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Fast Company
07-07-2025
- General
- Fast Company
New York's War on Rats has a new secret weapon: the big gray bin
In late June, I was standing at an intersection in the New York City neighborhood of Harlem, at 5 a.m., surveying a row of hulking gray bins that lined the curb. Next to me, Joshua Goodman, the deputy commissioner for Public Affairs & Customer Experience at DSNY, admired his team's handiwork. 'We want it to be iconic, but we also kind of want it to blend in and disappear,' Goodman said of the bin. 'Eventually we want you to walk down the street and not notice that it's here.' As the sun rose, and sleepy commuters passed by us, he explained that while these new bins are novel today, the hope is they become just another part of the streetscape. This morning, however, the European-style bins are hard to miss. Standing 3-feet wide and 5-feet tall with gently curved lids, these stationary on-street containers, officially named Empire Bins, are parked in front of large apartment buildings in Manhattan's Community Board 9. They are the latest initiative from New York City to fight rats and keep the streets clean, after the city commissioned a $4 million McKinsey study that concluded that the future of trash management is cans and bins. Since the study, restaurants and residential buildings between one and nine units have had to dispose of their waste in city-sanctioned trash cans (55 gallons or less, with a secure lid), in lieu of the heaping mounds of black trash bags that used to line the streets. Then, this past April, the city unveiled the Empire Bins as the next phase of its experiment in corralling waste. These sturdy, solid receptacles replace the mountains of flimsy trash bags that rodents easily shred in order to access the nightly all-you-can-eat buffets that we set out for them. While a handful of bins debuted in a smaller 10-block area last fall, they are now in wider use. The city will evaluate the next phase of containerization after the Harlem pilot study is complete, but for now, 1,100 are spread across the pilot area. The kitchen is now closed in Manhattan's Community Board 9, the city's first neighborhood to be fully containerized. Designing the Empire Bin Framing the seemingly obvious behavior of putting trash into cans as an innovation is the butt of jokes, but for a city that generates over 14 million tons of waste a year—and stuffs smelly, leaky, flimsy trash bags in every available space it can—execution is a challenge logistically, technically, and behaviorally. Enter design. 'Many people are sort of surprised that trash requires an aesthetic,' Goodman tells me. The bins are made by the Spanish company called Conteneur —which has a $7 million, 10-year contract with the city to provide up to 1,500 bins—and are slightly modified versions of their Oval 3000 model, which are found in cities like Barcelona. While the physical design is mostly off the shelf, the experience around them is New York specific. First off, the bins are gray with gray lids to match the color of the smaller rolling bins required for buildings with nine or fewer units. They are simply labeled 'Trash' and feature icons of a metal garbage bin and bundled plastic bag, along with a DSNY logo on the corner. 'Very straightforward iconography, just simple-to-understand terms,' Goodman explains. Some Empire Bins are also installed at schools in the neighborhood for recycling and compost in addition to trash, and their lids are color coded to indicate what goes inside: blue for glass, green for paper, brown for compost—just like residential bins. Second, the Empire Bins are assigned to specific addresses instead of being for whole neighborhood communal use like they are in most European cities. While the city has long known the weight of its waste, it didn't know the volume until it conducted a 70,000 block study as part of the containerization effort. Through this, DSNY concluded that a one-size-fits-all container would not work for neighborhoods because of the varying density. A block might contain any mixture of large and small residential buildings; instead, it took a building-by-building approach. DSNY mandated that buildings over 31 units receive an Empire Bin and gave buildings between 10 and 30 units the option to use the Empire Bin or individual rolling bins. Right now, Empire Bins occupy about 4% of the neighborhood's curbside parking. 'We don't want there to be too little or too much bin space,' Goodman says. 'Too much bin space is not an efficient use of our curb line, and obviously not enough is bad for sort of self-evident reasons.' And finally, each Empire Bin is outfitted with a battery-powered lock; the person or people responsible for trash at the building receive key cards to access them. There's no limit to how many key cars a building can receive. Conteneur advised the city to keep the cards plain, but Goodman felt like they needed a special graphic treatment so 'Empire Bin' and a photograph of the receptacles is printed on each green-and-white card. 'They said, 'You don't want it to become a collector's item.' And I said, 'No, I want it to become a collector's item,' he explains. 'The key card has to be cool. People have to want this. They have to be excited to get it.' In order to keep the bins in the exact same spot, DSNY installed tiny pyramids onto the pavement that hold them in place and prevent them from getting pushed around. Each bin weighs about 300 pounds empty, so a lot of strength is required to dislodge them. Additionally, DSNY, in collaboration with the Department of Transportation, installed flex posts around the bins to ensure there's enough clearance for the collection trucks' mechanical arm to grab them. Residents take their trash out like normal. But supers bag up the trash and toss them into the bins instead of leaving it on the curb for pick-up. They can access the bin 24/7 and don't have to wait until a specific time to use them. This way, there's no need for the intermediate steps of bagging trash and holding it in a trash room until pick-up then bringing everything to the curb. 'It has eliminated the building manager frustration around having to be here till 8 p.m. to put the trash out,' Goodman says. An Automated Truck for the Heavy Lifting Around 5:45 a.m., a new DSNY truck rumbled up the hill. To service the Empire Bins, DSNY had to build 16 custom side-loading collection trucks. The models in use in Europe don't meet the emissions requirements in New York, so DSNY Frankensteined their bodies onto the same model of chassis that the fleet currently uses. One of the two workers hopped out of the cab then flashed his universal access key card over the lock to peek inside to see if the bins had anything inside them. The first was empty, but the second had a few bags in it. He returned to the truck and hit a button on its side, which awoke a large, automated mechanical arm. It lowered itself around the bin, pinched its sides, then hoisted it 20 feet in the air before flipping it upside down to empty its contents. Then, the arm precisely lowers the bin back to its exact resting place. The entire process is automated, but there are cameras inside the cab that lets the driver keep an extra set of eyes on the mechanical arm for safety and a joystick just in case they need to operate it manually. Instead of heaving heavy, dirty bags into the back of a truck, workers essentially just press a button. It's a shift that helps reduce the tremendous physical strain on the job and risk of illness, especially leptospirosis, a bacterial infection that is spread through rodent urine. It's curable, but often goes undiagnosed, which can lead to complications. 'There are two kinds of New Yorkers who get leptospirosis: sanitation workers and dogs,' Goodman says. 'We have maybe six cases a year from handling trash bags that a rat has urinated on, and now they're not touching the bags.' The entire acrobatic sequence took less than 30 seconds. It reminded me of the Snow Plow Ballet, a 2003 performance by Mierle Laderman Ukeles, DSNY's first resident artist, of snow plows choreographed into a dance. The arm's graceful rise was not unlike a plié and relevé. Then the truck was onto the next set of bins—sometimes the bins are sited individually and sometimes in sequence—for an encore performance, and soon drove onto the next block. From Harlem to the Five Boroughs? If the Harlem pilot is successful, the Empire Bins may come to the rest of the city, though DSNY has to complete its study before the city decides. For now Goodman and his team will be gathering feedback and studying how the bins work in situ from residents as well as sanitation workers. Some early takeaways have emerged: DSNY noticed that drivers sometimes park over the flex posts, so it is considering installing bollards between them and the bins to ensure there's enough clearance for the mechanical arm. Meanwhile, some supers who manage multiple buildings have asked for a key card that can work on multiple bins; DSNY has worked with property owners to get authorization. 'We want this to be really simple,' Goodman says. Then there is the challenge of using the bins as the city intends. I spotted a paper bag of recycling and a couple grocery store-size bags of trash in front of a row of three Empire Bins. DSNY has added a 'No Dumping' sticker to prevent this. 'My hope is that long-term that's not necessary and that people come to understand what the bin is,' Goodman says. As Goodman and I wrapped up our tour, we spotted DSNY's Manhattan Borough Chief Daton Lewis trailing the pick-up, too. He was excited about the new method of trash collection. 'It's just amazing,' Chief Lewis told us, mentioning that a colleague who has served in DSNY for 20 years told him that the Empire Bins came 19 years too late. 'It's like a kid in the candy store for me.' So far, DSNY's containerization efforts seem to be working. In the first half of 2025, citywide rat sightings decreased 18.4% compared to the same time period in 2024. Still, the vocal pro-car faction has chimed in; the New York Post accused the bins of ' abducting ' parking spaces. Meanwhile, some advocates are calling for more on-street bins arguing that the fleets of rolling bins for smaller buildings are crowding sidewalk space. While Mayor Adams has said that the tradeoff of less parking is a 'small price to pay' for cleaner streets, it remains to be seen if the future political climate will be as open to the shift. A couple days after my trek to Harlem, I attended a screening of The Maintenance Artist, a documentary about Mierle Laderman Ukeles, that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival this June. A feminist artist who explored the cultural associations with maintenance and care, Ukeles, wanted more citizens to value the systems and labor that keep a city running. 'I believe that the design of garbage-recycling facilities, landfills, water treatment plants, rivers should become the great public design of our age,' she said in an interview that appeared in the film. 'They will be utterly ambitious, our civic cathedrals.' Since then, the city has commissioned a handful of civic cathedrals to sanitation: There's the salt shed on Spring Street that resembles a concrete crystal and the rotund silver digester eggs that define the Greenpoint skyline and are occasionally open to the public on architecture tours that always sell out. The newest entries to the canon, I'd argue, are the Empire Bins. Part of Ukeles's ambition was to help people realize that keeping our cities clean is a shared responsibility. 'After the revolution, who's going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?' she wrote in her 1969 manifesto. The answer should be all of us, in some capacity. Today, that means being receptive to the redistribution of curb space for waste collection. 'I don't think we were asked if we wanted to live with 24 million pounds of trash in the street,' Goodman says. 'And the idea that we can change it is, I think, compelling.' The super-early-rate deadline for Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies Awards is Friday, July 25, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply today.
BBC News
05-07-2025
- General
- BBC News
Funding for chewing gum removal given to Devon councils
Funding to help remove chewing gum from the streets has been given to two Devon Hams District Council and West Devon Borough Council both received a £23,590 grant from the Chewing Gum Task Force to clean up affected streets and footpaths across both areas and reduce gum task force grant scheme was established by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and is run by Keep Britain Tidy with funding from gum manufacturers including Mars Wrigley and Perfetti Van leaders said the funding would provide a positive impact on their ability to remove gum littering from the streets. Councillor Christopher West, West Devon's lead member for climate change and biodiversity, said he hoped it would "act as a reminder to people that our streets look much nicer without litter like chewing gum". Councillor Jacqi Hodgson, South Hams executive member for waste, added: "As a local council we can only do so much about the problems of chewing gum on the street, but we hope the public will be more thoughtful in how they dispose of their gum to help the streets stay cleaner."
Daily Mail
21-06-2025
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Furious locals in UK city of culture claim their title is a joke as council allows fly-tippers to dump with impunity turning their homes into vermin breeding grounds
Bradford is officially the UK's City of Culture - but furious residents say the honour feels like an empty slogan when they cannot walk their streets without stepping over filth as flytippers have been allowed to run rampant. Locals say they are battling a relentless epidemic of the anti social behaviour which has seen their streets blighted by dumped mattresses, broken glass, discarded appliances and mounds of rotting rubbish. Anger is growing not only at those who treat the city as a dumping ground but also at council officials, accused of failing to act decisively despite thousands of reported incidents and barely any fines handed out. More than 10,600 fly-tipping incidents were recorded across Bradford in the past year alone, yet only eight people were fined. And in the last three years, the council has handed out a miniscule £6,500 in penalties despite admitting they have cleared roughly 4000 tonnes from the street each year. Melissa Butler, 30, lives in Bradford with her two young sons and a baby. She told how her street in the Holme Wood suburb had become a dumping ground and a breeding ground for vermin. Ms Butler said: 'It's just disgusting, honestly. Every time I look outside, there's more rubbish. It feels like it's coming from all directions - people just pull up in vans or cars and dump stuff like it's a tip. 'One day it's just a few bags, the next there's a mattress. I went to the supermarket and came back to find a front door dumped behind my house. 'I've got two boys, and they play out the back because it's safer than letting them near the main road - but they shouldn't have to play next to piles of rotting rubbish and the rats it attracts. 'The only reason we haven't had rats inside our house is because we've got a cat and a dog. 'The amount of dead rats I've found in the garden is terrifying. I'm a clean person. I work hard to keep things tidy for my kids. But people keep dumping their rubbish. 'I've called the council so many times to report it. I tell them over and over again, 'This needs shifting, my children play there.' And sometimes they do come and clear it - but it just builds back up again. 'Once someone literally dumped a load of rubbish right in the middle of the road. Not on the grass verge - right across the tarmac, so the people who live further up couldn't even get their cars through.' Ms Butler said she had begged the council to put up a CCTV camera in a bid to deter flytippers, only for her pleas to fall on deaf ears. She added: 'The second people see a camera, they'd think twice. But the council say they can't do anything until they've had enough reports. It's like pulling teeth trying to get anything done. 'I don't think people realise that some of us here really care. We clean up, we look after our homes. I don't want all that mess at the back where my children play. Nobody does. But the people who dump this stuff don't live here. They don't have to deal with it.' More than 10,600 fly-tipping incidents were recorded across Bradford in the past year alone, yet only eight people were fined And in the last three years, the council has handed out a miniscule £6,500 in penalties despite admitting they have cleared roughly 4000 tonnes from the street each year Householders can be fined up to £50,000 and end up with a criminal record if they ask someone else to remove their rubbish and it is found to be fly-tipped. From 2022 to 2024, the council traced just 32 households who used rogue waste collectors. Last year, ten households paid a combined £2,050 in fines. Amanda Buckingham, 52, has lived in Bradford for nine years. Her frustration with the council has turned into exhaustion. She said: 'When I first moved here, they said they were going to sort the rubbish out. 'But now it's everywhere, absolutely everywhere. 'I used to clean it all up myself - every week, for months and months. But in the end, I just gave up. It does your head in. What's the point when it's back a few days later? You get tired of it. 'The other day someone pulled up in a big white van, opened the side door, and just dumped everything on the grass. 'The council needs to actually do the job properly. You've got council litter pickers going, 'I'll get this bit and that bit,' but then they skip whole areas. What's the point in that? It's a waste of time. 'It's not just the council, though, it's people too. Some folk won't even carry rubbish in their pocket until they find a bin. 'I bet half of them go abroad and behave themselves - but they come back here and just dump it. Why can't they show the same respect at home?' When Mail Online visited Bradford, our reporter found alleyways filled with detritus, including an abandoned fridge-freezer, graffitied mattresses and a shopping trolley filled with junk. On a nearby street, Council workers - wearing blue bibs citing 'Bradford 2025 - UK City of Culture' - were clearing mounds of dumped bin bags. Yellow 'crime scene' notices had been attached to another pile of flytipped waste, warning: 'This rubbish has been examined for evidence and will be removed soon'. The note added: 'Did you see who dumped this rubbish here? Ring Bradford Council.' Rebecca Crowe, 45, said the council's own tip policies are pushing people toward illegal dumping. Council tax payers can apply for a permit to access waste disposal sites but they are not permitted to use vans or trailers to throw away bulky items. Instead they must fork out £50 for the council to come and collect up to three items. Ms Crowe said: 'I think the council's made it too hard for people to get rid of rubbish properly - that's why so much of it ends up dumped in alleyways and fields. 'I've got a car, but I can't fit a king-size mattress or a wardrobe in there, can I? 'They should allow householders to use a van at the tip at least once or twice a year. You'd see fly-tipping drop overnight. 'I've got a tip pass. I follow the rules. But if you make it too difficult for people to do the right thing, they'll find another way.' Bradford Council says fly-tippers go to lengths to avoid detection by blacking out number plates or use fake plates. They are planning to install ten more hidden CCTV cameras at known hotspots to catch offenders in real-time. An existing camera caught a shameless fly-tipper dumped piles of rubbish on a Bradford street and then torching it. In a seemingly rare success, Reece Dulay, 32, was last week hauled to court where he admitted chucking garden waste, car parts, plastics and scrap metal onto Law Street over several days last July. Dulay had been touting for work on Facebook with the slogan 'no job too big' - despite having no licence to carry waste. In a separate case, Claire Alyson Miller, 36, tipped the contents of a wheelie bin onto the street. Miller pleaded guilty to fly‑tipping and was ordered to pay more than £1,000 in fines and clean‑up charges. Curtis Delamere, a father-of-two, said rogue waste removal firms charge as little as £50 to fill a van - before driving off and simply dumping its contents elsewhere. Mr Delamere, 30, said: 'We try to make the street look nice. But you walk a few yards down and there's just rubbish everywhere. It gets you down. 'We've had everything dumped around here - mattresses, fridges, TVs, gas bottles, even fire extinguishers. The grass on the field gets so long because the council won't cut it - in case their mowers break on all the junk. 'People just don't care anymore. It's become normal. I've got a four-year-old and an eight-year-old. They shouldn't have to step over bin bags and broken glass to play outside.' Mr Delamere said fortnightly bin collections were directly responsible for the hike in fly-tipping in the city. He said: 'The bins only get emptied once every two weeks - that's not enough. We're a family of four and we can easily fill two bins in that time. So what do people without a car do? They pay someone to take it away, and half the time that ends up dumped in an alley.' 'You can report it, and the council might send a van out to clear it. But then it just comes back again. It's like painting over rust. 'The money they're spending cleaning up all this could be saved if they just made it easier in the first place. Go back to weekly bin collections. Make tipping more accessible. Stop punishing people for trying to do the right thing.' Figures show over 10,600 cases of fly-tipping were logged in Bradford in the last year alone - up from 10,193 in 2023-24. The council estimates that the overall tonnage of fly-tipping it clears is expected to fall rom 4,803 tonnes in 2023/24 to 4,000 tonnes this year. At a town hall meeting in March, independent councillor Rizwan Saleem told how he was 'fed up of seeing mattresses at the bottom of my street'. He said: 'We need to catch the people doing it or they will keep doing it over and over again.' 'A lot of residents know where the waste comes from, but don't want to grass up their neighbour.' Nationally,local authorities in England dealt with 1.15 million fly-tipping incidents in 2023/24. The cost of clearing large-scale dumping cost taxpayers more than £13m. Fly-tipping is a criminal offence and can result in an unlimited fine or up to five years in prison. The council can prosecute or issue fixed penalty fines, currently set at £400. The council's Environmental Enforcement Team, working in partnership with the Police's Operation Steerside Team, can also seize vehicles involved in fly-tipping offences which helps to disrupt waste crime. Cllr Sarah Ferriby, Portfolio Holder for Healthy People and Places, said: 'We are working hard to maintain a clean and attractive environment, especially when a global spotlight is on our District in our City of Culture Year but also beyond this, so that we can all take pride in it. 'But we need everyone's help in reporting incidents of littering and fly-tipping. If you see something, whether it's fly-tipping, someone throwing litter from a vehicle or general littering, please report it. 'Action will be taken. Anyone thinking of fly-tipping is warned they will be fined or prosecuted. Using one of our Household Waste Recycling Centres is free if you live in our District.'
BBC News
04-06-2025
- General
- BBC News
Liverpool's fines for fly-tipping, littering and dog poo to rise
Litter louts, irresponsible dog owners and fly-tippers will face harsher penalties after Liverpool City Council confirmed plans to employ a new company to help it respond to environmental offences. Faced with spending £12m each year on cleaning litter and fly-tipping across the city, councillors have approved plans to bring in a firm to crack down on offenders who fail to keep the streets will be higher fines for litter and graffiti, while a tiered approach will be brought in for fly-tipping council said communities can "feel unloved and unforgotten" when there are high levels of litter and fly-tipping, and poorly managed household and commercial waste. "Unfortunately there's a small minority of people who don't play by the rules and it's frustrating that it blights the lives of other people, said council leader Liam Robinson, who added: "It's not acceptable."The charge for dropping litter will increase to £150, up from £80, with an early payment option of £100 for those who pay within 14 graffiti and fly-posting is also facing sterner punishment, with fines doubling to £ of up to three bags will result in a £500 fine, while more than three bags, but less than a van load, will attract a penalty of £750. A load equivalent to a light commercial van or "clear evidence of waste being commercial, or business waste transported by an unlicensed waste carrier" will land those responsible with a £1,000 who fails to pick up after their dog will also face sterner punishment, with a penalty of £ Robertson-Collins, the council's cabinet member for neighbourhoods and communities, told BBC Radio Merseyside that the local authority had employed 12 council enforcement staff along with an external contractor to tackle the problem."We've got to get people actually looking and catching those people who are not doing the right thing," she said. Listen to the best of BBC Radio Merseyside on Sounds and follow BBC Merseyside on Facebook, X, and Instagram. You can also send story ideas via Whatsapp to 0808 100 2230.
CTV News
14-05-2025
- CTV News
Montreal cracks down on cleanliness, could start fining landlords
Montreal is stepping up its efforts to keep the streets clean. But not everyone is on board with the city's latest approach to tackling garbage issues.
