TED/Robin Nagle: What I discovered in New York City trash

As said in the video, New York City residents are producing tons of garbage every day. And the lecturer sounded extremely surprised while saying that. Every day! This astonishing statistic is just one of the reasons Robin started a research project with the city's Department of Sanitation. She walked the routes herself, operating experiments and doing lots and lots of interviews. She even spent months doing polls about this issue, hoping to get a clearer version of the whole thing, and eventually come up with a solution. By the way, as mentioned in her lecture, she even drove a garbage truck herself. And all of these above doings were just going after the answer, who is cleaning after us???

By the way, what's worth mentioning was that, Robin Nagle is indeed an anthropologist, but with a very particular focus... garbage.

Robin Nagle has been the anthropologist at the Department of Sanitation in New York City since 2006, according to her biography.

Robin is fascinated with trash stems from her desire to understand the all-too-often invisible infrastructure that guides the flow of garbage through a megalopolis like New York. After all, the city produces 11,000 tons of rubbish each day... and all of that has to be dealt with somewhere and by someone. If not, damaging health problems and consequences for all. So why do sanitation workers experience such stigma, all too often scorned and berated while on the job? Nagle, who is also director of NYU's Draper Interdisciplinary Master's program in humanities and social thought, determined to find out. She got her sanitation worker license and has spent much time with workers on the job, getting an up-close view of the city's garbage and the systems in place to deal with it. 

I also agree it makes me incredibly angry when I go hiking/camping and see people throw litter on the floor on a beautiful trail. I've actually told people to pick it up and on one occasion when I was younger and less calm forced them too when they refused. In my experience it is always rich people who behave like this in the countryside as people like me are poor and know it is up to us to clean up after ourselves. We also only have the trails to go to escape the misery so we want to protect them.