![]() But for residences, the city collects free of charge from everyone: houses, midrises, huge apartment buildings, public housing complexes. In New York, commercial businesses rely on private service. Many big-city sanitation departments serve only single-family houses and small multifamily buildings, requiring bigger apartment buildings to pay for private trash service. To be fair to New York, it’s unlike other cities in some crucial ways beyond its sheer size. ![]() Stallard adds, are more delicious to rats than even the finest steak scraps). No wonder New York has a rat problem (the dog feces, Mr. “They’re up against tough odds with people literally taking garbage - raw garbage, dog feces that they cleaned up - and they’re putting it in a bag and putting it out on the curb.” “I would never ever ever ever even think to try to have an opinion on what New York does,” Cole Stallard, Chicago’s streets and sanitation commissioner, said of his New York counterparts (alleys host about 90 percent of his trash collection). trash being left the way it is in New York City,” Anthony Crispino, deputy director for the District of Columbia Department of Public Works, said of Washington residents (about 65 percent of Washington’s collection happens in alleys, for one). Other cities even store trash underground or push it through pneumatic tubes (Roosevelt Island, an oasis of relative cleanliness in New York, has a pneumatic system).īut the idea of trash bags, just piled on the sidewalk? Dense European cities like Amsterdam, Barcelona and Berlin that do collect trash from the street often use large shared containers that are also mechanically emptied. ![]() And they use two-wheeled bins that can be mechanically lifted by a truck. In 2024, this is not how trash is collected in most major American cities, or in comparably rich international ones.įor one thing, many American cities store and collect much of their trash out of view, in alleys instead of on the street. To be a little less philosophical about it, the current state of trash collection in New York City seems almost preposterous:ġ913: A century in the past, but the same problems as today. These questions are about no less than the dilemma of a truly dense city, where anything that demands its own space means something else must give. (It’s not lost on the Sanitation Department that the city is a punchline: “ This was our moon landing,” the agency posted self-deprecatingly on X when video of its newly unveiled trash truck was shared widely last month.)īut the details of how this might be done in New York turn on a number of deeper and more difficult questions about the city itself: Where, exactly, do you carve out space for an essential city service in a place with so little space left? How should the city dole out what has become its most contested public asset, the curb space in the street? Would New Yorkers give up parking to clean up the trash? The prospect has prompted much snickering: New York’s big idea to clean up trash is to … put it in trash bins? Like other cities have done … for decades? The Sanitation Department has vowed to do this, shifting the bulk of New York’s waste out of sloppy sidewalk piles and into containers in a manner more closely resembling that of other American cities and global capitals. ![]() Then it strains the sanitation workers who must move every bag by hand into a trash truck, as testy drivers honk behind them.Ĭonversely, if the city could just tame all of this garbage, New York might be transformed. That mess feeds rats, blocks sidewalks and spills into the street. It multiplies on the sidewalk, attracting carryout clamshells and still-full coffee cups tossed on top until it all melds into a sticky mess. March 2, 2024Ĭonsider the ubiquitous New York trash bag. Larry Buchanan, Emily Badger and DeSean McClinton-Holland walked miles around New York pondering trash, including tailing a midnight collection shift, and will never look at it the same way again. Photographs and videos by DeSean McClinton-Holland ![]()
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