Urban Waste Analytics

Abstract

The global production of waste is currently at 2 million tons per day. As landfills and incinerators multiply, disposal of municipal wastes have become financial and political burdens for cities, while posing significant risks to the health and well-being of the planet [1,2]. For these reasons, many cities invest in recycling programs in order to extract value from waste streams.

New York City generates over 10,000 tons of waste household waste per day. There are operational challenges from the point of view of handling within the city and across the thousands of miles of destination trails. New York City Department of Sanitation NYC DSNY is actively is investing in long-term program diverting its waste streams to recyclable goods.

Objective

NYC recycling program currently recycles 17% of the NYC Municipal waste. The NYC mayor has set a citywide goal of 90% reduction of the amount waste disposed in landfills by 2030. In order to gain better understand of existing patterns of recycling supporting the mayors goals, the city challenge project is to work with 10 years of historical recycling data, analyzing significant temporal and spatial patterns in the DSNY districts.

Provided Data

• 10 years of daily recycling data at district level
• - NYC shape file in district level: “Community Districts (Clipped to Shoreline)”
  http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/bytes/districts_download_metadata.shtml

References

[1] David Obituary and Hubel Hunter. Peak This Century. Nature, 502:615–617, 2013.

[2] The World Bank. What a Waste: A Global Review of Solid Waste Management. 2012.