TRASH

Containerization has been an elephant in the room as Mayor Eric Adams has tried to tame the city’s rat population, which researchers say is driven mainly by the availability of garbage. When the mayor appointed his new “rat czar” last month, he declined to commit to a citywide container program, although he said better bins were “very much part” of his rodent-fighting strategy.

In the report the Adams administration still does not commit to a citywide program. Besides changing New Yorkers’ behavior and transforming the city’s streetscape, the program would require an entirely new fleet of automated, ing containerized trash bins within a West Harlem community district, deploying wheeled bins to serve 10 residential blocks and 14 schools. A standard sanitation truck retrofitted with a new mechanized lift will unload the waste. side-loading trucks to lift refuse from the new bins. It would take the city at least three years and “significant capital investments” to design and manufacture the trucks, which are not widely available in the U.S., according to the study.

A Sanitation Department representative would not estimate how much a citywide program would cost, although Commissioner Jessica Tisch told The New York Times it would be “not inexpensive.” Adams’ latest budget sets aside $5.7 million over two years for the West Harlem pilot program, the representative said, providing a clue as to how much it would cost to expand containerization to all 59 of the city’s community districts.

But the city will take a step forward in the coming months by test-

The study included a block-byblock look at how trash containerization would work across the five boroughs, and it considered the examples of Barcelona, Chicago and Singapore, all cities that manage to avoid letting garbage languish on sidewalks.The 11% of New York City streets deemed unsuitable for containerized trash are in high-density neighborhoods, such as the Financial District, Downtown Brooklyn and Midtown West, which generate too much trash and are too narrow to accommodate shared bins, according to the report. But a full 80% of streets could host containers without any changes to their pickup frequency, while the remaining 9% could accommodate bins if the city doubled its collections.

Not for commercial corridors

Most commercial corridors would be unable to containerize their waste, given the huge volumes of garbage they produce—especially in Lower Manhattan and Midtown, the study found.

Containers have already been tested out in dozens of locations across the city—including Times Square, Downtown Brooklyn and other business improvement districts—through a Sanitation Department program called Clean Curbs. But the new report conceded that those bins were not scalable citywide, since they require workers to hand-load trash bags.

“There is a process from making sure we have the right trucks to pick up the containers, to make sure that we look at the design of the containers,” Adams said in a news conference last month. “There is a process to getting this city to become the cleanest city in America, which we’re going to do.”

The city is in various stages of reforming other parts of its garbage collection process. By next year it hopes to begin implementing a long-delayed program focusing on waste generated by businesses, which will divide the city into 20 “commercial waste zones” in hopes of taming an unruly system dominated by private hauling companies.

Since April 1, the city has required residential buildings to put out their trash later in the day to reduce the amount of time that garbage bags sit on the street—and become targets for hungry rats. Sanitation Department representative Joshua Goodman said that while there was no immediate data showing that effort’s success, “it’s clear that New Yorkers are experiencing clean sidewalks for far, far longer parts of the day.” ■