New Yorkers played central roles in developing such technological innovations as air-conditioning, toilet paper and the atomic bomb.
But when confronted with one of civilization’s most ubiquitous inventions — the plastic garbage can — many residents of New York City find themselves positively stumped.
This conundrum became acutely apparent last month, when a new city rule went into effect requiring all residential buildings with nine or fewer units to put their trash out in bins that have secure lids. Similar rules took effect last year for restaurants, some of which have struggled to comply.
Last week, Mahmoud Kasem opened a pair of rusted steel doors in the sidewalk in front of his business, the Al-Aqsa Bakery & Restaurant in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and descended into the mucky darkness of a small basement.
By squishing, stacking and cramming, Mr. Kasem can squeeze an almost infinite number of black plastic trash bags into this underground space. But bins — particularly the wheeled ones the city now requires restaurants and smaller apartment buildings to use — can’t be squished or stacked. His bakery generates enough trash to fill 12 bins three times a week. But Mr. Kasem has no place to put them all.
“I’ll be honest: This garbage thing really stresses me out, man,” said Mr. Kasem, 37. “I want someone to come down here and tell me where I’m going to put all these buckets. There’s just no space.”
Most major cities around the world require people to put their leaky, stinky garbage bags inside closed bins rather than piling them on the sidewalk. But in New York, with its especially dense street grid, intensifying battles over curbside space and overlapping layers of government oversight, even an obvious civic good like transferring garbage into containers can seem nearly impossible to achieve.
“It’s such arrogance,” Ann Korchak, the board president of the Small Property Owners of New York, said of the Sanitation Department’s leaders in charge of the new trash rules. “They fancy themselves as the professionals here, the urban planners, the waste policy experts. But they’re not living in our reality.”
The small wheeled bins causing so many woes are New York’s latest step toward its goal of handling trash like its urban peers. First, last August, came a rule from the Sanitation Department requiring all food-related businesses to place their waste in hard plastic containers. The same month, the administration of Mayor Eric Adams started a pilot program covering 10 blocks of West Harlem in which residential buildings were required to put their trash either in small bins or in large shared containers parked on the street.
The latest rule, which took effect on Nov. 12, applies only to smaller residential buildings, but larger ones will eventually have to comply. Containerization rules for them will roll out starting next spring.
The goal, said Joshua Goodman, a spokesman for the department, is to rid New York of its mounds of flimsy plastic garbage bags and all their grotesqueries: the sidewalk ooze, the smell, the rats.
“We’re interested in the rats,” Mr. Goodman said. “But also we’re interested in the look and feel of the city. People come here from all over the world and they go, ‘Why do you live like this?’”
So, what do New Yorkers think of the city’s big trash experiment?
Opinions, according to interviews with more than two dozen residents, building owners, supers and restaurateurs across all five boroughs, are as varied and obstreperous as the urban pigeon.
For those who feel strongly about landlords saving money, supers getting their sleep or drivers finding a place to park, trash containerization arrived like the first horseman of the apocalypse.
“It’s killing us,” said Chris Athineos, whose family owns several residential buildings in Bay Ridge, as well as in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Park Slope and Prospect Heights. “When the cans are full, they’re full. I don’t know what to do with the rest of the garbage.”
For people who care most about getting rid of rats, however, trash containerization appears to be a success. Since the pilot program started in West Harlem, rat sightings in the area have dropped 60 percent, Mr. Goodman said.
“I love it,” said Rosa Eugene, 96, who has lived in the neighborhood for 75 years. “The rats were bad here for years. Now I don’t see them anymore.”
The changes have complicated the lives of some New Yorkers, though some say they do not especially mind. Albatina Harris, 37, said she used to spend an hour a week searching for parking in West Harlem. Now it can take nearly three hours every time she moves her car, she said, because so many parking spots have been lost to containers.
“But I’m OK with it,” Ms. Harris said, “because it did help with the number of rats.”
Others find the trade-offs unacceptable. “I pay the super to take the garbage out,” said Alva Badillo, who owns four small buildings with residential and commercial tenants in Queens and Brooklyn. “Now I’m expecting him to lug the garbage cans back in the morning. So he’s going to want more money, which is a drag.”
Dominick Romeo, the super for a 60-unit building in Chelsea, said his work on the evening before a trash pickup day used to end at 5 p.m., when he finished bringing as many as 60 bags to the curb.
Now, under the city’s new rules — which were designed to limit the amount of time trash sits in public walkways — he is not allowed to put the bags out until 8 p.m. Sometimes he doesn’t finish until 10. Bins brought to the curb must be retrieved early in the morning, before they are stolen or blown away. In between, he said, he has little time for sleep.
“It’s too much work,” said Mr. Romeo, 47.
Mr. Goodman of the Sanitation Department countered that Mr. Romeo had failed to opt into a program that allows large buildings to apply for early pickup. (Larger buildings are also allowed to put out trash at 6 p.m. if it is in bins rather than loose bags.) Besides, Mr. Goodman said, if one building were to win a special dispensation, the department would be overwhelmed by requests for exceptions, to the benefit of the rats.
“These rules exist for a reason,” Mr. Goodman said. “They are not capricious. They exist to improve quality of life for all eight and a half million of us.”
Unmoved, Mr. Romeo announced in August that he would run for City Council, seeking to unseat Erik Bottcher, who supports trash containerization.
At the corner of West 168th Street and Boston Road in the Bronx, Abraham Isaacs took a few minutes on a rainy Wednesday recently to visit his mother. Mr. Isaacs, a city bus driver, said that in the weeks since the citywide rule for residential trash containerization took effect, he had watched as several riders struggled to maneuver garbage bins onto his bus. He assumed the bins had been stolen.
“I know this neighborhood,” said Mr. Isaacs, 36. “As soon as I saw these bins on the street, I knew people would take them.”
Still, he said, the bins that remain seem to be having their desired effect.
“The rats on this block used to be crazy,” said Mr. Isaacs. “So many rats. But in the last few weeks, I haven’t seen rats at all.”
Mr. Kasem in Bay Ridge, for his part, plans to take drastic action. The narrow stairs to his basement occupy valuable real estate, so soon he will pay a contractor to remove the stairs with a jackhammer. He’ll install a ladder instead, all to make room for his containerized garbage.
“I know, crazy, right?” he said. “But I don’t know what else to do. All this trash has to go somewhere.”
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