A RECENT Gallup Poll (New York Times, Sept. 7, 1969) found that the typical American citizen regarded New York as "the most interesting" of the nation's large cities, with the "gayest night life," "the best food," and "the best looking women." But when it came to cleanliness or health, New York did not score! New York's solid waste problems merit some explanation. Despite a fairly constant population of 8 million, the city's annual receipts of solid wastes have risen every year (Figure 1). This rising rate has been aggravated by the shutdown of apartment house incinerators required by recent air pollution control regulations. Predictions made by our planning consultants are for a continuing rise to 12 million tons per year by the year 2000. When, in 1934, the U.S. Supreme Court enjoined the city from disposing of its raw garbage at sea, the city was forced to embark on a full-scale incinerator program. Despite the Great Depression and World War II, by 1962 the city did manage to construct 11 incinerators with a total design capacity of almost 9,000 tons per day. Since the total amount of refuse delivered to the Sanitation Department was more than double the department's incinerator capacity, sanitary landfill operations were maintained through the years to fill the gap. Despite the increase in solid waste generation, no incinerator has been built since 1962, and no sanitary landfill site has been established since 1955. Does this indicate apathy, indifference or incompetence in our planning and engineering personnel? Not at all. Several of them are suffering from chronic frustration bordering on psychosis. Our primary problem has been local community resistance to any sanitation facility, be it garage, transfer station, salt shed, sanitary landfill or incinerator site. And the politicians who determine the priorities for expenditure of city funds have postponed, vitiated, studied, and outrightly rejected projects that might be unpopular with a segment of the voting population, however small.