Why has it taken this long to deal with their own trash?
Because New Jersey has always been right there.
The bins don’t actually travel all the way to New Jersey, they stay on the street in front of your building, they’re just to prevent having massive piles of garbage lining every single New York street, every single week.
They stay on the street in front of your building
You mean like every other municipality in the United States?
Yeah, NYC is the only place in the US that didn’t have these. I believe it was a union or mafia thing. Basically the trucks that pick up bags of trash require 3 workers and the ones that pick up the trash cans only require 2. That’s why they didn’t exist. It’s stupid.
Huh?!?
I mean technically you can get away with just a driver and someone picking up the trash cans.
But over here they usually are still three people with those trucks. One driver and two people picking up the trash cans, one bringing a fresh one while the other puts it back.The ones where I am only have one person. The truck has an arm to pick up the bins and dump them into the top of the truck.
This works in single family housing, but in the city there are waaaaay more bins at each stop.
Also the garbage bag companies Glad I think, paid it make the old metal cans like Oscar’s go away so they could sell more plastic.
I think it was after a strike by the garbage men over the condition of the metal cans. I listened to a podcast about it a while ago but can’t remember which one.
We have those too. But they are for the big metal cans for paper and glass.
Those wheeled plastic bins are usually collected by something like this:
Our little burg has one person pick up the trash. Trash bins are passed out by the city. The bins are specially built for mechanical pick-up. The driver stops, the arms come out, grab and dump the bin. Then the bin is set down, and the truck continues its route.
One set of trucks are for recycle, one set are for organics to grind and compost, and a third is for trash. Our family’s weekly trash usually fits in one grocery bag.
Yes! Just like that! It’s a crazy new New York invention!
Real answer: NYC has such insane amount of residential trash that it’s actually more efficient to have someone (usually a super) just prepare the trash in specifically designed industrial bags on the curb 2x week. Like the amount is so large no single bin like this could manage any amount of trash, so they don’t even bother loading bins they just process the bags directly into the garbage trucks. My building actually has like 15 bins like these where we can store our trash for the off days and our super sorts it all when the collection comes - they’re all usually full 2x week.
So switching to a bin only system would be require either more collection days (an insane amount of spending SDNY is tax dollars) or we’re just gonna get overflow trash on the street in shitty, easy to break homeuse bags. For reference there’s zero trash on my street unless it’s collection day and the city designated bags for those are pretty much indestructible and rarely spill trash.
Except rats have been chewing through the bags, hence the bins. Knowing NYC rats they will probably learn to chew into the bins too, though. Having put-out time and pick-up time closer together would/will make more impact on the rat problem, imho
Haha yeah true, I just factor in the rats as part of the population of the city.
But there’s no practical way to enforce when people put out their trash.
I may have been in NYC for too long, but I honestly don’t even see how rats are a problem anyway. They generally just scavenge garbage and do their own thing. They’re in a similar category to pigeons.
Plus, they are presumably a critical food source for alley cats. I happened to stumble upon a newborn litter of alley kittens a few weeks ago. The mother must have been away hunting.
So you’re basically murdering these little kittens if you decimate the rat population in NYC by preventing them from eating our trash. You sick fucks. /s
Those babies are still little enough, if they and mom are trapped, she can be TNR and they can be socialized and adopted!
Restaurants have a specific time they put out their bags, which is several hours before the trucks actually come around. I don’t remember the numbers but there was an article about it, probably in the NYT because I subscribe for the games despite living in LA. (We use cans and Dumpsters here. Still haven’t got the whole compost thing figured out, though.)
Anyway, see if there’s a TNR organization that can foster those sweet fluffballs!
AWWW the babies! My big guy was a bedstuy street cat, so glad I got him.
have someone (usually a super) just prepare the trash in specifically designed industrial bags
This sounds like a job for Garbage Bag Man! heroic theme music swells
Can’t someone else do it?
Lots of cities have residential towers and have massive truck sized bins and/or compacting bins to deal with it. The big difference with New York is that it’s towers were built before they seriously considered how to pickup and manage garbage so there isn’t space for loading docks and alleys and the other infrastructure you need for that.
Yeah that’s definitely true for the large high rises. Was referring to mostly walkups and brownstones.
Yeah we know, NYC is the idiot big brother of American cities whose greatest accomplishment was making QB in the highschool team.
Just like LA is the spoiled little shit brother and Chicago is the hard working one that never quite gets ahead anyway.
San Francisco: “guys, I’m gay”
USA: “we know, dude”
Miami: bursts in “yo anyone got any coke?”
USA: “shut up, Miami”
Detroit: “…I can get you some coke”
Texas: What kind of Coke do you want? Mt Dew, Sprite, Big Red?
Texas isn’t a city, nor do they have any world class cities, unlike other more civilized states.
That’s why it only got a one-star review
But there are two of the largest parking lots of the world, and Austin isn’t bad at all.
Are you referring to the highways? I almost looked at moving there until I looked into the traffic situation. I left DC to get away from that shit.
FYI, Houston is the 4th largest city in the US by population
And probably the 400th best at most.
Add another zero on there and you’ll be in the ballpark
Isn’t that mostly because they claim a ridiculously massive metro area? What’s the density like?
Lots of other places do too. That’s why true city size should be counted as the metropolitan population, not just the city borders. In that case, Houston is 5th, beaten by Dallas/Fort Worth at 4th, which surprisingly means Texas has 2 metropolitan areas out of in the top 5 in the country.
This simply isn’t backed by statistics. While Houston is the 4th most populous American city, it’s only ~200th in density. If “Lots of other places [did] too,” then they wouldn’t be half as far down that second list.
Honestly, as a Canadian I don’t think north america has any world class cities.
Really? NYC? Come on, you’re just doing the “murica bad” edgy teenager thing.
I’m surprised it’s universally downvoted as mindless shitting on America is a pretty sure bet for upvotes on Lemmy.
It’s weird that having a differing opinion of what makes a city world class means I’m “mindlessly shitting on america”.
It’s just my opinion. A world class city imo should have excellent public transportation, cycling infrastructure, parks and public gathering spaces, and traffic calmed commercial districs. Basically a world class city should have a lot of things worth visiting and infrastructure that lets you visit those places easily and comfortably without relying on a car.
No north american city meets those standards in the way that some european cities do.
…so do you not believe there are any world-class cities, period? I can find exceptions for every single city in the list of requirements you laid out.
You’ve never even HEARD of the NYC subway?
Dude, just stop having opinions, you’re clearly not informed enough.
Midwesterner detected. I bet you think your lakes are great too!
Disclaimer: judging by admittedly short visits to all three, I too prefer Chicago, but I couldn’t NOT do the joke 😉
I’m still so pissed that Chicago dumps their sewage into the Mississippi instead of the lake where it belongs. New Orleans has enough shit thank you very much.
Considering the lake flows into the river, it wouldnt make much of a difference
Also it’s mostly to spite St. Louis
No. No. They made the Chicago river reverse course and flow into the MS river. Chicago shit water belongs in Lake Michigan!
Lake Michigan flows out to the St Lawrence, not the Mississippi.
haha this is perfect
Don’t forget the drug addicted brother, Philadelphia!
Eric Adams, whose dislike of trash and rats is well-documented
Weird statement
It’s possible to like rats. I like rats. I had a couple as pets.
I don’t particularly care for the type you see in New York coming out of the sewer, but…
Clicking through and reading the link, he’s clearly talking about the rat problem in NYC. Not pet rats.
I’m aware.
deleted by creator
Sure. I was hoping a day later you would come by and harass me as usual. Now stop harassing me all the time.
I’m willing to bet the last time we crossed paths was like a week ago. Why are you so desperate to be a victim of harassment? Is this going to be your go-to every time you find yourself on the wrong side of an issue?
Stop harassing me.
before trash bags were invented, only about 60 years ago, everything was just put directly into metal cans. must have been really loud.
We went from bins to no bins and now back to bins. Not sure when NYC originally quit using metal trash cans, but that was a thing back in the day. Where I lived we used metal bins until the late ‘80s and then had to use municipal containers in the ‘90s.
Yall just getting trash heelys??
Only about 30 years later than Europe.
Someone posted a pic of the underground waste bins we have in Europe -
And the yanks were acting like it was some sort of witchcraft lol
I literally tried to describe this is how they do it in France to a friend recently. She was like “wait they bury their trash and use elevators?!” Had to just show her a pic like this. I have to admit the first time I saw it, it floored me… like “holy fuck never thought of that…”
It truly confounds the American mind.
Unless you have the misfortune of being in Paris during a garbage strike, in which case there are just giant piles of rubbish all over vatious streets, sidewalks, and alleys.
Unless you have the misfortune of being in Paris during a garbage strike,in which case there are just giant piles of rubbish all over vatious streets, sidewalks, and alleys.
That happens in literally any city that has a garbage collector strike.
Doesn’t matter how the collection system works if nobody is doing the collecting, that trash is gonna a pile up
It just looks way too expensive for the benefit.
It makes sense for densely populated areas, not quite in the suburbs where I bet they just use plastic bags or wheelie bins like everyone else.
Not sure if wheelie bins will actually work in New York City, as where the fuck are you going to store them if you live in a studio?
I’m not sure if you live in NYC, but there will typically be a courtyard next to big apartment buildings, often home for a trash area for the entire complex, among other things.
What happens when it breaks down or gets stuck though? Seems like it risks the trash overflowing because of that.
Breaks down how? I think the garbage truck is the one lifting and if that’s broken, you just send another one?
Oh I see, someone else wrote “elevators” and I thought it raised itself.
But still, don’t they get stuck sometimes?
There’s no way for it to get stuck. The underground bin bit is completely sealed and also a bit smaller than the hole it goes into, hence the metal plate between the visible and non-visible bits
Also because our taxes go towards infrastructure rather than killing brown people, things…just work
heheheh
European cities also waste less money maintaining sparsely populated suburbs.
And the rest of the USA tbh
Nothing he said was even that bad. He said “our revolution” which is talking about the changes happening in NYC. And we’re going to dedicate a whole article to what people on social media have said about it? Wtf?
For the clicks
For the engagement
For the eyes on the ads
For the $$
I thought ‘revolution’ here was a cute little play on words because of the wheels on the bins, not something serious.
