The Upper West Side’s Trash Walker is on a Mission

By Margie Smith Holt

Stroll the streets of the Upper West Side on trash night and you’ll see the usual sights: bags of garbage and recycling stacked high. A lone piece of furniture. The occasional (or not so occasional) darting rat. But you might also catch a glimpse of a woman with long red hair and delicate, gloved hands rifling through those bags. By her side: a shopping cart of recovered treasures.

Meet Anna Sacks, the lifelong Upper West Sider who, since 2018, has been going through our trash.

A Columbia graduate, Sacks worked a few years as an investment banker before spending a fall and winter on a regenerative farm in Falls Village, Connecticut through the Adamah Jewish farming fellowship, an experience that changed her life.

“I really fell in love with the cycle of composting,” Sacks said. “I lived this very different lifestyle where I produced little trash and didn’t consume much overall. I came back to the city after it finished, and I was just very curious about all of our trash that we were generating, because it was such a contrast from the life that I had lived during that period. And I started going through the trash and documenting it.”

The Rag tagged along with Sacks on one of her recent walks. It was a hot summer night—almost impossible to remember the mounds of dirty ice from a few months earlier—but there atop a pile of trash bags in the West 80s were three sleds that looked new, just waiting for the next snowfall.

Sacks snapped a photo and posted it on an UWS “Buy Nothing” Facebook page. Then she started untying bags. More finds: children’s books, a baby bottle warmer, kids’ toys, jewelry…all seemingly in perfect condition. She posted pictures of some. Others went into her cart.

“I use puncture proof gloves to protect my hands when I’m going through the trash,” Sacks said. “I always tie up bags…I leave things as I found it, if not better.”

Sacks pulls all kinds of things from our trash, ranging from the merely useful—tote bags, boxes of masks, bottles of hand sanitizer, unused notebooks—to the almost priceless.

Her current winter coat was salvaged from last year’s public school trash. One time she found a 1930s-era punch bowl set resembling Saturn by American designer Russel Wright. (There’s one in MoMA’s collection.)

“That was one of the most valuable,” Sacks said.

Outside one apartment building, two workers hauling an artificial fireplace to the curb wanted her to know that it seemed to be in working order. Sacks took a photo and posted it on Facebook.

A woman called out from down the block: “I follow you on Instagram!”

She’s hardly the only one. Sacks has nearly 150,000 followers on Instagram and is approaching half a million on TikTok.

If those numbers are any indication, she has succeeded in her original goal of raising awareness about how much waste we’re sending to landfills and incinerators—and how much of it could be repurposed. But Sacks says she feels that she’s barely making a dent in what she sees as a monumental environmental failure.

She’s especially distressed by the items being thrown away during large-scale moveouts—such as after someone dies; or by the mounds of stuff being put in the trash at the end of the school year and during dorm move-outs.

“I think the thing that weighs on me the most is when there are these apartment clean-outs and someone’s entire life is put into the trash.”

A new mom, Sacks is spending less time on the streets than she used to. At her height, she was trash walking three or four times a week; now it’s more like twice a month. She’s focusing more attention on policy, advocating for what she calls an “Office of Circularity,” a dedicated city office that would design and implement more creative reuse/repair/recycle systems across residential, school, government, and commercial waste streams.

“After going through the trash for almost a decade now [and noticing] the seasons of the trash and the patterns of the trash…these require large scale interventions. They require interventions of some sort that really can only happen at the government level,” she said.

Among her ideas: More recycling and composting. Microgrants for community groups to host monthly swaps. And a monthly free furniture day that would give people a chance to browse for large items they might want or need, and, perhaps most crucially, enough time to figure out how to get them home.

“What I’m proposing for the Office of Circularity is, at first, tweaks or very low-cost programs,” she said. “These are not things that are fiscally irresponsible. These are things that are kind of like minor edits to, or minor changes to, what we’re doing, [that] will have a disproportionate impact.”

Sacks said she was encouraged by a meeting last month with New York City Councilmember Gale Brewer about her free furniture day proposal and hopes a pilot program could be in the offing.

“I think it’s a good idea,” Brewer told the Rag. “But it’s not an easy project to pull off, I will also add that,” she said, citing concerns about getting the word out, ensuring that people put out items that are actually usable, and figuring out what to do with furniture that no one claims. “I’d like to work with her…I love her excitement and her enthusiasm and her intelligence.”

In the meantime, Sacks is dealing with a growing problem of her own: What to do with all the stuff she finds. While she sells or gives away much of it, she keeps a lot of it, too.

“I have a very complicated relationship to stuff,” she said. “I love things, I love objects, I love stuff, I love beautiful things…that’s one of the reasons why I do this, too…seeing all the beautiful things that are going into the trash…I become attached to them when I, you know, save them.”

And about those rats?

“They’re part of the urban environment,” Sacks said. She might squeal if one catches her off guard, but she’s much more tormented by what she finds in the bags they’re scurrying past.

“We need to change our ways. And there are these very, very targeted, concrete interventions, changes, tweaks that we could do that could have a disproportionate effect, that could prevent items from going to landfills and incinerators, that could save the city money, or be at least cost-neutral, that could build community, that could create local green jobs, that could just make this world a better place.”

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