Victims of the “Trash Revolution,” New York City’s iconic green-mesh garbage cans will soon be a thing of the past. (Allison Hunter)

New Yorkers pride themselves on their grit. We walk fast, we work hard, and we accept that trash is just a way of life. Trash piles up on street corners and fills sidewalk cans to the brim. About 44 million pounds of trash is produced by the city every day — ours is the largest waste management system in the nation, by far. We joke about that characteristic summer stench, and don’t flinch when our footsteps send rats scurrying across our path.

But a flurry of new city mandates is bringing hopes of change — and new trash cans — to our delightfully dirty archipelago. It’s the year of the trash revolution, with citywide mandated composting, recycling initiatives, and the dawn of “containerization” — for the first time in most New Yorkers’ lives, they’ll be required to throw their trash into cans rather than straight to the curb.

These new trash laws are expected to impact every New Yorker in one way or another — from the Chelsea super fighting containerization to the long-suffering residents of Brooklyn’s “rat mitigation zones” to the trash vigilantes of Ozone Park. Will “containerization” spark a true waste revolution? Will we ever change our ways? It’s too early to tell. But no matter what our future holds, one thing remains clear:

In New York City, trash is everything.

Artist Marie Lorenz explores Newtown Creek. (Ezra Nielsen )

Two New York Artists Transform How We See the City’s Trash

Rowing through a Superfund site in a homemade boat, looking for meaning in the debris

By Ezra Nielsen

The sun was setting, and the November air was turning chilly as we clipped on our life preservers and set off into Newtown Creek in a handmade rowboat. Our captain, Marie Lorenz, is an artist and intrepid explorer who has ventured into places most people would rather avoid. Dressed in camo pants, she had expert command of her vessel, a relief because, as a former freight canal that intersects Brooklyn to Queens, Newtown Creek is so polluted with dangerous materials it’s been designated a Superfund cleanup site. 

Our oars dipped into the toxic water as we navigated the labyrinthine canal, leaving behind the view of the Williamsburg Bridge and the Manhattan skyline. Once flowing through wetlands, marshes, and estuaries, Newtown Creek is now lined on both sides with concrete walls, warehouses, and light industry. 

A combination of wind and drought had kept it free of flotsam that day, Lorenz said, as we followed the smooth, black water into a glorious sunset, traveling toward what felt like the post-industrial end of time. 

We sailed past rotting boats, bridges, and massive piles of detritus, including a 30-foot mound of scrap metal bound for recycling and an entire yellow school bus. Newtown Creek is home to many of the city’s waste transfer stations — it’s a trash center of the metropolis. Surrounded by the accumulating waste we create, we can’t begin to understand ourselves, Lorenz insisted, without considering that waste.

“We followed the smooth black water  toward what felt like the post-industrial end of time.”

In the past 20 years, she has taken hundreds of trips in her rowboat along the waterways of New York City and the surrounding areas. As part of her ongoing project, the Tide and Current Taxi, she has rowed to Governors Island, crossed Pelham Bay, and explored the Meadowlands. Lorenz will tell you that water carries boats, marine life — and ever-greater quantities of garbage. 

In her trips around New York City, Lorenz collects the trash she collides with on the water and along the shore. She then refashions and reinvents these objects into sculptures and prints. 

For her show “Drift Tilt,” which was displayed at the Jack Hanley Gallery in Tribeca this fall, Lorenz cast fragments of refuse (such as a plastic six-pack holder) in gypsum concrete and attached them to the ends of slender poles that sway back and forth on metal frames. These hypnotically captivating kinetic sculptures move like so many metronomes, imitating, Lorenz said, the rhythm of the waves and the rhythm of being out in her boat.

She’s fond of a video of philosopher Slavoj Zizek speaking about weighty ideas at a dump. “Part of our daily perception of reality,” said Zizek, wearing a yellow vest and pointing at the piles of garbage behind him, “is that this disappears.” The idea resonated with Lorenz, who’s fascinated by the ironic dissonance people experience when they encounter trash. 

“Everybody sees it, and they’re like, ‘Oh, I can’t believe someone did that,’” she said. Her response? “It’s like, no no, you did it. We did it.’” 

Lorenz asks what would happen if we all had to live in and around the garbage that seems to magically disappear on a weekly schedule. Her work defamiliarizes trash as a way to become reacquainted with it. “There’s something about making prints of it, making casts of it,” she said, “that makes people look closer at it.”

Old wallpaper recovered from Dead Horse Bay and transformed by Keogh. (Tyler Paz)

A few days before the boat trip I visited another artist, Catherine Telford Keogh, in her studio near the Gowanus Canal. While Lorenz trawls the city’s waterways, Keogh explores it by land. 

During long walks, Keogh said, she goes wherever her curiosity takes her. Once she got a dog, she started looking down at the ground more closely, studying the trash people leave behind and how it varies from neighborhood to neighborhood, telling a story about the people who live there and what they value. 

Keogh is especially interested in how something that was once desired becomes its opposite: waste. A new product projects an aura, shiny and new, that promises a kind of fulfillment. “But, then you see it smushed under your car wheel on the ground, and there’s dirt on it,” Keogh said. “And it’s a kind of failure of this system.”

 “Metronome” (2024) by Marie Lorenz, from “DRIFT TILT.” (Tyler Paz)

In Keogh’s work, that failure is an opportunity to excavate our history by excavating waste, as a way to reinvent our categories for what’s precious and what’s worthless. For one piece, called “Hardgood & Dolly,” she unearthed a piece of old wallpaper from Dead Horse Bay, a leaking landfill along the Brooklyn shoreline that was used until the 1950s and closed to the public in 2020. The wallpaper, torn from a demolished house and then buried, has been exhumed: It sits in Keogh’s studio on top of a salvaged marble slab that looks like a massive lump of prehistoric wood, flaking and friable. Material that once defined domesticity has been transformed into something strange and new.

Keogh has also traveled to the water’s edge, to dredge toxic sludge from the Gowanus Canal, a Superfund site like Newtown Creek. She pours the viscous substance, which is filled with dangerous compounds such as PCBs and coal tar, into transparent containers, with the hope of making dead industrial matter vibrate with new meaning. 

For Lorenz, finding trash on the water is itself an adventure she wants to recreate for her viewers. “It’s more like the experience of beachcombing,” she said, “the experience of finding it. So I want to give somebody the joy that I feel discovering it.” 

Edited by Vincent Anthony

A member of the civilian patrol makes his rounds. (Mikella Schuettler)

Riding Along With the Trash Vigilantes of Ozone Park

A civilian patrol is restoring pride in their neighborhood post-Covid, one broken fridge at a time.

By Mikella Schuettler

On a windy Sunday evening in October, Raji Uddin, 33, and Daniel Hill, 19, met in the parking lot of an Ozone Park grocery store. They climbed into a car painted to resemble an NYPD police cruiser and tuned into the police scanner in the cupholder.

Uddin and Hill are part of the Cityline Ozone Park Civilian Patrol (COPCP), a group of 15 or so volunteers trained in CPR who patrol neighborhoods along the border of Brooklyn and Queens.

Almost every night, pairs of volunteers roam the neighborhood, responding to car accidents and helping residents file police reports. Patrol partners switch each night, depending on availability — one person drives while the other monitors the sidewalks and listens to the police scanner. 

But tonight, the patrol was on the hunt for something else. 

Uddin and Hill wound through the neighborhood, down streets lined with two-story houses, under the A-train subway tracks, and onto a bustling main road, where Uddin spotted a television dumped on the sidewalk. Hill hopped out of the car and logged the garbage using his 311 app. By morning, he said, the Department of Sanitation will have picked it up. 

Members of the patrol log illegal dumping almost every night. Garbage bags and other trash on the street might not be a priority for the three police precincts that cover the area, but for the community, the mess is significant. 

“It just makes the community seem disgusting, like it’s a dirty area,” said Uddin, “and people don’t want to come by.”

Uddin’s family has lived in the neighborhood for three generations, and he proudly points out the diversity of businesses — from bubble tea stores to barbershops — along Liberty Avenue. According to him, Ozone Park has everything you could ever need. 

Hill began volunteering with the patrol for high school credits, but patrolling with people like Uddin is why he continues today. He hopes to become a police officer or a politician in the future, to continue helping his community. 

The patrol car has become a fixture in the neighborhood. People standing at the tea stalls along the sidewalk waved at Hill and Uddin as they drove through the streets. 

A small park came into view, home to three concrete checkerboards. 

“We found a fridge here in the middle of the plaza on Elder Lane. Pots and everything,” Hill said, pointing. 

According to Mohammad Khan, the executive director of COPCP, illegal dumping is most felt in places where the community gathers. “When public spaces are dirty, people don’t come to enjoy them.”

“This little island is supposed to be a place for people to come, hang out, and play some chess,” Khan said. “If that park now has trash all over, then you’re not likely to sit down there.”

Hill and Uddin of the Cityline Ozone Park Civilian Patrol. (Mikella Schuettler)

The pandemic appears to have increased dumping in several neighborhoods. In 2021, 142 complaints of illegal dumping were logged in Ozone Park via 311. By 2024, that number was over 700. 

Frustrated residents started reaching out to reporters to complain, and in 2022 Mayor Eric Adams allocated $14.5 million to New York’s Department of Sanitation, some of which went towards expanding enforcement of illegal dumping.

But as the trash continued to pile up day after day in Ozone Park, residents decided they needed to take matters into their own hands and the civilian patrol started submitting illegal dumping complaints as part of their rounds.

It’s unclear to the Department of Sanitation and to Ozone Park residents why dumping increased during the pandemic. 

“Illegal dumping is difficult to quantify, and it’s difficult to ascertain reasons behind it,” said Department of Sanitation Press Secretary Vincent Gragnani. 

Khan and his fellow Ozone Park residents suspect people may have gotten into the habit of illegal dumping when Covid forced people indoors, leaving the streets empty and unattended. Gragnani and the DSNY, however, believe much of the dumping is more organized. “In most cases, it’s contractors looking to evade the fees of properly disposing of construction materials,” Gragnani said.

Since 2022, the city has implemented a targeted approach — as of May, the DSNY had installed 280 cameras around the city to catch those illegally dumping trash on the streets, with plans to add more cameras next year. (Earlier this year, a surveillance camera in Ozone Park caught an illegal dumper, and the DSNY impounded the vehicle.) 

The DSNY says it’s also stepping up enforcement: In 2023, they issued more than 300 court summonses to illegal dumpers. By October of this year, the agency had already issued more than 200 fines, with fines starting at $4,000.

“Crooks who are dumping trash here are on notice: If you dump on our neighborhoods, we will catch you, we will impound your vehicle, and you will pay,” Gragnani said.

“It makes the community seem like it’s a dirty area, and people don’t want to come by.”

Deep in Ozone Park lies Bayside Cemetery. The small field is filled with headstones and mausoleums from the 1800s and is a source of pride for many in the community. It’s also an illegal dumping hot spot.

“It’s really sad because your loved one is gone, they’re resting their final rest over there, and someone being inconsiderate is throwing trash,” Khan said. 

Indeed, as the patrol car drove past Bayside, trash bags, mattresses, and other refuse could be spotted leaning against the gates. 

The Cityline Ozone Park Civilian Patrol was formed in 2020, amid a string of robberies and violence that seemed to target the Muslim community in particular. At the time, Khan said, the Bangladeshi community was hesitant to go to the police with their concerns, fearing that complaints might impact their status in the United States.

“It has to do with the lack of knowledge, lack of understanding. They’re easy targets,” Khan said. 

For Khan, there are parallels between the 2020 crime wave and the current garbage debacle. 

“I think in other neighborhoods, you might have people that shout and say, ‘You can’t dump here. You can’t do that.’ I don’t think anybody in this neighborhood would stand up as much,” Khan said. 

Members of the patrol have worked to improve the relationship between the Bangladeshi community and the police. Many volunteers speak Bengali and encourage residents to report crimes, dumping, and other problems in the community. 

“If you don’t report, it did not happen, it does not exist,” Khan said. 

Although the problem is far from solved, the volunteers of the COPCP are proud to be working in their community to make a real difference, one patrol and one 311 call at a time. 

Edited by Judith Marks

All residential trash in New York City must now be “containerized.” (Dominick Romeo)

Meet the New Yorkers on the Front Lines of the City’s 14-Million Ton Problem

In a vertical city, it falls on building supers and porters to manage the tons of stuff we discard every day.

By Tasnim Jackson and Emma Rosenberg

In New York City, where most people live in apartment buildings or multifamily homes, building superintendents and porters provide critical support. Many supers live onsite, meaning they’re essentially on call 24 hours a day. New Yorkers go to them for help with everything from leaky pipes to pests to noisy neighbors. Or sometimes, just to chat. 

They are also the first line of defense when it comes to managing trash: Roughly half of New York’s  trash — some 24 million pounds a day — comes from residential buildings. It falls on supers and porters to manage the tons of stuff we discard every day, while keeping up with the city’s ever-expanding rules and regulations.

The newest of those, launched in November, is Mayor Eric Adams’ containerization mandate, which requires New Yorkers to now put their trash bags into bins rather than piling them on the curb, as they’ve done for generations. 

We talked to two supers in Manhattan — one in Harlem, the other in Chelsea — about the impact of the city’s “trash revolution” on their work. Both have tremendous pride in their work and agree that the best part of their job is being there for tenants and taking care of the space they share. But they have different takes on how the city’s trash rules are being implemented — and who they benefit. 

Romeo says the city’s new trash regulations hurt supers. (Elaine Sanders)

“That’s what I love about being a super,” said Dominick Romeo, 47, the superintendent for a condominium complex in Chelsea. “We make a difference.”

Born and raised in Hell’s Kitchen, Romeo is a career superintendent with decades of experience and a deep love for his job and his tenants. 

But the implementation of the city’s new trash rules has taken a toll on his life and routine. And he now finds his passion for the job starting to wane.

When he’s not taking out trash and managing tenants, Romeo is an activist and actor who enjoys writing. But the city’s changing rules are now cutting into his free time. In April of last year, the city changed the trash set-out time from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m.

“All of a sudden, the city threw this curveball at me,” Romeo said. “Now I can’t spend time at night writing. I have to throw out garbage.”

Though Romeo intentionally sticks around for an extra hour after his shift ends at 5 p.m. to catch up with tenants as they come home from work, the new trash regulations mean he has to stay on until 8 p.m. for trash duty. Some other supers and porters leave and return later to take out their building’s trash, a task that can take upward of an hour and a half, depending on the size of the building. Either way, Romeo said, the rule cuts into personal and family time while unnecessarily extending the work day — with no overtime pay.

“The problem with that is I have to go out to an event. I got tickets to see a Broadway show. A friend of mine invited me to see the latest Marvel comics movie,” he said. “My garbage day fell on Valentine’s Day. One of my garbage days fell on Christmas.”

Romeo is also an outspoken critic of the Department of Sanitation’s new rules for the city’s containerization program, part of Adams’ larger effort to reduce the city’s rat population. 

As part of the program, all buildings will be required to start using the DSNY’s new, official trash bins by June 2026. Engineered to keep out rats with a secure hinged lid, the new bins cost around $50 and come in 35- and 45-gallon sizes — smaller than the 48–55-gallon trash cans many buildings already use.

Many landlords, including his, have already bought these bins, but the amount of trash his 60-unit building produces would need to be stored in more bins than he has space for, a common super complaint. “I have 15 containers out in my courtyard right now,” he said. “In my building of 60-something units, I would need 60 containers, and that’s impossible to store 60 containers.”

He agrees they are effective at keeping rats at bay, but he still has to contend with getting rid of persistent rats that come onto his property to prevent an infestation. He has several rat traps baited with Cheez Whiz and avocados set up around his building. Upon catching a rodent he drowns it in a 5-gallon bucket of water, something he said takes a major emotional toll on him.

“They literally screech for their lives. It’s a sound that you’ll never forget,” he said. “Sometimes while I’m sitting in my apartment, I’ll hear somebody press on their brakes, and it makes a screeching sound. It brings me right back to when I had to kill one of them. It really hurts me as a human being.”

Scanlan says containerization has made parts of his job easier. (Emma Rosenberg)

More than a hundred blocks uptown, Joe Scanlan, 63, has been the superintendent for a three-family home on 143rd Street for 17 years. He says keeping the sidewalk clear of trash, litter, and leaves is the hardest part of his job.

His neighborhood of Hamilton Heights is the face of New York City’s containerization pilot program, which started in September 2023. On November 12, the Department of Sanitation required all residential buildings in New York City with up to nine units to containerize their trash — according to the city, 95% of New Yorkers live in buildings of that size.

While Scanlan controls what goes on in his small building, and the Department of Sanitation is in charge of the streets, the condition of the sidewalk depends on the public.

“I don’t know if this neighborhood is unique, but there seem to be more mindless things like candy wrappers. Or somebody finishes a soda, and they just toss it — when there are bins within 20 feet,” he said.

Even though keeping the sidewalk clean is an impossible task for Scanlan, he’s a fan of the city’s new mandate to “containerize” trash because it’s made other parts of his job easier.

“The bins help a lot with trash,” he said. “It completely changes the cycle in that we aren’t chained to the Tuesday, Thursday, Sunday evening thing. You can put the trash out whenever you need to.”

Still, he thinks there’s room for improvement in how the city manages the new containers alongside other sanitation efforts. Dealing with the street sweeper is a big challenge because of the city’s new Empire Bins — large European-style dumpsters kept on the street. They take up a lot of street space, said Scanlan, posing a problem on Tuesday and Friday mornings when the street sweeper comes around.

“That’s what I love about being a super. We make a difference.”

Romeo sees the city’s failures to address supers’ concerns around the new containerization rules as part of a larger problem. So he has decided to run for City Council, with the hope of being a better representative for the working class.

“You guys didn’t want to listen to us. Well now I’m going to run against you,” he said.

He’s also the leader of NYCBuildingSuperS, a grassroots movement of supers, porters, and building owners, which he formed in response to these city trash regulations. The group recently protested outside of City Hall, demanding more frequent daily trash collection, earlier trash take-out times, and an in-person meeting with then-Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch.

A lifelong Democrat, Romeo said he is ashamed of how the party has handled this situation, and even wrote a letter to the City Council expressing his disappointment. “As your elections approach next year, I ask you to think of us Supers and Porters,” his letter read. “And when you make that claim that you are the party of the working class — try to hold a straight face and not laugh.”

Edited by Julian Tiburcio

In 2023, there were an estimated 3 million rat-related 311 calls — but the vast majority of rat sightings go unreported. (Elaine Sanders)

Life and Death in a Rat Mitigation Zone

One beleaguered Brooklyn neighborhood is battling its rodents with rat bootcamps and bobcat pee.

By Quinn Waller

Greyson Joseph didn’t see a rat for two whole years after buying his Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment  in 2018. Then, in 2020, he saw a rat or two — but he still wasn’t worried.

“I remember thinking, it’s no big deal,” said Joseph, a 43-year-old life insurance actuary. “I’m pretty lucky to live in a spot that doesn’t have rats.” 

But by 2022, a full-blown invasion had begun. 

Now, Joseph said, he frequently hears rats scurrying under his floorboards, in his walls, and in the basement. “I practically can’t look out the window, even during the daytime,” he said. “They’re just all over the place.”

Joseph is just one of many Bed-Stuy residents dealing with unwelcome rat neighbors in a city that can feel overrun with rodents. To fight the infestation, Mayor Eric Adams established four Rat Mitigation Zones (RMZ), in April of 2023: Bed-Stuy, Harlem, East Village/Chinatown, and Grand Concourse-Bronx. 

In a Rat Mitigation Zone, the city explains in its Rat Mitigation Portal, residents can expect more frequent rat inspections and “a data-driven, coordinated, multi-agency effort there to address rats and the conditions that cause them.” In 2023, the city also hired Kathleen Corradi as the city’s first-ever Rat Czar and rolled out new garbage protocols aimed at reducing rats’ food sources. 

“Rats impact how you feel about the city that you are in, and that’s why we’re taking this seriously,” said Adams at the press conference announcing Corradi’s hiring. “There’s no instant rat pellet that’s going to solve this problem. You have to build dams in every area.”

The dams may or may not be holding. The city has been quick to celebrate decreases in RMZ rat sightings, but many residents say they don’t see a difference on the ground.

“This is a war. If you live here, it’s your war.”

It’s difficult to get an accurate picture of New York’s rat population, due in part to high rates of rat mortality (rats rarely live longer than a year). One 2023 study of rat-related 311 complaints, conducted by a New York pest company, estimated that the city was about 3 million rats strong, up from an estimated 2 million in 2010. These millions of rodents, with their penchant for gnawing and burrowing, are capable of significant property damage. They can also be dangerous to human health. Rat urine is the city’s leading cause of leptospirosis, a disease that can lead to kidney damage, meningitis, liver failure, and death.

Twenty-four New Yorkers were infected with leptospirosis in 2023 – a sharp increase from the two years prior, which saw an average of 15 cases a year, according to the Department of Mental Health & Hygiene. 

Experts believe the city’s rats first arrived on European ships in the late 1700s and quickly multiplied. By the 19th century, rat-baiting, which pitted rats against terriers in a ring, had become a popular betting sport.

“If the rats come out of their holes by the millions some night and take over City Hall and start running the city, I won’t be the least bit surprised,” one weary exterminator told The New Yorker in 1944.

That battle raged on into the new millennium.“It is unrealistic to think you are not going to have rats,” Mayor Rudy Giuliani declared in 2000. Giuliani’s own (unofficial) “rat czar,” Joseph Lhota, echoed this somewhat defeatist sentiment in a 2015 interview with The New York Times: “Anybody who’s in charge of eradicating rats in New York knows exactly what Sisyphus felt like,” Lhota said.

Nevertheless, Adams has persisted in rolling the rat boulder up the hill, allocating an additional $3.5 million for rat reduction efforts in the Harlem Mitigation Zone.

Keeping rats out of garbage bins is another top priority for the administration. In August 2023, food establishments in New York were required to begin “containerizing” their trash. Beginning on November 12, 2024, residential buildings with up to nine units — which is the vast majority of buildings in New York — were required to follow suit. If successful, this measure will containerize about 70% of the city’s garbage, potentially ending the age-old practice of piling garbage bags on the sidewalk.  

According to the Department of Sanitation, rat sightings reported to 311 fell in 12 of the first 13 months since containerization efforts began.

“All of this work is getting results,” said Department of Sanitation Press Secretary Vincent Gragnani in an email. 

In May 2024, the city reported that 311 reports of rat sightings decreased 14% in the four Rat Mitigation Zones year-over-year. But when accounting for all rodent-related 311 complaints, including “signs of rodents,” and “conditions attracting rodents,” our analysis of community districts containing Rat Mitigation Zones found a 12% decline in reports since the anti-rat efforts began, when compared to the year prior. Bed-Stuy fared less well, with a decline of a little over 5%.

However, in June and July of 2024, Brooklyn as a whole saw a greater decrease in the average number of 311 calls compared to the Bed-Stuy/Bushwick Rat Mitigation Zone.

Tracking 311 call volume is part of what the city has referred to as its “data-driven approach” to rat mitigation, but residents question how effective it is.

“Who’s calling 311 about rats? I don’t think I’ve ever considered that as an option,” said Bryce Richardson, 43. “You just see them and go about your business.” 

Miranda Amy, 27, described multiple times rats have scurried across her feet — something she has only experienced in Bed-Stuy. 

And Greyson Joseph, the Bed-Stuy homeowner, said that past exterminators haven’t been much help. He doesn’t see the point of enlisting the city’s help. 

“That would be awesome if our city services could actually do something to mitigate impact on an individual level for a building,” Joseph said. “But I feel like the city has more important things to do than to deal with my rats.”

Experts believe the city’s rats arrived on European ships in the late 1700s. (Elaine Sanders)

Alexandra Fochios, an American University law student and author of an Administrative Law Review paper on public policy and rat eradication, said that rat mitigation strategies are most successful when they involve cooperation across all levels of government.

In her paper, Fochios cited Alberta, Canada, as one such success story: “From over 500 infestations in the 1950s, the number dropped to between 10 and 20 in the 1990s and finally to zero in 2003.” 

New York City’s efforts span city departments including the NYC Health Department, the Department of Parks and Recreation, the Department of Sanitation, the Department of Education and the Housing Authority. 

“It’s a great first step,” Fochios said. “But they haven’t yet taken that step to link city, local, and then state and federal.” 

At the community level, New York offers Rat Academy, a free, two-hour rat education and prevention workshop, held in person and online about once a month. Nadeen Gayle, Bed-Stuy’s district manager, recently attended one of the workshops. “We have to be more educated in the community as a whole about rats,” said Gayle. 

For others, education has given way to action.

After a rat died in the engine of his car, Nijmy Alan Cadet ordered bobcat urine online to attempt to repel any more rats from his car.

“I don’t know how they got the bobcat to pee in the bottle. I hear they’re pretty aggressive,” said Cadet. “But I bought some and we’ve been spraying it about.” Cadet reported mixed results. He also gave a bottle to Hernan Pagan, the director of the People’s Garden in Bed-Stuy.

Pagan said he’s gotten the garden’s rat population under control using the bobcat urine and three traps he baits with tuna and leaves around the garden or nearby houses.

“I caught 14 rats in two weeks at one house alone,” Pagan said. He doesn’t have confidence in any assistance offered by the city.

“If you’re depending on the city, forget it,” he said. “This is a war. If you live here, it’s your war.” 

Edited by Emily Davis

Sure We Can, a nonprofit recycling center in East Williamsburg, says it redeemed 12 million containers last year. (Zhenjia Zhang)

They get paid 5 cents per can. But the city could lock away their revenue.

Recyclers make a living on the sidewalk. What happens when NYC locks up the trash?

By Zhenjia Zhang

Giant plastic bags full of cans and bottles loom like mountains in the yard of Sure We Can, a nonprofit recycling center in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The slightly pungent smell of trash permeates the yard as Pedro Romero, 35, carries two bags out front and throws them into a waiting truck, the cans reverberating with a crisp clang. 

Romero has been doing this work for 13 years with his wife, Josefa Marin, 53, at Sure We Can to support their blended family. They are independent recyclers, also known as canners.

Romero and Marin start working around 7:30 a.m. every day of the week. They spend one to two hours searching the neighborhood’s trash bins for water, soda, and beer containers, then haul them back to the redemption center to sort them out by company and material. They get paid right away, five cents per container, in cash. Beverage distributors then collect their brands’ containers and deliver them to recycling companies.

“I make $2,000 a month with my wife,” said Romero. “It’s not enough for us to pay for the rent and groceries. Sometimes we work more hours to make money.”

But their livelihood could be under threat.  

To reduce the piles of garbage on sidewalks and the presence of rats, the New York City Department of Sanitation (DSNY) announced its “Future of Trash” containerization plan in April. It aligns with Mayor Eric Adams’ ongoing efforts to “Get Stuff Clean,” aimed at significantly tidying up the city’s public spaces.

As of March 2024, all businesses in New York City are required to put their trash in bins, with a warning period in effect until January 2, 2025. The fine for not complying is $50 for the first offense, $100 for the second, and $200 for all offenses thereafter.

On November 12, that mandate was extended to residential buildings. Smaller buildings with up to nine units are required to put their trash in wheelie bins with lids. Buildings with 31 or more units will eventually have Empire Bins, or “European-style stationary on-street containers” that will be “locked and only openable by the Department of Sanitation and designees of the building owner,” according to a city press release. Medium-size buildings will be able to choose to use either Empire Bins or smaller wheelie bins.

“New Yorkers aren’t always careful about separating their recycling from their trash. Canners have long done that work for them.”

Manhattan Community District 9 (Morningside Heights, Manhattanville, and Hamilton Heights in West Harlem) will be the first to receive the Empire Bins, in May 2025. The city is running a pilot program in the district to test the plan, with the goal of having all trash containerized in the area by June 1, 2025.

“Containerization is absolutely a right idea to keep trash and rats out of the street,” said then-Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch at a City Council oversight hearing on containerization on November 14. 

But it sounds like bad news to canners, who could lose access to containers locked away in Empire Bins. The city’s containerization plan does not include recycling, which can still sit on the sidewalk in bags, but New Yorkers aren’t always careful about separating their recycling from their trash — canners have long done that work for them. 

The five-cent container value was set by the 1982 New York Returnable Container Act, also known as the Bottle Bill. The law encouraged the recycling of beverage containers and established a three-and-a-half-cent handling fee for redemption centers, creating an opportunity for job creation in the sector.

Last year, Sure We Can canners redeemed over 12 million containers, according to their statistics, which shows the significant contributions canners make to the city’s waste management, independent of the Department of Sanitation. But even after canners remove recyclables from the “waste stream,” three out of four aluminum cans end up in landfills, according to the city’s 2023 Waste Characterization Study. Canners can’t keep up with the number of containers New Yorkers throw in the trash, and their job could get even harder as the number of redemption centers like Sure We Can dwindle. 

A Google Maps search displays 18 redemption centers across New York City, some of the only community spaces left where canners can meet and organize. A 2024 review by the Empire State Redemption Association, a coalition that represents redemption centers and their workers across the state, identified 97 centers that have closed or appear to be closed and 54 that have disconnected phones and have no social media presence. 

The work canners do to ensure the city’s recyclables actually get recycled often goes unnoticed, and they say it’s undervalued.

“Canning is a type of informal, low-barrier work, easy to participate in if you experience challenges with traditional employment based on where you come from, your immigration status, your work status, and language use,” said Ryan Castalia, executive director at Sure We Can.

Many canners face barriers to finding alternate employment: 45% are Spanish speakers and experience language barriers, 32% have health issues, and 20% are undocumented immigrants, according to a 2023 report by Sure We Can and the Alliance of Independent Recyclers.

On average, canners work just under 25 hours per week to earn about $119, according to the same report. That amounts to roughly $5 per hour, or only one-third of the city’s minimum wage. Some have pushed for an updated Bottle Bill, which hasn’t changed since 2009, to account for the growing pressures of inflation and higher cost of living. New York Assembly Member Deborah Glick and State Senator Rachel May introduced the Better Bottle Bill in 2022, which has yet to be approved by Governor Kathy Hochul. The bill would raise the value of containers to 10 cents, increase the handling fee to six cents, and expand the types of redeemable containers to include coffee, teas, sport drinks, wine, liquor, and ciders.

Pedro Romero and his wife have worked as “canners” for 13 years as a way to support their family. (Zhenjia Zhang)

The introduction of locked Empire Bins has piled another obstacle before canners, who feel they need access to every cent they can get. High-density residential buildings account for 30% of the city’s trash, said Vincent Gragnani, press secretary for the Department of Sanitation, in an email.

“If the bins are locked, there are logistical challenges, different bins and systems. Less consistency also means obstacles for canners,” said Castalia in an email. “It is unconscionable that canners are largely excluded from decision-making in a system that they drive, the efficacy of the most effective recycling system in New York.” 

If canners can’t get the Department of Sanitation to hear their concerns, their only option is to turn to their own communities for help.

“If all the material is locked away, we would do a public engagement campaign,” said Castalia, “asking people to leave redeemable material outside of those containers.”

Edited by Liya Cui

NYC’s residential recycling goes to Balcones’ 11-acre complex in Sunset Park, where it’s cleaned, sorted, and resold. (Edward Grattan)

These New Yorkers Are Making Money Off Your Trash

Private companies handle the heavy lifting of New York’s sometimes profitable but always complicated recycling ecosystem.

By Sabrina Ortiz and Aurora Martínez

New York City generates more than 14 million tons of waste and recyclables per year. Most of it disappears from sight with the clang of a garbage truck, but behind the scenes, a vast network of private recycling facilities is transforming trash into profit.

Since its inception in the United States, recycling has depended on private companies to handle the heavy lifting: processing and sorting materials, and then finding buyers.

Across New York City, at least 25 private facilities operate year-round across the Bronx, Queens, Kings, and Richmond counties, according to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.

“All recycling, whether it’s collected from commercial, residential, or institutional sources in New York City, is going to go into a network of private industries that are separating the material, baling it as commodities,” said Samantha MacBride, an urban sustainability professor and researcher at Baruch College. 

Together, these facilities process massive volumes of paper, cardboard, metals, plastics, and other recyclable materials pulled from the 44 million pounds of waste collected daily in New York City that would otherwise end up in landfills. Since 1989, when Local Law 19 jumpstarted the city-wide recycling of non-hazardous solid waste, these private facilities have fulfilled a critical public need — all while making a tidy profit. 

The city’s private recycling industry also supports the local economy by providing essential raw materials for businesses and creating jobs in recycling and manufacturing. 

Nationally, the waste and recycling industry in the U.S. generated an estimated $91 billion in revenue in 2022, according to the Waste Business Journal. In 2020, a report from the Environmental Protection Agency credited the industry with supporting 681,000 American jobs, contributing $37.8 billion annually in employee wages. 

Once recyclables are collected — from residential homes or businesses — trucks take it to privately owned material recovery facilities, or MRFs, where the transformation begins.

“It would be far cheaper to just send everything to a landfill than to recycle it.”

Collection and processing are distinct steps in the recycling chain. Collection involves picking up and trucking materials, a service that can be handled by public, private, or even nonprofit entities. For example, the New York City Department of Sanitation (DSNY) collects recyclables from residents and public schools, while businesses have to hire private companies.  

Processing refers to the sorting, baling, and marketing of recyclable materials, a step dominated by privately owned companies. In 2018 about 64% of MRFs in the U.S. were privately owned, according to data from the National Waste & Recycling Association; the remainder were either publicly owned but privately operated or managed by nonprofit organizations. 

Regardless of ownership, all MRFs must sell sorted recyclables on the secondary material market to generate revenue and cover operational costs. This challenges their profitability, said MacBride.

“It would be far cheaper to just send everything to a landfill than to recycle it,” MacBride said. 

Even for privately owned MRFs, the profitability of recycling is challenged by fluctuating commodity prices, rising operational costs, and city regulations. 

New York City’s Business Integrity Commission imposes rate caps — $26.87 per cubic yard of loose refuse or $17.64 per 100 pounds of refuse — on recycling facilities, and customers demand high-quality services at low costs. Profitability hinges on maximizing efficiency. 

Adam Mitchell, vice president of sales and marketing at Boro-Wide Recycling, summed up the business model as “buying something for one cent and selling it for three cents, using part of that money to run your operation, and the other part makes you the profit.”

Balcones Recycling

Brooklyn is home to the largest MRF of its kind in North America. Balcones Recycling in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, is responsible for processing all of the city’s residential metal, glass, and plastic recycling. 

Balcones receives around 1,000 tons of recyclables daily, including 200 tons of paper. The 11-acre facility, identifiable by the city’s first and only commercial-scale wind turbine, operates 24 hours a day, six days a week, according to Balcones education and outreach manager Kara Napolitano.

The facility has changed names over the years but, since the early 2000s, has focused exclusively on the city’s residential recycling needs.

Balcones has a public-private partnership with New York City, through which DSNY pays Balcones per ton of recycling processed. Part of that partnership includes operating on city-owned land, which is mutually beneficial — it means the city doesn’t have to haul their materials as far, and it keeps operational costs lower for Balcones.  

DSNY trucks collect recycling from across the city and deliver it either directly to Balcones or to one of the company’s two transfer facilities. Transferred materials are sent by barge down the East River to the main facility — the barges can carry over 100 truckloads of recycling and take six to eight hours to unload. A new barge arrives roughly every 18 hours.

Next, the materials undergo a sorting process that uses everything from optical sorters and human workers to disc screens — which separate and smash glass — and  electromagnetic eddy currents to separate materials into their respective recycling streams. The facility employs 80 people, with 20 to 35 employees per shift across three eight-hour shifts each day.

The sorted materials are sold “up and down the eastern portion of North America, from southeast Canada to Georgia, Alabama, and Ohio,” Napolitano said. Further processing doesn’t occur in New York, due to the high cost of doing business locally. 

The sorted materials are generally purchased by middle men who break them down further. Reprocessors, for instance, clean and melt down plastic, and then resell it to companies for use in their products; cartons are sold to specialized paper mills; and glass is sold for use in everything from making new bottles and jars to new road projects. 

A key aspect of the partnership with the city is revenue-sharing. 

“New York City pays us per ton that they bring to us,” said Napolitano. “When material values are high and we make enough to cover operations, then we start sharing revenue with the city.”

Cooper Recycling

Recycling extends beyond household waste to construction and demolition debris — including concrete, bricks, porcelain, tile, masonry, metals, wood, plastics, cardboard, and paper — making up 46% of the waste stream in New York State, according to a report from the Department of Environmental Conservation.

Cooper Recycling, the city’s largest such facility, plays a pivotal role in managing this waste. Founded in 1947 as a small operation in Bushwick, Brooklyn, it expanded in 2017 to a modern five-acre facility in Williamsburg, significantly boosting its capacity.

Privately held, woman-owned, and family-operated for three generations, Cooper Recycling processes up to 2,000 tons of material daily, though it averages about 1,500 tons, according to William Cooper, director of business development, as reaching maximum capacity often complicates processing efficiency.

The equipment is designed to recycle 95% of the incoming material, but in practice they recycle about 70%, due to impurities and the condition of the materials. As an example, Cooper produces wood for a paddleboard manufacturer. To meet purity standards, the wood must be refined, resulting in some loss of clean material during the process — an “addition by subtraction” challenge.

Space limitations also constrain operations. Due to high daily volumes, materials must be processed within 24 hours, limiting opportunities to refine them further until everything is salvageable.

“Avoiding landfill and diverting materials for their highest beneficial use is keenly important to us,” Cooper said. “We also recognize that handling materials safely and sustainably is also chiefly important.” 

Most clients bring debris to Cooper Recycling to dispose of it efficiently, not necessarily to promote sustainability. With no nearby landfills, it is often easier to use a transfer station. 

Once processed, materials are sold. In the construction and demolition industry, Cooper explained, aggregates generally go back into aggregate products. For example, concrete will go back into cement mixture, metals into metals, paper into paper, and so on. Wood has the most diverse use cases and goes into paddleboard production, laminates, and even alternative fuel for cement kilns

Glass bottles and jars are separated and smashed. (Edward Grattan)

A 2023 NYC Waste Characterization Study by DSNY revealed that 75% of the city’s residential waste could be diverted from landfills if properly recycled or composted through existing programs, but only about 20% actually gets diverted. This highlights a critical gap — not in infrastructure but in public awareness and participation.

Misplaced trash in recycling bins creates significant issues for facilities. Once sorted, nonrecyclable items must be sent to landfills, adding disposal costs that cut into operating budgets. This reduces what facilities can reinvest in the system or give back to the city, Balcones outreach manager Napolitano explained.

Education aside, Napolitano said recycling is crucial but not a silver bullet.

“If you really want to make that big save the planet impact, you should just use less stuff,” she said. “The solution isn’t recycling — the solution is we need to create less waste overall, and recycling really just cuts into a small, small part of that.”

Edited by Eliot Force

Washington Heights café owner Jose Chica says he isn’t a fan of the citywide composting mandate. (Elaine Sanders)

The Breakdown on How New Yorkers Are Breaking Down Organic Materials

New York has ambitious composting goals. It still has a long way to go.

By Anushka Dakshit

For one Washington Heights coffee shop owner, New York City’s mandatory composting program has left him with a tough choice: argue with the city or pay for a service he doesn’t understand.

Jose Chica says he has dutifully kept a compost bin outside of his Colombian café, Salento, on Amsterdam Avenue for the past two years, but as the associated costs from paying a private carter pile up, he wishes he could opt out. Private carters can charge up to $26.87 per cubic yard of nontraditional waste.

It’s all part of the city’s ambitious goal to modernize its waste management, with a plan to divert 50% of organic material from landfills by 2050. Though New York has long required restaurants and other food establishments like Chica’s to separate food waste for pickup, the city expanded its curbside composting program in October. Now all residential units are also required to separate out their food waste, yard waste, and food-soiled paper as part of the largest composting program in the United States. 

Chica said he doesn’t know much about the environmental impact of composting, but he knows he’d rather not waste time and effort arguing with the city over the impact to his business.

“The best thing,” Chica said, “is to pay and let it go.”  

Just a few doors down, Native Noodles owner Snow Win has a more optimistic take on mandatory composting. She admits it has been a bit of an adjustment — “We don’t have a basement and the kitchen is kind of small, so it’s a bit hard” — but she thinks it’s good for the city and good for business. Win says composting helps to keep roaches and moldy odors out of the kitchen, so she doesn’t mind paying a private carter $300 a month to handle her waste. 

“Changing people’s behavior is the biggest challenge.”

The goal of composting is to convert food and other organic waste into useful byproducts like renewable energy and soil, rather than into harmful greenhouse gases. It’s a complex process that begins when New Yorkers roll the composting bin out to the curb. 

From the curb, compostable material is trucked either to the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment in Brooklyn, where it’s converted into heat and power, or to the Staten Island Fresh Kills site, where it’s composted into nutrient-rich soil, most of which is sold to landscapers. The remaining 40% is given away for free to community groups, parks, and residents, said Department of Sanitation Press Secretary Vincent Gragnani. 

Over the past two years, the city has reported a 65% increase in compostable material diverted from landfills — about 260 million pounds. The city hopes to divert all 1 million tons of food waste to composting sites by 2030. But even as collection ramps up, there are still no plans to build a new facility within city limits, a DSNY official told the City Council in September. 

It has expanded capacity at Fresh Kills and introduced new equipment, such as an aerated static pile system that exposes pre-compost waste to moisture, which speeds up the waste-to-compost process. The Fresh Kills site can now accept 2,000% more food waste, according to DSNY Deputy Commissioner John Goodman.

“The share of community board districts sending material to be composted is growing substantially, and the amount sending material to Newtown Creek is falling by half,” Goodman said, pointing to the city’s plans to divert more and more compostable waste to the soil-making operation at Fresh Kills on Staten Island. 

Though officials estimate that the renewable energy operation at Newtown Creek could reduce annual carbon dioxide emissions by more than 90,000 metric tons, others question how positive the process is for the environment.  

Currently, a third of the compostable material that eventually passes through Newtown Creek becomes engineered bioslurry (EBS), while the rest becomes fertilizer. The EBS is processed into synthetic natural gas — or “biogas” — through anaerobic digestion, which uses bacteria to break down biodegradable material. 

The DSNY says 40% of the biogas produced at Newtown heats homes and businesses in the city — replacing methane that might otherwise be fracked, according to Gragnani — while the other 60% is used to power the treatment plant itself. 

However, experts say that this framing of synthetic gas as “clean” is misleading because it produces the same chemicals created by fossil fuels when burned. DSNY counters that biogas is a better alternative to the methane produced by landfills.

New York City rolled out the Smart Compost Bins program in 2023 and gradually expanded to neighborhoods citywide. (Elaine Sanders)

Several cities have mandated composting over the years, including San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle. San Francisco has diverted almost 80% of its trash from landfills since launching its composting program in 2012, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. But in New York City, many more people need to participate to make the program effective, according to Samantha MacBride, a professor of urban environmentalism and public management at Baruch College.

“You’ve got trucks that are essentially driving around empty, and it is very expensive to run a program like that,” MacBride said. A successful program would have a capture rate of 30%, but the compost program currently has a capture rate of about 4%, according to MacBride’s calculations. 

“Changing people’s behavior is the biggest challenge to curbside composting,” Gragnani said. He added that the city has sent mailers, hosted information sessions, and trained nearly a thousand outreach workers to knock on doors and help New Yorkers get onboard with the new composting program. They’ll be adding another 730 trainees next year. 

But MacBride questions the usefulness of a door-knocking campaign in a city like New York. “Did they actually talk to everyone, or did they just make an effort to knock on a door?” she said.

Whether New Yorkers like it or not, composting is now the law, and small-business owners like Chica and Win — along with the rest of the city — are doing their best to take it in stride. 

“​​Nothing we can do,” noted Chica. “The city says, ‘You gotta do this,’ we have to follow.”  

In a city that interacts with roughly 8 million pounds of food waste each day, every little bit counts.

Edited by Genna Contino

An Elegy for New York’s Gross Green Trash Cans

The city’s iconic litter baskets are soon to be replaced. It’s time to appreciate them.

Text and photos by Allison Hunter

Like familiar cops on a beat, the litter baskets of New York City have lined the streets for as long as we can remember. These dark green receptacles, fashioned out of heavy-gauge metal wire, are now rusted and bent from enduring the constant abuse of being piled high with the city’s trash. 

Despite the $100 fine warning emblazoned on the side of each can, the cans are routinely stuffed with large plastic bags full of household and business trash. The braided metal allows for air to pass through the sides. It also offers pedestrians a view of the contents, as if from behind a veil. 

First rolled out almost a century ago, the 30-pound mesh containers helped rid sidewalks of filth. But the cans are no longer practical. Too many critters feast on whatever oozes out of the bottom. When startled, rats scurry out from the garbage stew, over the curb and down into the sewer, waving their skinny long tails behind them. 

But soon the city’s garbage will be hidden from view inside newly designed “Better Bins,” which the Department of Sanitation says will be safer for people and less friendly to rats. 

The DSNY says it maintains about 23,000 litter baskets around the city and plans to replace all of the green ones over the next several years. Though 15% have already been replaced, says DSNY spokesman John Goodman, there are still about 11,500 remaining throughout the five boroughs. (And you can visit them all, with this handy DSNY map.)

These trash baskets were photographed in Manhattan neighborhoods, including Hell’s Kitchen, Washington Heights, the Upper East Side, and Tribeca. They are snapshots of our messy, uniquely New York lives, and what we leave behind.

Edited by Zachary Zawila 

“The best thing I’ve ever found was a set of stained-glass lightbulbs.” (Niamh McAuliffe)

High Risk, High Reward

New York City’s bargain hunters trawl for treasure in the trash and have stories to tell.

By Niamh McAuliffe

Edited by Hannah Fierick