A Periodic Table of NYC Trash

My fascination with urban litter began at some point in the past seven years, but I can’t be more specific. That’s the period in which I have lived in Chinatown, and in which I started noticing the neighborhood’s unique and heterogeneous trash footprint. My block, for one, is a garbage buffet. On a typical weekday morning, I might pass a fish head, a pair of adult underwear, a pair of kid underwear, a tertiary cut of meat, a broken settee, a soybean-oil tin, and drug baggies of all colors and shapes, some so small that I can’t imagine more than a grain or two of an illegal substance fitting inside. This all appears within the space of twenty or forty feet. Rats love my block. They frolic openly.