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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now let's get to a hyperlocal issue affecting some of our most underappreciated New Yorkers: our city supers. They have a major gripe that hasn't been reported much, but now has by WNYC and Gothamist. Many of us are not breaking down our cardboard boxes in this age of so much delivery. With the influx of e-commerce in our lives, cardboard boxes are piling up in our buildings' trash rooms. This, obviously, is for those of you who live in apartment buildings. Surprise, surprise, it's not supposed to be the super's job to break them down and tie them up, or at least to break them all down. More broadly, sorting through trash in New York City can be more complicated than you might expect. There's paper recycling, metal and glass, composting, new trash takeout times. You know about many of these things, specific bins, et cetera. We're going to talk about the supers, and we're going to talk about the cardboard. Let's help our supers keep our buildings clean and get all these rules straightened out and just plain old etiquette straightened out.

Joining us now is Liam Quigley, reporter covering parks and sanitation for WNYC and Gothamist. Hey, Liam. Welcome to the show.

Liam Quigley: Hi. Good morning, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: First of all, for people who don't know you yet and know your beat, what's the breadth of what you're covering for us under parks and sanitation?

Liam Quigley: I cover everything from rats, beaches, pools, trash and putting trash in containers. In doing that, I end up talking to a lot of supers across the city.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we will open up the phones on this right away. Any supers listening, first of all? You will get first priority on the phones if we happen to have a super, or let's say even anybody who has ever been a super. 212-433-WNYC. What's the experience like when it comes to handling the trash? What do you consider resident etiquette to be? What's their responsibility? What's your responsibility in a just world and what is it in reality? 212-433-9692. Anybody who lives in an apartment building and is not a super, do you have any questions about throwing out your trash? In particular, how do you handle cardboard boxes in the hyper quantity of delivery that we tend to get these days? 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692.

How did you get on to this angle of cardboard boxes and breaking down the boxes, Liam?

Liam Quigley: I was in the East Village covering an ongoing issue, which is the rollout of the containerization program for the city, but in doing so, I kept running into supers who were kind of lugging big piles of cardboard boxes out of buildings. I was asking them, what's on your mind, and a lot of them kind of pitched me on this story and were saying, a lot of the younger residents are not breaking down these cardboard boxes, and that increases the workload for the supers.

Brian Lehrer: Why the younger residents, you think?

Liam Quigley: The supers say it's just kind of an etiquette that's lost on some younger New Yorkers. They also order a lot of stuff online. I talked to one super who said that sometimes when new tenants move in, they order almost everything for the apartment, including furniture, online. That often comes in a lot of cardboard boxes.

Brian Lehrer: Where are people supposed to put the broken-down boxes if you get into this? Because depending on the building, you might have a trash room or a compact room, however they label it in a particular building, on each floor, but it might be really, really small, and there might be an outside area. I know one person in a building who said to me, well, we have this outside area and it's spacious. The compact room on my floor is tiny, so what am I supposed to do?

Liam Quigley: I think it varies building by building, so I would just chat with your super and see how you can make their life a little easier. I know in my building, if I have some cardboard boxes piling up, I break them down as I get those deliveries and I keep them in the kitchen. Then at some point in the week, I'll move them down to the area where trash will later be put to the curb. I cut them down or fold them down, and you can use tape or twine to do that. Just check with your super and see how you can help them.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. I like your newsletter entry over the weekend. For people who don't know, we have a WNYC weekly brief that goes out on Saturday. You can sign up for that for free if you're interested and in addition to The Brian Lehrer Show newsletter, which goes out on Thursdays. That's up to you.

Liam had the lead piece in Saturday's WNYC newsletter, and you wrote, "In covering trash and sanitation in New York City, I'm now talking to more building supers than ever. They deal with a lot of garbage and most have the same complaint. People aren't breaking down their cardboard boxes, which drives them mad. It's a big problem as package delivery continues to grow in the city, thanks in part to the rapid rise of free shipping from Amazon over the past decade." Then I was interested in this next thing you wrote, which is, "I quit Amazon years ago, but I grew up in New York and know how important it is to break down my boxes." What goes into quitting Amazon?

Liam Quigley: I'm not going to lie. I definitely use eBay a lot more, but it made me realize that I was ordering a lot of things that I didn't really need and that I could often find in the city, sometimes for cheaper at the hardware store or the dollar store. That alone reduced the amount of cardboard that was going through my household. Though, I still order stuff on eBay if the price is right.

Brian Lehrer: You wrote, "In reporting this story, I also found out the sanitation department actually tracks how many cardboard boxes people toss out." Do you have any of those numbers top of mind?

Liam Quigley: Yes. In 2005, it was something like a little over 100 pounds of cardboard per household per year in New York City-- sorry, 35 pounds. Now that's up to just over 100 pounds per year. Whereas something like newspaper was around 100 pounds a year per household. That's down to around 10 pounds per year per household. That just shows that that part of the recycling stream, cardboard boxes, has really grown while a lot of other types of paper recycling has gone down significantly.

Brian Lehrer: That's really interesting about the newspapers, right? That says a lot about the transition over however many years to the modern world that we're living in. People get their news online, and they get their goods from trucks, right? People don't get their news from newspapers. They get their news from their devices. People don't get their goods from neighborhood stores. They get their goods from trucks. Relative to the past. Of course, not 100%.

Paige in Kensington, you're on WNYC. Hi, Paige.

Paige: Hi. First of all, huge fan. My story is- well, my comment is that it's not just a younger person issue. I am in my 30s, and when I was in my early 30s, one of my very first jobs when I moved to New York, and I've lived in cities my whole adult life, I was an assistant [unintelligible 00:08:10] who was much, much older than me, but she told me-- I think she was just trying to get more time out of my hourly wage, but she told me not to bother breaking down the cardboard boxes, that her super didn't want her to do that. I just thought that was the most outrageous thing I've ever heard, and I still rant about it, and I'm like, no one says that. No one [unintelligible 00:08:33] to break down cardboard boxes. I am a proud breaker down of cardboard boxes and shout-out to our awesome [unintelligible 00:08:41]. That's my story, and it's across generations.

Brian Lehrer: There you go. Paige, thank you very much. Interesting, if infuriating, story. Michael in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Michael.

Michael: Hey, how are you doing? I enjoy the show. My family, we always- we gather the boxes and we tie them up and take them down, and I'm always amazed how many people just seem to throw their boxes in there, or they send their children down with the boxes and they just pile up. It's always felt really disrespectful to the supers. It's like making work for them.

My father was a master printing pressman, I'm a Black guy, but he had to have a second job cleaning offices to make ends meet for our family, and I used to help him. I was astounded how many people in these offices-- There was smoking going on then. They just seemed-- it was almost like their job was to make a bigger mess than they had to. My sensibility about that may be different from if you've never thought of that.

My building has 90 apartments, has two different wings. I think people are basically decent and stuff, and maybe it doesn't occur to them, but it's a really good thing not to make people's jobs harder than they need to be. Tying cardboard boxes before you take them down and so there's a neat- more can fit, all of that stuff, you absolutely need to do that. That's bothered me a long time. We've been in this building almost 30 years. For this to come up on your show is amazing, and thank you for bringing it up.

Brian Lehrer: I'm so glad that gave you an opportunity to get that off your chest publicly, Michael. Call us again. Please do. Yes, interestingly-- and here's another one related in a text. Listener writes, "Tenants, please take one minute to learn what day your recycling pickup day is so you're not putting all your recycling items out the day after the pickup day. It's so frustrating as a super for this to happen because then these items sit out for another week waiting for the next recycling pickup day. A little bit goes a long way. Be kind," and then that ends with a smile emoji and a heart emoji.

I guess breaking down the boxes is one piece of this etiquette.

Liam Quigley: Yes, definitely. I know when I moved into my last apartment, one of the first things I did was go on the Department of Sanitation website, see when your collection days are, and then I just put that in my Google calendar as a recurring event. Obviously, it's something you just-- it's muscle memory after you live in a place for six months, but just something to help things go smoothly.

Brian Lehrer: Listener writes, "I used to be on the board of our large condo building. Each floor has a refuse room. Not only do people not break down boxes, they simply cannot cope with putting recycling into the proper containers. In my experience, people of all ages flout the rules. We threaten fines for not breaking down boxes, but there is no follow-through with actually finding people, so the problem continues. I would love to hear some successful strategies for dealing with this issue."

Did your reporting get to that point, successful strategies for dealing with this issue?

Liam Quigley: If there's a recalcitrant person who's just not recycling; I mean, at the end of the day, to me, that's between the landlord, the super, and the tenant, because the landlord is the one who gets the fines of. In some cases, I heard from supers who have the fines taken out of their pay if the Department of Sanitation issues violations to the building. You can go on the DSNY website and order or print out decals that you could paste up in the lobby to give people a heads up, "Hey, this is how you're supposed to recycle," but it's tough if somebody's consistently not following the rules.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and posting the rules clearly, you would think, would thwart a lot of it. Like the caller, Michael, was just saying, he doesn't think a lot of people are doing this to be mean. They just sort of don't realize that it's a thing, but then there's that text on the rules being very plainly stated, and a lot of people don't do it anyway.

Another thing that I noticed from your piece that's sort of solution-oriented is on the next step, which probably fewer buildings even ask their tenants to do, and that is tying up the cardboard boxes from your apartment with twine. You asked if tape-- because who has twine? Can they use tape? What's the answer?

Liam Quigley: You can use tape. I always used tape for years, and I wasn't 100% sure if I was following the letter of the rule, but I did ask the sanitation department and they said tape is fine. If you want to do twine, you can buy at the hardware store.

Brian Lehrer: Do you have like a number two, a number three, a number four gripe of supers these days, if not breaking down the cardboard boxes is number one?

Liam Quigley: The rats are always-- it's a battle. From the Bronx to Manhattan, the war on rats is raging on. I talk to supers who, even with the new bins that are being used in parts of the city as we shift to containerization, the rats are still a problem, and they tell me how they have to dispatch these animals when they're captured at the bottom of a bin or stuck in a glue trap. That's kind of a perennial challenge for supers, it sounds like.

Brian Lehrer: If someone catches a mouse on a glue trap in their apartment-- I'm probably asking you a question you have no idea of the answer to, but if somebody catches a mouse on a glue trap in their apartment, is there etiquette for disposing of it?

Liam Quigley: Without getting too gruesome, some supers will drown the animals, some will stomp them. I don't know. That's a good question. I'll have to ask supers what the preferred, most humane method of dealing with the animals is.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, I was thinking about the tenant. Of course, there's debate about glue traps in the first place from the humane standpoint, but that's a separate conversation. Listener writes, "Regarding breaking down cardboard boxes, it's a recurring theme on The Bear. Touches on teamwork, mindfulness, and how stress can lead to taking shortcuts that literally pile up." I haven't seen an episode of The Bear where that comes up. Have you, by any chance?

Liam Quigley: No, I haven't seen that show at all, to tell you the truth.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Certainly, Season 1 was fabulous. Season 2, more mixed reviews, but that too is another conversation for another day. I wonder if there's any other pop culture that would touch on breaking down cardboard boxes in particular or supers lives.

Liam Quigley: I can't say that off the top of my head-- Though, I definitely remember working in a shipping job, and the first thing I would do when I got to work was spend 30 or 40 minutes breaking down a lot of cardboard boxes, so I can appreciate the labor that can go into it. Now with living alone, it's a lot easier, and I get a lot fewer boxes.

Brian Lehrer: Listener writes, "I had a 'discussion' with someone about this, and their position was that they're paying the super/janitor salary, so it's okay." Then someone else writes, "Why not return the boxes to Amazon? My super--" Well, then it goes on to a sentence I think that had some typos and I don't understand it, but just that first sentence with the question is a topic of conversation. Why not return the boxes to Amazon? Another listener-- Wait, Clyde in Brooklyn is going to pick up and further that one. Clyde, you're on WNYC. Hi.

Clyde: Yes, I don't think that you can count on people recycling or tying up boxes. People just aren't going to do it. Some people will. I think that you should pay for the recycling of an object when you buy the object, regardless of what the object is, in which case you could put anything out on the street, and the person would have a job that picks it up and would be getting paid, and this would not be a problem.

Brian Lehrer: That's interesting. That's one version, Liam, of the producer pays argument for all kinds of environmental pollution, right? They have so much trouble getting those laws passed. I think there's one stuck in Albany right now. Baking into the cost of items, the packaging, the environmental impact of the packaging, the disposal cost of the packaging. Whether it winds up exactly the way Clyde says, in the ideal world where you can leave everything unbroken down in the street, and there'd be people paid to come and break it down, and then there's more jobs and those jobs are available because we paid in the first place into the system the real cost of the product, which means including disposal. Whether it winds up exactly that way, I don't know, but producer pays or consumer pays as part of the price is kind of a larger question that relates to this micro issue.

Liam Quigley: Yes, and there were some moves to require a fee for Amazon deliveries in the city. I don't know the status of that legislation either, but they would have increased the pricing for ordering online. Though, I will say, if you want to, you can certainly reuse cardboard boxes if you sell things on eBay or have to ship things of your own. That's definitely an opportunity to get some of the cardboard off the curb. Though, I will say that curbside recycling for cardboard that does enter the recycling stream in New York City is all taken to Staten Island and it's repurposed very quickly, sometimes as quickly as a few hours, according to the sanitation department.

Brian Lehrer: About The Bear, listener writes, "The breaking down cardboard boxes storyline comes up strongest in Season 3, introduced as one of Carmy's non-negotiables," so there you go for you Bear fans. David in Riverdale. One more call. You're on WNYC. Hi, David.

David: Hi. I live directly across the hall from the vestibule where the trash chute is. Actually, going back to most buildings' designs, buildings were designed with trash chutes so that the super took care of the stuff at the basement level. Doing recycling now is like an added task, which really isn't the super's job, but it ends up being that way. When people don't break down their boxes, it means that the super or the staff have to do that. Plus, often, it makes it so that you can't get into the vestibule of the trash chute.

Brian Lehrer: David, thank you very much. I guess we'll leave it there, except to ask Liam if you've had any response to your story in a way that makes you think there might be a way forward to make this less of a problem for supers. Other than that, people can read your article on Gothamist and hear this conversation on the radio.

Liam Quigley: I definitely say to my younger friends when I am at their house-- you'll notice that they have a big stack of cardboard boxes from Amazon, and you can just ask them, "Are you going to break those down?" Some people just don't know that that's the etiquette, or at least we think it is.

Brian Lehrer: Liam Quigley, our reporter covering parks and sanitation for Gothamist and WNYC. Thanks a lot, Liam.

Liam Quigley: Thanks for having me.

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