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The World's Most Wasteful Megacity

merbs writes: The world's most wasteful megacity is a densely populated, steadily aging, consumerist utopia where we buy, and throw away, a staggering amount of stuff (abstract). Where some faucet, toilet, or pipe, is constantly leaking in our apartments. Where an armada of commerce-beckoning lights are always on. Where a fleet of gas-guzzling cars still clog the roadways. I, along with my twenty million or so neighbors, help New York City use more energy, suck down more water, and spew out more solid waste than any other mega-metropolitan area.

4 of 186 comments (clear)

  1. Smokey Mountain by jblues · · Score: 4, Interesting

    In Manila, there was a trash heap, Smokey Mountain, that was so large that it would regularly catch fire under its own decomposing weight. People made their livelihood there, so that, sadly, one could claim to be 3rd generation Smokey Mountain. It has been shutdown (and grassed over) now, but the new dump-site, Payatas is home to some 80,000 people.

    --
    If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
  2. BIG ROUND NUMBERS!!! by Moof123 · · Score: 1, Interesting

    As soon as things are in absolute rather than per capita you know it is BS. Big round numbers mask anything meaningful. If New York has twice the populationof another city, but is compared in absolute terms it is not a useful comparison. I stopped reading once I saw it was a BIG ROUND NUMBERS hatchet job.

  3. Re:Wrong point. by goodmanj · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I think you're trying to bait me on the "should EPA regulate CO2 as a pollutant" news item, but the relevant point is that fuel usage (and CO2 emissions) was one of the submitter's complaints, about New York, along with solid waste, which New York state produces the least of of any state, and domestic water use, in which it's merely below average.

  4. Re:But... by Guy+Harris · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I didn't think NYC had "detached" homes...

    They do, although some of those might be multi-family homes (for what it's worth, Trulia claims that this house at the intersection of 109th Avenue and 164th Place is a single-family home).

    But their definition of "New York" is the "megacity", which includes more than New York City; it includes:

    Constituent cities: New York City (Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island); West Connecticut (Fairfield, Litchfield and New Haven counties); North New Jersey (Bergen, Essex, Hudson, Hunterdon, Mercer, Middlesex, Monmouth, Morris, Ocean, Passaic, Somerset, Sussex, Union and Warren counties), Long Island (Nassau and Suffolk counties); Mid-Hudson region (Dutchess, Orange, Putnam, Rockland, Sullivan, Ulster and Westchester counties)

    which, I guess, means that, as a resident of Ocean Township, New Jersey, I grew up in "New York", and there were plenty of detached single-family homes where I grew up ("plenty" as in "all the homes in my neighborhood").