How and When NYC Will Mandate Trash Bins to Combat Stinky Sidewalks, Rats

The days are numbered, officials hope, for two ubiquitous features of New York’s sidewalks: towering piles of trash and scurrying rats.

The city is making moves toward complete trash “containerization,” the long-held dream of garbage management experts and city planners.

If implemented correctly, it could transform your curbside. But there is a long way to go, and lots of logistics to sort out. Here’s a guide on the basics:

What is ‘containerization’?

The idea is simple: Instead of putting flimsy, plastic trash bags on the curb, New Yorkers would instead put garbage into hard, plastic containers. Trash collectors then empty those containers directly into a truck and cart it away. Revolutionary? Not really — containerization or something like it is the standard in every other major city in the country, and many around the world.

“Some advocates said this would be impossible, and other advocates said it would be incredibly easy, and both of those groups were mistaken,” said Joshua Goodman, a deputy commissioner at the Department of Sanitation. “It is absolutely achievable. But it is not as simple as ‘why can’t you just copy/paste what they do in Barcelona?’” 

Why do this?

Garbage bags can break, leaking stinky trash goo. They’re practically open smorgasbords for rats, and they can hide dangerous objects that injure trash collectors. Pulling off containerization could mean New York exits those notorious lists of the most rat-infested cities in the world, and the rancid smell of summer trash becomes a thing of the past.

Containerization could also help reverse the rate of injuries for sanitation workers, who are among the most likely to get hurt on the job out of all city workers. 

Where is it going to happen, and when?

It’s already started for commercial businesses and for a handful of residents. But the rollout for the rest of the city will begin later this year.

For a sneak peek at what containerization will look like for residents, see West Harlem. City officials began a pilot program for permanent, installed trash containers there last year on just 10 blocks and a few local schools. And earlier this year, Mayor Eric Adams and sanitation officials announced that Hamilton Heights will get stationary, on-street containers next year.

Last summer, the city mandated that all food-related businesses had to put out their trash in containers, then expanded it to all chain businesses last fall and finally put the commercial container rule into effect for all businesses as of March 1 of this year.

Going forward:

• Starting this fall: All residential buildings with fewer than 10 apartments must set out their trash bins with secure lids. And come 2026, the bins used must be the official New York City bins. (More on that later.)
• Starting in the spring of 2025 in Hamilton Heights: Larger residential buildings of more than 31 units will instead have to use stationary, on-street containers, with a dedicated container for each of the buildings. Buildings with 10 to 30 apartments will have the choice between the containers or the bins. 
• TBD: Universal containerization. There is no date or timeline yet set by the city for full, citywide containerization.

What about recycling and compost — will that go in containers, too?

Not yet. Right now, the same rules apply for both compost and recycling: if you put it on the curbside in a bin, you can set it out a little bit early, at 6 p.m. But the option to bag it is still there if you put compost or recycling out at the normal set-out time of 8 p.m.

What will it look like on New York streets?

The containerization era will look like: the installation of big containers on residential streets, new side-loading garbage trucks on the street, standardized rolling bins for smaller buildings — and tens of thousands of fewer parking spots.

One of the policy changes resulting from the West Harlem pilot is to assign containers to each property, rather than shared containers among buildings. Buildings utilizing containers will have to place them in front of their properties. 

The city is currently going through the bidding process for a vendor to manufacture, install and maintain the public containers, with about 600 to 1,500 to be installed in Hamilton Heights. They’ll be roughly 2,000- to 3,200-liter square bins (about 530 to 845 gallons) that must meet be capable of being lifted by side-loading trucks and have accessible domed lids. 

For smaller buildings, the city’s already reached an agreement  with a vendor for city-approved, standardized bins. They will be sold for around $50 and will be available sometime this fall. 

While the city had initially estimated 150,000 parking spots citywide would be lost to accommodate the bins, Goodman said that recent policy changes have cut down the estimated lost parking spots to somewhere between 44,000 to 69,000.

However, there has been some criticism of the city’s new trash rules. 

The Center for Zero Waste Design, an organization aimed at curbing waste, has released its own recommendations. Among those: the city should not permanently carve out curb space for larger buildings and should use shared street containers for smaller buildings rather than bins that’ll clutter the sidewalk. 

Clare Miflin, the organization’s founder, expressed concern that some of the new sanitation department policies would not incentivize trash reduction, which should be the ultimate goal. 

“It’s just about trash and hiding the trash,” Miflin said. “It’s not about how can we incentivize people to put stuff in the recycling — it’s incentivizing people to put stuff in the trash.”

What about trash from businesses?

Commercial properties just started to have to use hard containers to put out their trash. All businesses must use a bin with a secure lid. That rule went into effect on March 1, 2024. The fine for not complying is $50 for the first offense, $100 for the second and $200 for all offenses after that.

Back in 2019, the City Council passed legislation to split the city into 20 trash zones, with just three vendors allowed per zone. That effort is meant to slash the miles traveled by commercial carters. 

While implementation of that system had been paused because of the pandemic, the first zone of Jackson Heights, Corona and Elmhurst in Queens is expected to come online later this year. 

What about the smell? Is this really going to help with rats? 

The idea is to cut down on both. On rats, early data is positive. In the Harlem containerization pilot program, city officials say rat sighting complaints decreased by 68% in the year trash went into the bins.

As for the smell, look to the East River, where Roosevelt Island has been whisking its garbage away in pneumatic tubes for decades — and doesn’t have that summer garbage stink notorious elsewhere in the city.

But I already put my trash in a container now. Can I keep doing that?

For now, you can use your own container. But in 2026, everyone in buildings with nine units or fewer will have to use the official bin chosen by the city this spring. Those bins, created by Otto Environmental Systems, will cost about $50, and the city is aiming to sell nearly 3.4 million of them.

How well has this worked in other cities?

It depends on the city, but there are many examples of large, dense cities handling trash better and more smoothly using containerization or another direct-to-the-truck option. 

As Curbed pointed out in its “case for containerized trash,” San Francisco has a three-bin system run by a private company and has 99% compliance, according to the city. In Spain, Barcelona places shared trash containers on its street for all trash and recycling, Amsterdam has underground shared trash containers and in Taipei, Taiwan, residents are required to throw their bags of trash straight into the garbage truck.

The DSNY studied garbage collection in dozens of global cities and found mixed results, notably that shared containers often overflow and are surrounded by loose bags. But it concluded that the problem is “solvable with a truck that can side-load shared containers and accept loose bags.”

Those side-loading trucks are part of New York’s strategy, as mentioned above.

Looking back: How did the trash problem get so bad?

There’s a long history of garbage in this city and lots of reading material on the subject. The short answer is: 19th century street designers nixed alleyways when creating Manhattan’s famous grid, giving residents nowhere to put piles of trash. According to this worthwhile read from the New York Times last month, the grid creators may have overlooked alleyway planning because they were much more concerned about another project on their plate: the Erie Canal.

In the 20th century, once trash-on-the-streets became the norm — and later when plastic bags reigned supreme following a notorious 1968 Sanitation worker strike — the pick-up system became hard to change politically and logistically, as Streetsblog has written. For example, New York never had the right trucks to efficiently load big, hard-sided trash bins until very recently. And for decades, agencies didn’t talk to each other about tackling the street trash problem.

Benjamin Miller, a former policy director for the sanitation department, told the outlet: “It’s a question of, simply, inertia, lack of imagination and motivation and prioritization.”