We’ve probably all done it. Finished a newspaper, bottle of water, or pack of gum and thrown it in the garbage. Many people realize that these types of items should be recycled, but because they’re in a rush or there are no recycling bins around, they are thrown in the garbage.

New York City has long had waste management problems, dating back to the times when garbage was dumped in the Hudson River. In an effort to become more environmentally friendly, the city has taken large strides to increase recycling. I used two data sets in order to take a deeper look into the current state of recycling in NYC.

The first data set, Recycling Diversion and Capture Rates, calculated the diversion rate for each community district in New York City. In the world of waste and recycling, the term “diversion rate” is used to express how much waste is diverted from the landfill. In most cases, the waste is either recycled or composted instead. The higher the diversion rate, the higher percentage of waste that is recycled.

Diversion rate fluctuated quite a bit across community districts, which is reflected on the map below.

Before uploading the data onto CartoDB, however, I first needed to establish the appropriate borders for the NYC Community Districts. I downloaded the NYC Community District shape file and uploaded the zip file onto CartoDB. I realized that the districts were numbered differently in the shape file and data set and had to change them appropriately. After renaming the districts by their numbers in the Diversion rate spreadsheet, the data easily displayed on the map.

(Full, interactive map can be found here: https://jlaurenti.cartodb.com/viz/668beaa6-df11-11e4-9ab9-0e0c41326911/map)

Due the topic of the map (recycling), I chose the color green, which is often associated with items or actions that are environmentally friendly. The higher the diversion rate in an area, the deeper shade of green.

The color ramps provided by CartoDB weren’t ideal, so using the CSS feature, I created my own monochrome green scale.

In order to think more about why certain districts had higher diversion rates than others, I analyzed my second data set, Public Recycling Bins. This data set provided the exact location (by address) of each public recycling bin in the city. I merged this with the first data set. Because the exact address was provided for the recycling bins, it was easy to overlay this data onto the original map of diversion rates.

I tried a few different ways of displaying the recycling bin data to ensure that they were visualized appropriately. I tried a heat map and bubbles, but decided to go with the simple display. This way, the viewer will notice where on the map there are large amounts of recycling bins (clusters), but still be able to see the shade of green in each community district. Finally, I chose the color orange as a good variant from green.

I immediately noticed that in some of the districts with high diversion rates, such as lower Manhattan, there were a large number of public recycling bins. I examined other areas of the map to determine if this was a coincidence or a correlation.

Upon further investigation, there were some districts in Upper Manhattan with large amounts of recycling bins, but lower diversion rates. However, the districts in lower Manhattan had the largest proportion of recycling bins per area, so I believe there is a correlation.

However, simply providing public recycling bins isn’t the answer.  People must also be aware of current problems with the environment, how recycling can help, and be willing to do so.