NEW YORK (AP) Residents of New York City have been disposing of their trash by throwing plastic bags filled with foul-smelling trash directly onto the sidewalk for the past fifty years.
Rats feast on the rubbish that spills into the street when the bags eventually leak or burst apart. The city’s image as unclean is further cemented in the winter when the rubbish mounds are buried in snow and stay frozen in place for days or even weeks.
At least for the largest metropolis in America, New Yorkers are now gradually getting used to a completely new routine: placing their trash in containers. with covers.
All residential buildings with fewer than ten units were required to have covered bins earlier this month. Most residential properties are like that. Earlier this year, bins were to be used by all city companies.
Jessica Tisch, the city’s former sanitation commissioner, who oversaw the new measures before taking over as the city’s new police commissioner last week, acknowledged that this must seem ridiculous to anyone listening who lives in any other city in the globe. However, by New York City’s standards, it is revolutionary because we have been putting all of our trash on the curbs for the past 50 years.
It’s long past for New York City to catch up, according to locals who have previously witnessed waste containerization abroad.
John Midgley, who owns a brownstone in Brooklyn and has lived in London, Paris, and Amsterdam, said, “You see plastic bags open with the food just rotting and stinking and then it leaks out over the sidewalk and into the road.” You know, week after week after week, the stench of it accumulates.
The city’s sanitation agency collects around 24 million pounds (11 million kilograms) of the 44 million pounds (20 million kilograms) of rubbish that New York City residents, companies, and institutions leave out on the curb each day. Private garbage carters handle a large portion of the remainder.
Trash had to be put in metal cans in New York City at the beginning of the 20th century. However, in the days before plastic bags were widely used, trash was dumped straight into the trash cans, leaving them dirty and unclean.
The city’s sanitation workers then went on strike in 1968. Trash cans were overflowing for nearly a week. Like a dystopian nightmare, garbage piles were piled high on sidewalks and spilled into the streets.
According to Steven Cohen, a dean of Columbia University’s public affairs department, plastic bag manufacturers gave thousands of bags to help clean up the mess, and New Yorkers never looked back.
He said that convenience was the reason. The sanitation workers favored the new, lighter, and supposedly cleaner sealed plastic bags after the walkout.
Compared to the original metal containers, plastic retained more scents. A worker might easily throw a bag onto a truck by grabbing its neck.
But Democratic Mayor Eric Adams administration has deemed trash bag mounds Public Enemy No. 1 in hiswell-documentedwar against thecity s notorious rats.
Rats may enter a plastic bag with little difficulty. Durable bins with closing, locking lids should, in theory, do a better job of keeping them out.
The bin requirement, which took effect Nov. 12, comes with its own challenges. Among them: Finding a place for large, wheeled bins in neighborhoods where most buildings don t have yards, alleys or garages. Landlords and homeowners also have to collect the empty bins and bring them back from the curb in the morning something you didn t have to do with plastic bags.
Caitlin Leffel, who lives in Manhattan, said residents of her building had to hire someone at surprisingly high cost to bring out the bins the night before and bring them back in three times a week.
I know there are problems with the way this city has collected trash for years, she said. But the way this program has been rolled out, it has not taken into account many of the nuances of living in New York City.
Building superintendents are also grumbling about the added work of bringing bins back from the curb.
It s completely rearranged our lives, says Dominick Romeo, founder of NYC Building Supers, a group of building managers that recently rallied in front of City Hall against the new requirements. Folks are running around like crazy.
Eventually, the largest residential buildings those with more than 31 units will have their own designated container on the street. New trash trucks built withautomated, side-loading armsanother innovation that is already common in many other countries will then clear them out.
The upgrades should make pickups easier and cleaner, even if it might take longer for trash collectors to make the rounds, says Harry Nespoli, president of the union representing some 7,000 city sanitation workers.
For now, he says, workers are still tossing trash into their trucks manually, which has its own downsides.
Some places, they re not even using bags. They re just putting their trash into the bins, Nespoli said. It s going to take time to get everyone to do it the right way, but at the end of the day, it s our job to pick it up.
Tisch believes New Yorkers will eventually come around to the new reality.
City officials, for now, are issuing written warnings for non-compliance. Not everyone knows about the new rules yet. But come Jan. 2, fines ranging from $50 to $200 will kick in.
No one wants to live on a dirty block, Tisch said. No one wants to walk past a heaping mound of trash and trash juice when they are leaving to go to work or they are walking their kids home from school.
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