The solid waste treatment plant on Governors Island was the 1st Incinerator in the US. In 1905, New York City began using garbage incineration to generate electricity and light the Williamsburg Bridge.
By the 1920s-30s, NYC apartments had incinerators. You could dump dry rubbish into a chute to be burned. The rag-and-bone men picking out re-sellable garbage off dump piers became a thing of the past.
Over the next century, incinerators burned much of the city’s waste. By the 1960’s, the city was burning almost a third of its trash in its 22 municipal incinerators and 2,500 incinerators in apartment buildings. But a combination of environmental problems, particularly disposing of the ash, along with steep capital and operating costs, made incinerators less attractive by the mid-1980’s.
In 1923, garbage washed onto beaches, including dead dogs, cats, and chickens. Inwood incinerator, at 215th St, near 10th Ave, opened in 1934, after NYC got sued by NJ for ocean-dumping (causing issues for ships during low tide). This caused Inwood to smell and sue NYC. Inwood lost in court even though NYC promised incineration would odorless.
At the same time, New York City was also dumping garbage offshore, until, in May of 1931, the State of New Jersey filed a law suit because the Jersey Shore had been left extremely polluted by this practice. The Supreme Court ruled that New York City was forbidden from dumping its municipal waste offshore, and imposed July 1, 1934 deadline by which New York City had to find an alternative. The Supreme Court also imposed a $5,000 per day penalty for non-compliance after the deadline.
To meet this new demand, on June 28, 1934, New York City opened its Inwood incineration plant on 215th Street, near Tenth Avenue. The incinerator, and three others that went online that day, were to burn 750 tons of garbage a day, each.
The city promised nearby residents that the plant would be odorless, but that turned out not to be the case, and on November 13, 1935, the City of New York was sued for $50,000 in damages and an injunction preventing the city from operating the plant. The city won though, because the trash needed to be burned somewhere.
In 1970, the Federal Clean Air act was enacted, and incinerators shut down because they did not meet the new emissions guidelines. The City Planning Commission recommended that incinerators be phased out and replaced with landfills. The Inwood incinerating plant was closed on November 30, 1970 and the garbage began to be rerouted to the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. Today, the site is used by the Department of Sanitation as a base for administration, storage, and parking.
In 1989, a bill to ban incinerators in New York City was adopted and signed by Major Edward Koch. The bill required all incinerators to shut down within four years. In 1990, the last working municipal incinerator stopped operations, and it was torn down in 1993.
