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New York|What Can Hundreds of Pieces of Litter Tell Us About Manhattan?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/26/nyregion/nyc-litter.html
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Consider, for a moment, the mind of the litterbug — the mental processes that take place between the last sip of a Dunkin’ matcha latte and the casual toss of the cup onto the sidewalk or street. Is there a thoughtful pause, maybe to scan for witnesses or calculate the effort required to carry the cup to the trash can on the corner? Since everyone agrees that littering is bad, how is it that it remains so persistent?
Litter has a way of permeating the city’s consciousness, like noise or crime, a signal that social norms have broken down.
“If you walk out of your apartment and see litter,” said Joshua Goodman, a deputy commissioner in the Sanitation Department, “your first thought is, ‘No one cares about me.’”
On a blustery Tuesday in November, the photographer Emilie Gia Mẫn Rolland and I combed five distinct neighborhoods in Manhattan — from Washington Heights in the north to Wall Street and the financial district in the south — to gather litter and piece together the stories it tells about the city.
These stories varied by neighborhood. If you walk five blocks and spot only a flier for a handyman and a sticker for Andrew M. Cuomo’s unsuccessful mayoral campaign, chances are that you are on the Upper West Side. If you find a plethora of discarded cannabis packaging … well, you could be anywhere.
