Picking Up

Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City by Robin Nagle, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. 

The author is an anthropologist who worked for awhile as a worker in the Department of Sanitation of New York City. She gives an interesting history of sanitation in New York City, plus a memoir of her time as a garbage woman. She drove several kinds of garbage trucks. Working for sanitation is a dangerous occupation. The machinery in the truck sometimes accidentally propel dangerous objects at the workers: hypodermic needles, broken glass, nails and caustic chemicals. Besides picking up garbage, DSNY also clears snow from the streets, using snow plows and spreader trucks that spew salt on icy roads. The department bought its street sweepers, which they call mechanical brooms, from the English firm Johnston Sweepers.