DSNY Waste Characterization: Citywide Subsort

The Department conducted the 2017 NYC Residential, School, and NYCHA (NYC Housing Authority) Waste Characterization Study over three seasons: spring, summer, and fall. This study builds on decades of research and analysis into the evolving composition of NYC's waste stream. The study team hand sorted samples into 70 main sort categories. Sub-sorting of an additional 172 categories was conducted to get a more detailed understanding of the wide variety of plastic products in the waste stream, as well as a sub-set of Paper products. Results are presented in absolute terms as the quantity by weight of each material type. The quantity of each materials is calculated by applying the percent composition to the total quantity of DSNY collections for fiscal year 2017 (July 2016-June 2017).

The residential characterization included four residential curbside collection streams: Refuse, Paper, MGP (metal/glass/plastic), and Organics.

The school characterization included Refuse, Paper, and MGP streams collected on dedicated school collection routes. For the purposes of this study, DSNY did not characterize Organics separated for diversion but instead included organic waste in the school Refuse stream. The NYCHA characterization focused sample collection from the large compacting containers used by DSNY to collect Refuse at NYCHA's large campus-style developments.

For more information about how DSNY conducted this study and previous waste characterization studies, see: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/dsny/site/resources/reports/waste-characterization.

For information on NYC's recycling programs, see: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/dsny/site/services/recycling

Querying over HTTP

Splitgraph serves as an HTTP API that lets you run SQL queries directly on this data to power Web applications. For example:

curl https://data.splitgraph.com/sql/query/ddn \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -d@-<<EOF
{"sql": "
    SELECT *
    FROM \"cityofnewyork-us/dsny-waste-characterization-citywide-subsort-phkb-tkts\".\"dsny_waste_characterization_citywide_subsort\"
    LIMIT 100 
"}
EOF

See the Splitgraph documentation for more information.