Last year, 200 composting bins were rolled out in New York City, with a unit on every other corner you could open and close via an app. This was exciting for those of us who have hit an age when rubbish disposal is something we think about. For a while, my kids indulged me in my need to discuss composting – whether our bag would fit in the bin; how good the exercise made us feel; whether it actually did anything useful or not – before pointing out I was talking about it too much. This week, a new fleet of wheelie bins has been introduced across the city, and the excitement has been almost too much to bear.
The “trash revolution” as Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, put it while placing a black bin bag in a wheelie bin in front of reporters on Monday, sounds like a characteristic piece of hyperbole from the man, but for once he wasn’t exaggerating. Like banking technology, rubbish disposal is one of those baffling areas in which the US in general, but New York in particular, is wildly behind Britain.
You have probably seen the visuals: pyramids of sagging black bin bags piled high on New York pavements, oozing bin juice and adding to the city’s rat problem. In the kind of 90F (32C) heat we’re having this week, it’s these kerbside rubbish mountains that give the city its distinctive summer smell – gently rotting General Tso’s chicken with a sharp undertone of mouldy citrus and a hint of, what is that? The sort of armpit-baked-bread smell that wafts out of branches of Subway and, rich and warm with decay, is more usually associated with peat bogs. I don’t hate it altogether. Like a lot of New Yorkers who take performative pleasure in defending the city’s most disgusting elements, I can disparage the bin smell while remaining vaguely sentimental about it. But of course this does not remain true of the rats.
And so a bin technology that has been in place in Britain for decades finally reaches New York although, unlike in Britain, New Yorkers will be asked to pay for it. By 12 November this year, landlords and property owners of, in the first instance, all buildings with one to nine residential units, will be required to buy wheelie bins from the city at roughly $50 a pop. Officials predict that this will reduce the amount of loose bin bags on New York’s sidewalks by 70%. Violators will be fined $50 by the Department of Sanitation, a levy that increases for serial offenders and is enforced by its own discrete cop unit called the Sanitation Police. Eventually, all buildings in the city will have to meet this standard.
The wheelie bin rollout is part of a larger discussion about what to do with the refuse mountains created in high-density cities in an era of unprecedented waste. You can get fined for not separating the recycling in New York, but using composting bins for food waste isn’t compulsory. The city generates 14 million tonnes of trash a year, disposed of via 6,000 garbage trucks. As Eric Lach reported earlier this year in a fantastic piece in the New Yorker about garbage disposal, for a long time the city’s waste was dumped in the Fresh Kills landfill site in Staten Island, until that borough threatened to secede from the city (or possibly from the United States as a whole) if the garbage trucks didn’t turn around. The site was closed by Rudy Giuliani in 2001. Now New York ships its trash outside the city.
Anyway, in a city facing huge and intractable problems around affordable housing, the public education system and the state of the subway, the wheelie bins of Mayor Adams’s trash revolution may end up being the most successful and feelgood part of his legacy. He certainly looked very cheerful on Monday, dumping rubbish for the photo op in a crisp white shirt and aviator glasses while his signature theme tune, Empire State of Mind, blasted in the background.
Meanwhile, the real credit for any trash revolution should really be directed to the boots on the ground. One of my daughter’s favourite T-shirts features a photo of a large garbage truck under the acronym DSNY – the Department of Sanitation New York – and the legend “New York’s Strongest”. (Of course the DSNY has merchandise available for purchase in adult and child sizes; this is what makes America great.) We talk a lot about New York Tough in relation to the fire and other emergency services. But in this sweltering heat, it’s the city’s sanitation workers who deserve the most praise, their own TV show and the life-changing technology of a 35-gallon bin on wheels.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
• This article was amended on 11 July 2024. An earlier version said that the requirement to buy wheelie bins would apply, in the first instance, to landlords and property owners of apartment buildings with fewer than 10 units; in fact it applies to all buildings with one to nine residential units, not just apartments.
