It turns out that recycling a mayor doesn't lead to an increase of recycled waste. According to DNAinfo, the percentage of the city's waste that has been recycled has fallen from 19% in 2002 to 15% in 2011. Naturally, those Chaco-wearing patchouli-huffers out west are eating our lunches (then recycling the waste). Seattle and Portland have rates over 50%, while San Francisco's rate soared to 77% in 2009, no doubt on the success of converting plastic bottles and highlighters into bongs. more ›

Sitting at home staring at the menu screen of your Matrix Revolutions DVD and ordering another chimichanga isn't just hurting your sex life, it's hurting the environment. The Times takes aim at the take out containers that comprise some of the city's 14 million tons of waste each year, and finds New Yorkers torn between convenience and guilt. "There's nothing I can do," a 25-year-old accountant tells the paper while eating from one of those ubiquitious plastic containers. "It annoys me. It's plastic in a landfill." But not as annoying as packing your lunch in a reusable container. more ›

Remember CityTime? It's Mayor Bloomberg's $740 million boondoggle to modernize the city's payroll administration that—oh look, Willow the cat! Anyway, it turns out that Bloomberg is really good at wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on implementing technological advances that years later appear to be abject failures. The Times reports that $363 million has been spent on Nycaps, a plan to "modernize" the personnel information on the city's employees that originally was budgeted for $66 million in 2002. That's right, $297 million spent over nine years for a website made in 1996. more ›

Besides slowing down Don't Ask, Don't Tell and the formation of telecom monopolies, if there's one thing the Justice Department can't resist, it's $16 muffins or $7 Beef Wellington bites. A report [pdf] released by the DOJ's inspector general found that in conferences it hosted from 2007 through 2009, the department paid way too much for coffee, candybars, and a bunch of other overpriced food that the lawyers need to feel special. more ›

You know it, the mice eating your Saltines know it, your real estate broker HAD to know it (damn you, Mickey): your apartment is a sieve. And now it's confirmed: The gaps around your A.C. unit are costing the city an extra "$130 million to $180 million a year" in fuel consumption. That's around a billion delicious, heat-thwarting Freeze-Pops, people! more ›

We didn't need The Onion to remind us that the city is a bit of a "trash-ridden hellhole," but they were slightly off: the city is built on top of a trash-ridden hellhole. And a new, fascinating interview in this month's The Believer with Robin Nagle, the anthropologist-in-residence at New York City’s Department of Sanitation (DOS), reveals even more about the state of garbage in NYC. more ›

With 300,000 cubic yards of sludge being carted from the recently designated Gowanus Superfund site, a project manager for the effort has an admittedly "out there" idea. Through the process of vitrification he wants to pack and heat the waste, until it's transformed into big glass cubes. "You could construct an aquarium," Christos Tsiamis told the News, adding that "It creates an absolutely safe byproduct," so the fish tanks won't stink. Maybe a Mac store could go in one of them? more ›

After increasing the cost of pooper scooper fines from $100 to $250, city inspectors issued far fewer tickets to dog owners who didn't pick up after their pooches last year. The number of pooper scooper violations plummeted from 903 in the fiscal year of 2008 to just 580 in 2009—but experts say the decline in tickets has nothing to do with the higher cost of the violations. more ›

At least one part of the city's planned rehabilitation of Coney Island seems to pay homage to the amusement district's gritty history. Newly installed sections of the Coney Island Boardwalk are already starting to fall apart — less than a year after they were screwed down. "It's not even a year old, and we're right back to square one," Todd Dobrin, chairperson of Friends of the Boardwalk, told the Daily News. "Something is wrong, and we need to find it out now before we waste all our resources on something that needs to be done again." more ›

It was, oh, about one year ago that fisherman Robert Skonieczny first caught wind of an awful stench coming in the direction of Tottenville on Staten Island. Courageously, Skonieczny tracked the odors along Arthur Kill to its source: a storm drain spewing feces and other human waste into a marsh that feeds the bay! A call to 311 was placed, and he was told an investigator would be dispatched to the area. But over time, the smell got worse, the water in the marina got murkier, and the storm drain continued spewing feces, feminine hygiene products and toilet paper. Until yesterday! The Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) was on the scene and finally fixed an obstructed sanitary sewer that was diverting the waste to the storm sewers. DEP says they never received a complaint until this Monday, and suggested maybe Skonieczny's complaint got sent to the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), but that city agency tells the Staten Island Advance they weren't alerted until last Friday. In other sewage news, be advised this is not the weekend for a dip in the Hudson; some 2 million gallons of raw sewage could be dumped in the river Sunday while a pipeline is repaired in Yonkers. more ›

Apparently New Yorkers make so much waste that the city's Department of Environmental Protection has to ship NYC sludge to the Garden State. According to the Daily News, "Sludge production at the Newtown Creek sewage treatment plant - the last of the city's 14 plants to upgrade its systems - has shot up 28% in five years." City Councilman David Yassky is concerned that the Newtown Creek upgrade will end up costing $5 billion, over twice its initial estimate, and said, "There is just something very wrong with DEP's management of its construction projects." At any rate, the DEP thinks the deal with NJ was necessary (and it also means that less waste will go into the East River); deputy commissioner of wastewater treatment Doug Greeley joked, "[Otherwise] It would be constipating New York City." more ›

The former executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, George Marlin, is urging federal investigators to look into WTC rebuilding delays, since seven years after the WTC attacks, Ground Zero is mostly still a giant hole. Marlin is recommending that the feds look into the delays as beyond a matter of bureaucratic wrangling and incompetence, but an issue of criminal wrongdoing that could include waste, fraud, abuse, and the the misleading of investors. more ›

The NY Times columnist Clyde Haberman is annoyed about shops that keep their air-conditioned stores' doors wide open and found other New Yorkers who share that gripe. One downtown resident was told by a Soho clothing store that the open door was "company policy," so the outraged resident called the store's main office, where someone "said they had a ‘green team’ forming." more ›