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By: Serach Nissim
What happens if you accidentally throw away your valuables and only realize the mix up after the garbage has already been picked up?
The episode is not so far fetched and not too rare. As per the NY Post, Jill, a Staten Island mother-of-three, realized last Friday that her wallet, keys and jewelry were all unintentionally tossed out with the trash. Her wallet, which held cash and credit cards, also contained her car keys and a heirloom pair of gold earrings from the 1940s, was thrown out when her daughter had helped to unloaded bags from their car. She only realized the faux-pas after the Department of Sanitation garbage truck had already picked up their trash. She told the Post that while it would have been a big deal to replace any of those things, the loss of the earrings which had been passed down in her family, was the pinnacle in her mind. “I wore the earrings for my wedding, my daughter wore them for her high school graduation and prom,” said Jill, who did not wish to publish her last name. “When you lose something so personal, you are hysterical.”
The city collects some 24 million pounds of trash daily. She didn’t know if it was even possible to find her treasures. In fact though, over the years, New Yorkers have thrown out and managed to recover goods including laptops, passports, valuable clothing, a lottery ticket worth $1,500, and even tefillin, or the Jewish ritual leather scroll boxes which orthodox men bind around their arms and forehead during prayer.
Joshua Goodman, Deputy Commissioner, Public Affairs & Customer Experience for the NYC Department of Sanitation, told the Post that the department gets frantic calls several times a month, with owners looking to recover something from their trash. Goodman said the instances are “a good reminder that every item in the trash used to belong to someone.”
Jill’s first move was to drive around her neighborhood, looking for the garbage truck. When this was to no avail, she called 311, which connected her with the Staten Island transfer station, where neighborhood waste is loaded onto bigger trucks headed to the final disposal destination. Lucky for her, employees were able to pinpoint the local truck that had picked up Jill’s garbage and prevent the cargo from being shipped out of the city. “You have a finite amount of time” — two or three hours after street pick-up — “before the trash is taken to a transfer station and taken out of the city via a barge or rail car,” said Goodman. If Jill had called after that time frame and missed the truck before it was taken out of the city, her chances of finding her goods would have been doomed. The DOS allowed her to come down to the station and dig through the mountain of trash. She was told she wouldn’t have more than 90 minutes and it was suggested she bring a friend to help with the search.
“I’m usually in pressed pants and lipstick,” said Jill, noting that the trash was “pretty smelly.” After searching with heavy duty gloves for about 30 minutes she spotted and reclaimed her green wallet. “I was in shock,” she said. “Everything was intact. [But] it smelled like a pile of garbage.”
