New York City waste management system

New York City's waste management system is a refuse removal system largely run by the New York City Department of Sanitation who maintain the waste collection infrastructure and hire the public and private contractors who dispose of the tens of thousands of pounds a day of waste created by New York City's population of more than eight million.
History.
Waste management has been an issue for New York City since its New Amsterdam days. “It has been found, that within this City of Amsterdam in New Netherland many burghers and inhabitants throw their rubbish, filth, ashes, dead animals and suchlike things into the public streets to the great inconvenience of the community" reads a New Amsterdam ordinance dated February 20, 1657. In the 18th and 19th centuries, New York residents were encouraged to throw their trash into the East River to shore up low-lying sections of Lower Manhattan. In the 1950s and 1960s, city planner Robert Moses encouraged residents to dump their trash to fill numerous swamps and rivers around the city to make them more hospitable to development for parkland, fairgrounds, and airports.
At the height of its use, Staten Island's Fresh Kills landfill was the largest dump in the world, sprawling across 2,200 acres. Fresh Kills first opened as a temporary landfill and closed in 2001. Starting in the late 20th century, NYC is making an effort to turn old landfill sites into parks. Notable examples of this are Freshkills Park in Staten Island and Shirley Chisholm State Park in Brooklyn. Most of NYC's waste ends up in landfills outside of the city. In 2017, the DSNY disposed of 3.2 million tons of refuse to facilities outside of New York City.
Trash incineration.
In 1885, New York City opened the nation's first trash incinerator on Governor's Island. All the way up to the 1960s, 11 unfiltered trash incinerators operated in NYC, burning garbage without regulation.
Street cleaning.
In the late 1800s, New York City implemented a street cleaning program that picked up after the large amounts of litter in the streets, as well as; cleaning up after the horse-powered transportation that transported the city. In 1895, New York City became the first U.S. city with public-sector garbage management.
Recycling in New York City.
New York City began recycling in the late 1980s. The primary recycling facility is the Sunset Park Material Recovery Facility in Brooklyn.
Canning.
New York City is a hotbed of canning activity largely due to the city's high population density mixed with New York state's current deposit laws. Canning remains a contentious issue in NYC with the canners often facing pushback from the city government, the New York City Department of Sanitation, and other recycling collection companies. Sure We Can, a redemption center co-founded by nun Ana Martinez de Luco, is the only canner friendly redemption center in the city, providing lockers and communal space for the canners to sort their collections of redeemables.
Composting.
New York City first began composting in the borough of Staten Island in 2012. The program was instituted by then-mayor Michael Bloomberg. By 2017, the program had expanded to include 300,000 households, 722 schools, agencies, and institutions, and 80 drop-off points, across the city. In 2019 the city collected 50,000 tons of compostables from curbside service. In 2020, citing budget cuts related to the Covid-19 pandemic, New York City suspended its curbside composting and organics recycling for schools. Through the effort of a community coalition called "Save Our Compost," enough funds were retained in the city budget to allow four community-scale composting sites to remain open. 
Ongoing waste management issues in New York City.
As of 2020, excessive littering remains an issue in all boroughs of NYC, especially Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens.
In 2021, city-funded composting in New York City remains tenuous. The New York City Parks Department has made efforts to relocate two of the remaining composting sites on Parks-managed land, currently operated by Big Reuse and the LES Ecology Center, raising concerns among composting advocates.