Photo of the Day: Waste on the streets of New York
UPDATE: I have word that the New York regional office is up in arms over this photo. Please note that I received it from a college friend who does NOT work for the Census Bureau. I don’t want anyone to be falsely accused/needlessly fired over something that they didn’t do…
423 West 127 Street, New York, New York
Multiply this by the 494 local census offices around the country…and know that this happens on a daily/weekly basis.
Tags: boxes, materials, New York, print, printing, recycle, recycling, sidewalk, waste
May 26th, 2010 at 11:32 am
May 26th, 2010 at 12:00 pm
Looks like a picture of boxes…..just because they are throwing things away doesn’t mean it’s waste. Many of these boxes appear to be resealed. What would it look like if the boxes were filled with used materials that were being thrown out because they’re no longer needed?
May 26th, 2010 at 12:03 pm
at least they’re marked “recycle”…
May 26th, 2010 at 12:05 pm
“Multiply this by the 494 local census offices around the country…and know that this happens on a daily/weekly basis.”
Actually…. no. Recycling or destroying that much material happens about… 4 times in 2 years. All other paper waste (which amounts comparibly to any office of equal size) is regularly shredded and recycled.
Hyperbole ill suits you.
May 26th, 2010 at 12:38 pm
SRM… I can’t tell, but are those 2009 dates on the boxes? Why on earth would they recycle old materials?!
May 26th, 2010 at 12:49 pm
“Multiply this by the 494 local census offices around the country…and know that this happens on a daily/weekly basis.”
[citation needed]
May 26th, 2010 at 1:16 pm
The 494 is the number of offices. The rest is my commentary…And yes, I have word that the boxes contain surplus printed materials. SRM
May 26th, 2010 at 1:52 pm
Thanks for the clarification. We now understand that you are mixing fact and fiction.
May 26th, 2010 at 3:51 pm
I believe it! Looks like our LCO.
May 26th, 2010 at 5:56 pm
Wait a minute–They told me in training that discarded census materials were to be specially processed, shredded, bleached and carted to a double-secret landfill in Indiana. Please don’t tell that’s not true. I might lose my faith in the US Census Bureau.
Maiasaura
May 26th, 2010 at 6:49 pm
The boxes seem to be recruiting and testing materials..Almost every office has so much of this leftover stuff.
May 26th, 2010 at 8:15 pm
My office put out at least 50 dumpsters worth of stuff! They have been thowing out materials over the last couple of months. And some poor schmuck gets paid to do it.
May 27th, 2010 at 12:30 am
I wish we only had that much.
May 27th, 2010 at 12:52 am
I work in this LCO and everyone is trying to find the culprit. Never since the manhunt for Osama bin Laden have I seen such diligence. We were told when they find this person they are going to shred this person like they do the PII and Title XIII information.
The new directive we were told today is that we are to only throw out materials in unmarked boxes and a census employee must now stand watch until the garbage truck comes to pick it up.
The headquarters and RCC staff are the same people who ordered us:
* paid to have all this stuff printed and delivered to the LCOs
* estimated and told us to hire all these enumerators and office clerks
* paid Harris Corp to develop the HHCs
* paid to develop the PBOCS (pee box) which doesn’t work
* to box all this material and clearly label it for disposal
* get it ready for the disposal truck at 2:00pm which never came.
Now they are yelling at us and telling us to quietly destroy this material to cover their asses so they can save their jobs.
Thank you MyTwoCensus. It’s about time someone aired out their dirty laundry.
May 27th, 2010 at 2:06 am
@Anonymous – no, this is not fact and fiction. it is reporting mixed with commentary, like most news in this country and around the world. wake up to reality!
May 27th, 2010 at 10:10 am
You heard this from a college friend? Did he open the boxes to see what was in them or just assume? I say it is highly unlikely to have this much going out daily as you claim. If that was so, they’d almost be receiving daily shipments that they are carting right out to the trash.
May 27th, 2010 at 12:05 pm
I don’t know about New York, but the recycling in my area requires everything to be separated. You can’t just put out cardboard boxes of paper materials to be recycled. You have to take the paper out, put it into a separate bin, and collapse the cardboard boxes.
But then perhaps it’s reflective of the overall paranoia, that they are doing the right thing by recycling the discarded paper goods, but expect that no eyes will be laid upon it nor the contents, thus putting it into boxes that are sealed, and having huge hissy-fits when somebody photographs the piles of boxes. Hello, everybody has trash; and usually recycled stuff is put onto a big conveyer belt and people look at everything to make sure that there is nothing in there that can contaminate the load, for example, a discarded candy wrapper amongst all of that paper.
I expect that our LCO will have similar discards once all of our barely-used manuals and training materials (along with the errata thereof which were received after we had completed training) are all brought back in and will need to be recycled.
All of these materials, once deemed so important, become mere fodder for the recycling heap. Folks, be sure to buy 100% recycled content paper; who knows, it may contain your 2010 census manual!
May 27th, 2010 at 2:32 pm
Just how many boxes are being dumped in NYC ??? I can only imagine
May 27th, 2010 at 4:03 pm
Yawn. Much ado about next to nothing, and yet more of S.R. Morse’s “tempest-in-a-teapot” style of journalism.
Since Morse is obviously paying attention to comments here, even replying to them, I wonder if he’ll do me the courtesy as well.
I agree with him that this is not a case of mixing fact and fiction. He’s not making anything up here, not lying. But what he is doing is creating the illusion of “controversy” where there really is none, of making a mountain out of a molehill just for the sake of titillating his readers.
I mean, look: Show me one organization, government, public or private, that doesn’t generate large amounts of paper waste like that seen here. And in the case of the Census, we’re talking about 1) a huge operation that occurs only every 10 years (probably the largest data-collection operation on the planet), and 2) an operation that is by its nature very paper-intensive. Paper is required for each and every aspect of its operation.
Now, if you are running such an operation, and have hired lots of people to carry out its various tasks (OK, maybe you over-hired, but that’s a separate story), then you need to make sure that you have enough materials for those people to do their jobs. If you think you need 2,000 enumerators manuals, then you order 3,000, just to be sure you have enough. You certainly don’t order 2,000, then find yourself short and needing to make up the remainder on short notice; that’s economically worse than ordering too many and having to recycle the leftovers.
As someone else said here, this is really a case of hyperbole on Morse’s part. So Mr. Morse, what do you think?
May 27th, 2010 at 4:05 pm
By the way, Mr. Morse, as I’ve said before, I’m not knocking your entire effort. There is much material here that is important and ought to be exposed to the light of day. It’s just that things like this, picayune stuff, diminish your credibility and allow people to write you off as just another Internet crank. You’d be doing yourself (and us) a huge favor by being a lot more judicious in your postings. (And using rags like the NY Post as references certainly doesn’t do anything good for your cred.)
May 27th, 2010 at 9:42 pm
All PII and Chapter 13 is shredded.
We’ve recycled at least as much as shown, maybe more, two or three times.
When the enumerators, crew leaders and such return their unused Census materials and the end of an operation – manuals, ect, they are seperated and recycled or, in the case of things like pencils and supplies – donated to local schools or teachers associations.
The percentage of waste is probably on par with any business or operation of this magnitude.
Hyperbole, I probably have to agree, but it was kind of – fun.
May 27th, 2010 at 9:48 pm
@LCO-AM: “Hyperbole, I probably have to agree, but it was kind of – fun.”
Good way to put it. If this was my blog, I would’ve put that photo into a “picture of the day” gallery without comment and just left it at that, instead of making a Federal case out of it like S.R. Morse did.
It is interesting to see scenes like this to remind us of just how much paper is flying out there in that blizzard of paperwork.
May 28th, 2010 at 12:07 am
I guess SRM would prefer that all these materials should be shipped back to some central storage facility and kept there…..and let the taxpayer pay shipping and rent for who knows how long. Maybe they could use the warehouse from the Indiana Jones movies.
Seriously, what’s worse? Running out of supplies and telling people they can’t accept more applications because they ran out of materials or having some left over. No, I get it…..just print in advance the exact number needed! That solves all of the problems! LOL
May 28th, 2010 at 2:02 am
I work in this district as well. The problem is not the boxes being dumped. In fact the initial story is a non story. The LCO needs to get rid of trash. No. To me the issue is the response behind the scenes.
May 28th, 2010 at 4:40 am
@yet another enumerator
I do play a gatekeeper role in maintaining this blog. I find it essential to throw as much information as possible out into the public sphere because while each individual post may not be monumental, when things are all added up, they can be significant. i get many tips based on each post, so you never know where problems are lurking until they are made public…
May 28th, 2010 at 10:25 am
Thanks, Stephen.
May 28th, 2010 at 2:35 pm
@SRM: Thanks for finally answering me. I know I’ve been kinda hounding you for a while, and though we may disagree about the way you approach these stories, your site in general is a useful one, so thanks for putting it up and maintaining it.
May 28th, 2010 at 11:13 pm
It’s also that the LCO’s over-ordered some stuff (nonessentials) and under-ordered some other stuff (essentials) that bothers me. But unlike the LCO that dumped unused boxes of practice tests, our LCO has a strict “shred everything” policy. They have shredded tons and tons and tons of surplus paperwork — surplus because they over-ordered.
May 29th, 2010 at 9:12 pm
YAE:
August 23rd, 2010 at 12:35 am
I have just one question. What do I need to get going with this next operation?
August 23rd, 2010 at 12:36 am
correction….what do I need to do to get going with this next operation?