New York City is a massive outlier when it comes to waste disposal. They have no working landfill sites or incineration facilities, they have considerable political difficulties in exporting waste to New Jersey or New York State and their waste management system is still substantially dysfunctional due to the legacy of organised crime. As a result, they have the highest per-tonne landfill costs in North America. These problems could be fixed on a practical level with a handful of modern waste-to-energy plants, but that's politically untenable in the current climate.