The Absurd Problem of New York City Trash

In New York City, trash has no dedicated space all its own.

It fits, instead, in plastic bags squeezed into the in-between spaces of the city.

It fills the gaps between buildings, the landings of stairwells, any available turf between two fixed objects.

Say, a parked car and a dining shed.

Even towering piles of trash can be almost invisible to inured New Yorkers.

But step outside the city for a moment — or view it with a visitor’s eyes — and a sense of absurdity may set in: How can one of the world’s greatest cities handle its garbage like this?

Consider the ubiquitous New York trash bag. It tears. It leaks. It smells. It multiplies on the sidewalk, attracting carryout clamshells and still-full coffee cups tossed on top until it all melds into a sticky mess. That mess feeds rats, blocks sidewalks and spills into the street. Then it strains the sanitation workers who must move every bag by hand into a trash truck, as testy drivers honk behind them.

Conversely, if the city could just tame all of this garbage, New York might be transformed.

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. 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?

(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.)

But 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?

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.

To be a little less philosophical about it, the current state of trash collection in New York City seems almost preposterous:

How we got here

And what the 1811 street grid has to do with it.

The scene in the video you just watched might equally be from the 1970s or the 1920s. Trash in New York has largely been collected the same way for generations, typically with a couple of guys in the middle of the road grinding down their knees and lower backs to thrust refuse onto a truck.

All that’s really changed has been the style of the vehicle and, if you go back far enough, the animal pulling it:

In 2024, this is not how trash is collected in most major American cities, or in comparably rich international ones.

For one thing, many American cities store and collect much of their trash out of view, in alleys instead of on the street. And they use two-wheeled bins that can be mechanically lifted by a truck. 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. 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).

But the idea of trash bags, just piled on the sidewalk?

“People would not tolerate — Would. Not. Tolerate. — 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).

“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). “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.”

No wonder New York has a rat problem (the dog feces, Mr. Stallard adds, are more delicious to rats than even the finest steak scraps).

To be fair to New York, it’s unlike other cities in some crucial ways beyond its sheer size. Many big-city sanitation departments serve only single-family houses and small multifamily buildings, requiring bigger apartment buildings to pay for private trash service. In New York, commercial businesses rely on private service. But for residences, the city collects free of charge from everyone: houses, midrises, huge apartment buildings, public housing complexes.

That’s more than 800,000 residential buildings, producing about 24 million pounds of waste a day. Commercial businesses produce another 20 million pounds daily.

History has also been unkind to New York on the trash front. If we freeze that scene from above, all the constituent parts — the bags, the street collection, the parked cars — can be traced to decisions people made decades or even centuries ago:

Let’s start with the men who drew up the iconic 1811 plan for Manhattan’s street grid north of Houston Street. They didn’t include any alleys — for no particular reason historians have discerned.

The map’s three authors left few notes about their thinking. But two of them also happened to be working under deadline on the plans for the future Erie Canal (and they produced a voluminous report for that one).

So it’s entirely possible Manhattan has no alleys for trash collection today because the men who drew the street grid in 1811 were preoccupied by what seemed at the time like a bigger assignment.

“It isn’t because they said alleys were bad,” the historian Gerard Koeppe said. “It’s because they were thinking about the Erie Canal.”

In 1954, New York made another momentous decision that wasn’t particularly related to trash but that now looms over the city’s possible solutions. That’s when New York conceded its streets to free overnight parking for private cars. Until that point, the streets typically looked like this, with cars allowed to park for no more than an hour during the day and three hours after midnight:

Now New York’s streets are lined with about three million parking spaces.

Today the only plausible place to put large, sturdy, rat-proof trash containers is in the street, as many European cities do. But to do that, New York will have to claw back street space from cars. And the city will also have to do that at a time when competition for curb space is soaring from entirely new sources: bike lanes, bikeshare docks, dining sheds, rideshare pickups, Amazon deliveries, electric car charging stations, cargo bike loading zones and more.

To take one last step through history, we must also revisit the New York sanitation worker strike of 1968. Before the strike, New Yorkers were required to put their trash straight into metal cans — picture the kind Oscar the Grouch might occupy.

But those cans overflowed to horrifying effect during the 10-day strike:

Garbage was just loose in the street.

At the time, the chemicals industry offered to come to the city’s rescue with a new product — the durable plastic trash bag. The industry even donated 200,000 of them to City Hall in its hour of crisis.

New Yorkers were relieved to be rid of the racket that metal cans made. They believed bags might better contain the smell that attracted rats. And sanitation workers preferred slinging bags into a truck over wrestling with cans. As the city moved in 1971 to formally wipe out the rule requiring cans, a city official declared the plastic bag the most significant advance in garbage collection since trash trucks replaced the horse and wagon.

Tackling the ‘black bag problem’

Or, how the city will try to put trash in containers, which sounds easy but actually is not.

It’s hard to say why, over the last half-century, New York never seriously rethought the plastic bag until now. Critics blame inertia. And the Sanitation Department had other things to worry about, like budget cuts, route planning, run-down equipment and where to put all the trash once Mayor Rudy Giuliani promised to close Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island.

“In my day and then in subsequent years, I don’t think it was ever thought about from the point of view of: ‘What’s the container? Is this the best container?’” said Norman Steisel, who was the sanitation commissioner from 1979 to 1986 (his big project was moving from a three-man truck to one that required only two workers).

Enter Mayor Eric Adams, who hates rats. And a new sanitation commissioner, Jessica Tisch, who had no particular background in trash and who has been prone to asking an outsider’s questions about it, like, “What if people put it out later in the day?”

“I think tackling the black bag problem,” she said, “is the single biggest thing you can do to make the city cleaner and restore dignity and order.”

In February, Ms. Tisch and the mayor unveiled their revised plan for “containerizing” trash; recycling, which is not so enticing to rats, will remain on the sidewalk for now. Their plan calls for one strategy for smaller residences, another for big apartment buildings, and a third for the midsize buildings in between, which actually wind up being some of the hardest.

Any plan to deal with all these bags must solve for three things: the right kind of container for each building, where to store that container, and what kind of truck can pick it up. The city’s proposal also assumes that it will continue collecting trash two or three days per week from every residence in the city.

For buildings with fewer than 10 units, including single-family homes across the outer boroughs, the city has proposed to use standard wheelie bins, as some residents already do. Residents would store them against their buildings or in front yards and wheel them to the curb on collection days. New York’s existing trash trucks, retrofitted with a lifting arm, would pick them up and empty them.

Apartments of 31 units or more would need large, stationary containers parked on the street. They would look something like this:

Two containers, each fitting four cubic yards of trash, would take up the space of one parked car. A specially designed side-loading trash truck would then lift those containers for dumping.

The middle-density buildings — those with 10 to 30 units — are tricky because they may produce too much trash for wheelie bins, but not enough to fill a container. These buildings also tend not to have full-time superintendents or trash compactors. The Sanitation Department wants to let the managers of each midsize building decide whether to use wheelie bins or on-street containers.

For every property, the answer will probably depend on the particular dimensions of their trash rooms, elevators, front yards and sidewalk space.

To understand how this will play out in real life, let’s look at a stretch of West 21st Street in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan — the same block shown in the photo above from 1940.

On a recent Friday morning before collection, there were 373 bags of trash and recycling sitting on this block-long stretch of West 21st Street.

The sidewalks looked like this …

… with trash bags erected in sculptural heaps …

… and lined up like little expectant soldiers.

There was a mattress. There is always a mattress.

The city’s plan, in theory, would take most of this trash (OK, not the mattress) and move it into a container. If we zoom in on the corner at West 21st Street and Seventh Avenue, the result might look like this:

If we continue down the full block, the city’s plan could mean placing about 80 wheelie bins on the sidewalk, and 20 containers in the street, replacing 10 parking spaces. That’s the middle range of the possible scenarios.

There’s a clear trade-off between the wheelie bins and the on-street containers: Strategies that clear more of the sidewalk take up more of the street.

The most efficient plan — taking up the least total space — would have multiple buildings share street containers. That would solve for midsize properties that have too many wheelie bins but not enough trash to justify their own street container. But the city is worried about another problem here: Shared containers would attract illegal dumping, particularly by businesses that are supposed to pay a private hauler for trash collection. So instead the city plans to assign locked street containers to specific addresses, to be unlocked by the building super.

Citywide, this plan would require at least 800,000 wheelie bins, to be purchased by individual residents and building managers (any bin will do at first, but by 2026, the city will require a standardized one).

And the Sanitation Department estimates that this plan would take up 22,000 to 34,000 parking spaces — about 1 percent of the city’s total on-street parking — depending on what the medium-size buildings opt to do. That’s significantly less than the 150,000 parking spaces the city first estimated last year. The department has cut that number by removing recycling from the program and shifting more buildings to wheelie bins.

The apartment-dense Upper East and West Sides of Manhattan would probably lose the most parking.

Every design choice has trade-offs. The on-street containers clear the sidewalks, but they may also complicate street sweeping and plowing. The wheelie bins require no street space, but too many of them may also be a nuisance. The city’s preferred side-loading trucks lift only from one side, so the city will need two fleets of right- and left-loading vehicles. Alternative hoist trucks that lift containers 20 feet off the ground can dump from either side, but they risk whacking trees and light posts. Even overhead, New York is crowded.

“This whole program,” Ms. Tisch said, “is one big balancing act.”

Commercial businesses offer a glimpse of these trade-offs to come. Last summer the city began to require restaurants, and then chain stores, and now all businesses to keep their trash in containers before private haulers collect it. There’s already less waste on the ground than existed one year ago, but there’s also a growing number of bins chained to bike racks and sewer grates to prevent people from stealing them.

Scaling up to the whole city

What happens when ideas that make sense in other cities run into the particulars of New York.

Eventually, the city envisions deploying a fleet of bespoke trash trucks — a European truck body on an American chassis, costing about $500,000 per truck — that would mechanically do the work of two people tossing trash bags.

“It’s a great idea,” Harry Nespoli, the head of the New York sanitation workers’ union, said (the trucks will still require two sanitation workers). “But over the years,” he added, “I’ve seen ideas come into New York City and come out of this city, and some of them just don’t work.”

The city is planning to pilot its strategy in Harlem starting in the spring of 2025, and any kinks and workarounds will no doubt become clear then. For example: What happens when snow piles up around the street containers? Can they withstand drivers smashing into them? What if sanitation workers can’t fit the wheelie bins between tightly parked cars?

Can such an ambitious project, which could run citywide to hundreds of millions of dollars, also stay on track at a time of city budget cuts?

The biggest logistical challenge will be the city’s enormous variability — that it contains our depicted Chelsea block and the suburban-style streets of Staten Island and the extreme density of the Financial District.

“It’s the central issue — creating some kind of uniformity in a place that doesn’t have uniformity,” said Martin Melosi, an environmental historian who has chronicled the history of waste in New York.

New York must also consider really big apartment buildings: A thousand-unit complex would need about two-dozen on-street containers. And the city has many neighborhood main streets, where ground-floor stores and cafes may not welcome a wall of wheelie bins out front serving the apartments upstairs. Then add dining sheds to these scenes. They use the same street space trash containers would. But the details of how the city contains trash on the street may also affect how appealing it is to eat there.

Clare Miflin, an architect and the executive director of the Center for Zero Waste Design, argues that a different scheme would better address these harder cases. In denser parts of the city, she suggests all small and midsize buildings use shared on-street containers, clearing the sidewalks of wheelie bins. (With the right design choices, like a smaller opening to throw trash, Ms. Miflin says the city could still discourage illegal dumping.)

That would take up more parking, and require more frequent collection in the densest parts of the city. But Ms. Miflin suggests the biggest apartment buildings don’t need their own permanent street containers. They could use four-wheeled bins that would be stored inside, filled from trash compactors, and pushed to designated on-street spots on collection days. That same street space could then be used for recycling bins on other days, and for delivery trucks and rideshare drop-offs at other hours.

Ms. Miflin worries the city is too focused on rats and not enough on how the challenge of trash containerization could also serve much larger goals in rethinking the city’s streetscape and reducing overall waste in the process.

“You should make the best use of space,” she said, suggesting that the sidewalk in front of a cafe or a ground-floor apartment isn’t best spent on wheelie bins. “Things should be on the street. But don’t consider the street something we can take as much of as we like.”

The city concedes that its plan won’t solve for every building or block. Neither wheelie bins nor street containers will work on about 4 percent of residential blocks, places where the buildings are just too big or the streets too small (or both, in the Financial District). The city would have to offer waivers or specialized trash plans to the residents there.

Considering the scenes of trash in the city today, the bar is set remarkably low, said Benjamin Miller, a former director of policy planning at the Sanitation Department and author of another history of New York trash (the word “remarkably” is ours; he used a synonym we can’t print).

“Almost anything we do would be good,” he said. “And getting rid of bags is the first sort of ‘duh!’ The benefits follow from there.”

The streets would be cleaner. The trash trucks wouldn’t idle as long. The sanitation workers would be healthier (half of their line-of-duty injuries now are sprains and strains).

Containers also make it easier to reduce waste. Some cities do that by billing more to the buildings that produce more trash. And research has suggested that if cities charge for the actual cost of garbage services, they wind up with less trash. But if you wanted to price trash, first you’d need to put it in containers for easier monitoring and measuring. (In New York, this would require a change from a service that’s nominally free.)

Then there are the building supers who’d surely be happier.

All this trash — “I go to sleep thinking about it,” said Martin Robertson, the super for a 303-unit building in Brooklyn.

Trash is the bulk of his job: figuring out where to store it, how to squish it, how to keep ahead of the ever-growing mound of cardboard.

His trash room is 163 square feet in size. But with the trash compactor, the sink and a bit of space to move around, he counts less than 42 square feet for storing the actual bags until he can take them outside on collection day.

“Literally every inch is a fight,” Mr. Robertson said. “And every system to save and reduce those inches is a fight.”

Out of space and out of better ideas, Mr. Robertson has taken to piling up his trash bags in a parking space he has claimed in front of the building with his own traffic barriers.

He has basically arrived on his own at the conclusion the city is reaching now, too: There’s nowhere left to put the trash but in the street.