I want the bags gone. Anyone who’s walked home in New York while stepping around split-open garbage bags and pretending not to notice what is crawling out of them probably feels the same way.
I’m 16 and in my Bensonhurst house, taking out the trash is one of my chores. That means schlepping our NYC Bins to the curb the night before pickup and schlepping them back in the morning. I’m not a sanitation expert, but I read the city’s plan because I wanted to understand why my block uses bins that have to be moved while big buildings elsewhere have stationary steel containers.
The Statue of Liberty weighs about 450,000 pounds. New Yorkers set out about 24 million pounds of trash, recycling, and compost every day. That’s more than 50 Statues of Liberty on the curb by weight daily. Containers are the solution, but New York City still has to decide which trucks will empty them, where the containers will go, and how much the system will cost.
Under DSNY’s plan, buildings with one to nine units will use plastic NYC Bins. Larger buildings and public schools will use the Empire Bin, a stationary container that sits in parking spots and is emptied into a truck mechanically. Buildings with 10 to 30 units can choose either option.
The scale of this effort is huge, involving as many as 66,817 stationary containers, occupying the equivalent of 29,842 parking spots. That’s about 1.5% of street parking, which doesn’t sound like much, but Manhattan would lose about 6.4% of its spots; on the Upper West Side, the projected share is more than 10%. That 10% makes a different street.
The type of truck also matters. DSNY’s current plan relies on automated side-loading trucks that pick up containers from one side of the vehicle. Routes with containers on both sides can require additional passes. The city’s environmental review projects nearly 1.2 million additional collection-truck miles each year, and a need for about 270 additional trucks — a 19% increase in the fleet. That’s a lot of driving to collect the same amount of garbage New Yorkers already produce.
That’s only after buying the trucks themselves. An automated side-loading truck is likely to cost about $621,000; 270 of them come to about $168 million. That’s my calculation, not the city’s, and I didn’t include the containers, fuel, maintenance, or extra staff. The real fleet and the cost could be different.
So far, the public has seen only pieces of the bill. The city has committed $25.4 million for side-loading trucks and $7 million for the bins. The Sanitation Commissioner reported that the executive budget includes $14.8 million for containerization in 2027, growing to $162.2 million by 2030.
Those estimates still do not provide a complete cost and the truck question may not be settled yet.
DSNY says it is not committed to any single model. It should not be. The truck is not a minor technical detail; it’s the hinge on which the system turns.
The city already has a real-life case study in West Harlem, where about 1,100 Empire Bins are operating. How long does collection take? How many miles do the trucks drive? How much curb space is actually used? What’s the impact on cleanliness, rat complaints, and worker injuries? The Downtown Brooklyn pilot should provide another real-world test.
The question isn’t whether we should use containers, but whether we’re designing the right system to empty them.
New York should do three things before the environmental study is completed and the next phase of deployment begins. First, it should publish a 20-year comparison of the side-loading and top-loading systems. Next, it should publish the results of the Downtown Brooklyn and West Harlem pilots. Finally, the city should commit to the next major fleet only after testing which collection system is best for New York’s actual conditions.
New Yorkers have lived with mountains of garbage bags on the sidewalk for so long that it can seem like part of the city. They shouldn’t be. Let’s solve it — but let’s measure twice before bolting anything down.
Bellden Mikhels is a 16-year-old Fort Hamilton High School junior who lives in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.
