streets were clogged with horse manure and rotting food; travelers could smell the city from six miles out; and outbreaks of cholera and yellow fever were common.
“If we don’t do our job for one day, pretty much everyone notices. If we don’t do it for two or three days, it’s a public health crisis.”
In the early 1890s, a commissioner and Civil War veteran named Col. George Waring introduced such modern practices as street-sweeping and a uniformed workforce organized along military lines. He even launched something resembling a modern recycling program: Households were required to separate their refuse into ash, food waste, and “rubbish”; materials like metal and paper were reused, and the grease from food waste was used to make soap. New Yorkers were so thrilled that they threw Waring and his workers a parade.
The party did not last. In the 1930s, New York City was forced by court order to stop dumping its waste directly into the ocean. The ensuing shift to landfills and incinerators led to mounting environmental concerns, which the city off-loaded by sending its trash to be buried or burned in places as far afield as Pennsylvania and Ohio—a practice that today costs New York upward of $430 million a year, and which critics argue is both financially and environmentally unsustainable.
In the early 1970s, the city switched from metal trash cans to plastic bags, thereby establishing what Cohen has called a “rat nutrition program.” In the modern era, modest experiments with composting failed repeatedly due to high costs and low participation. While the diversion rate climbed to 60 and even 80 percent in cities like Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, New York’s refused to budge.
By the time Tisch took charge, DSNY appeared to be irreversibly mired in inertia. But the new commissioner had several advantages. For one thing, she enjoyed the support of a mayor who believed that cleaning up New York’s streets was essential to its post-pandemic recovery. For another, she came to the job with considerable administrative skills, a deep understanding of technology, and an insatiable appetite for tackling the hardest problems she could find. In a recent New York Times profile, Damian Williams, a friend from Harvard who now serves as the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, described watching Tisch work on “the most insane jigsaw puzzle I’d ever seen, with the tiniest pieces possible.”
“Garbage is messy,” Williams told the Times. “But Jessie is someone who doesn’t run away from that type of challenge. She embraces it.”
That jibes with Tisch’s own feelings about leading DSNY out of a period of crisis. While she acknowledges the complexity of the situation she inherited, she is focused on seizing as many opportunities as she can to improve service and advance the city’s sustainability goals. “It’s an incredibly exciting time because I think that we can get a number of things over the line,” she notes.
Early on, for example, Tisch used DSNY’s rulemaking authority to change when trash could be set out for collection. For decades, New Yorkers have been permitted to put their garbage out at 4 p.m., which is earlier than in any other major American city. But sanitation workers typically don’t collect it until their 6 a.m. shift the next say, leaving mountains of leaky, overstuffed bags on city sidewalks for more than 14 hours a day. “It’s gross, and it attracts rats,” Tisch says.
Yet while many other cities have adjusted their set-out times to improve cleanliness, New York City had never managed to do so—in large part because changing any long-standing routine in a city of 8.8 million people is excruciatingly difficult.
“There are lots of stakeholders involved in changing something as basic and fundamental as what time you can set out your trash,” explains Tisch, who spent months in intense negotiations with tenants’ associations, the real estate industry, and DSNY’s own union before finally hammering out an agreement to push the set-out time back to 8 p.m. beginning April 1 of this year. When she announced the change at a press conference last October, her opening remarks—“The rats are absolutely going to hate this announcement. But the rats don’t run the city; we do.”—went viral, cementing her reputation as “the rat lady” among her fellow citizens.
“I don’t expect everyone to change their behavior overnight,” Tisch concedes. “But it’s something that over time will make a meaningful impact on the way the city looks and feels.”
“Everything that’s worthwhile is incredibly complicated.”
Tisch’s experience at the NYPD, meanwhile, informed her approach to illegal dumping, a problem that disproportionately affects low-income communities of color. The penalties for illegally dumping trash outside of officially sanctioned collection areas are steep—violators can be fined $4,000 and have their vehicles impounded—but until Tisch came along, there was no enforcement mechanism and therefore little deterrence.
To Tisch, the solution was obvious: “Hello! We should put up cameras and pair them with a license-plate reader,” she recalls thinking. A pilot project with 50 cameras proved so successful that the agency is now installing hundreds more.
Tisch also developed a new data platform, TrashDash, to help boost DSNY’s performance. While the agency has historically used tonnage per truck, per route, as its principal metric of success, TrashDash gathers data on everything from the nature of customer complaints to the number of hours that garbage sits on the curb. Tisch modeled the system after CompStat, the police department’s tool for collecting strategic and operational data, with the goal of improving efficiency and quality of service.
“The data improvements she’s talking about could be game changers,” says Cohen, who credits Tisch with being the first sanitation commissioner to focus on data analytics as a means of developing cost-effective solutions. “One of the things that’s very clear is that she uses data to manage, and thinks about things in a very pragmatic way, which is what you need.”
Each of these initiatives has reformed specific aspects of solid-waste management in the city. But they are only the opening moves in a far more ambitious long-term strategy for modernizing the way New York deals with its trash. And the real heavy lifting has only just begun.
DSNY has rolled out hundreds of “Smart Bins,” high-tech composting receptacles that are solar-powered and accessed via a smartphone app. (NDZ/STAR MAX/IPx)
Tisch’s favorite problems require coordinated solutions with many moving parts.
Of these, composting, which could finally move the needle on New York’s diversion rate, and containerization, which Tisch describes as the holy grail of trash collection, are by far the most involved—and could have the greatest impact on the city’s future.
Approximately one-third of the city’s household trash is organic material that could be converted into soil or renewable energy. As a result, Tisch says, “the most meaningful opportunity to move the diversion rate in New York City is in composting.” Yet previous efforts to introduce curbside composting were neither cost-effective nor scalable.
All that changed with a pilot program that Tisch ran last year in the borough of Queens. Whereas sanitation workers previously collected compost with dedicated trucks during overtime hours, the commissioner had them collect it during “straight” time in dual-bin trucks that could handle both organic and inorganic waste. And while earlier programs required participants to opt in and order special bins, compost would now be collected on regular recycling days and people would be allowed to use any bin they wanted. Tisch even fine-tuned the agency’s messaging to attract people who were more interested in combating rats than reducing greenhouse gas emissions. “We talked to them about the fact that one-third of the material in the trash is rat food,” she says. “If you just get the food out of the trash bags, you’ll see an impact on the rat population.”
As a result, the Queens pilot diverted almost 13 million pounds of organic waste at one-third the cost of previous programs. “It’s not breaking the bank, and you can roll it out big,” says Tisch, who plans to extend the program to all five boroughs by 2024. In the meantime, she is installing hundreds of communal composting receptacles across the city. Known as Smart Bins, these high-tech containers are locked to prevent people from using them as garbage cans, accessed via smartphone app, and solar powered.
Over the long term, Tisch hopes to make shared, rat-proof bins a key part of the way New Yorkers dispose of all their residential trash and recycling. But that won’t be easy.
“If we’re going to get the vermin problem under control in New York, we have to get the garbage out of plastic bags,” Columbia’s Cohen says. “She sees that. That’s another potential game changer. But it’s going to take a long time.”
While some world cities have already shifted from curbside pickup to communal containers—oft-cited examples include Barcelona, where citizens sort their refuse into color-coded bins, and Amsterdam, which uses below-ground receptacles—the challenges of adopting such a system in New York City are manifold.
To begin with, there is the question of where, exactly, the containers would go. Underground storage is not an option, thanks to the mess of subterranean pipes and cables that already lies hidden beneath New York’s streets. But finding space for them above ground in a city with some of the most valuable—and contested—real estate in the world won’t be easy, either.
Given New York City’s population density, it is also unclear how large the bins should be and how many of them will be needed. DSNY has engaged McKinsey and Company to help answer questions about the design and placement of the bins, but the results are not yet in.
What’s more, while sanitation workers currently heave the city’s trash into their trucks by hand (a fact that has earned them the sobriquet “New York’s Strongest”), containerization would require the use of automated trucks with mechanical arms. But since no major US city has yet made the transition to containers, there is no locally available truck that can safely and effectively do the job. (DSNY is working with the trucking industry to develop one but that, too, will take time.) The agency will also need to ramp up collection and hire additional workers to prevent the containers from overflowing: While DSNY currently collects trash two or three times a week, communal bins are typically emptied every day.
It remains to be seen whether the city will invest the resources required to make all this happen. And even if it does, Tisch believes that containerization will be one of the most complex and difficult infrastructure projects of the next decade.
But for someone who enjoys nothing more than untying Gordian knots, that is less an impediment than an incentive.
“Everything that’s worthwhile,” she says, “is incredibly complicated.”
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