![]() ![]() Paris has roughly the same density as Manhattan, yet little of the hesitancy to tackle the problem with large containers for recyclables on the street, said Clare Miflin, an architect and the founder of the Center for Zero Waste Design. Photo: Marvel Architects and Recycle Track Systems, in partnership with Sam Schwartz Engineering and HR&A Advisors Photo: Marvel Architects and Recycle Track Systems, in partnership with Sam Schwartz Engineering and HR&A Advisors The Department of Sanitation has been promising for two years that New York will get some below-grade trash containers. This could be the new way garbage is picked up in New York City, if the Department of Sanitation can make its almost-two-plus-year-old pilot program happen. At a City Council committee meeting on March 4, DSNY confirmed that when Clean Curbs does launch in the coming months, it will be “very small-scaled, probably one block.” Meanwhile, New York City’s two-year-old Clean Curbs pilot program, which would allow some businesses to containerize their waste, has not gotten out of the planning stage. Battery Park City, which is overseen by a state entity, also uses compactors and large containers to keep that neighborhood’s streets clean. You don’t even have to leave the city to find examples of a better way: Roosevelt Island’s 16 residential buildings have used pneumatic tubes and compactors to store and move waste since the mid-1970s. Photo: Christopher Robbins The Financial District. Big cities in France, South Korea, Argentina, and the Netherlands use below-grade containers, pneumatic tubes, and street-level sorting bins to keep their streets clean and their trash pickup efficient. ![]() Take New York’s approach to residential waste containerization. In conversations with policy experts, architects, elected officials, and former city workers, one word came up repeatedly to describe the Big Onion’s relationship with garbage: “inertia.” The greatest and richest city in the world is being embarrassed by other municipalities when it comes to nearly every facet of how we generate, sort, store, and recycle the more than 12,000 tons of waste handled by the Sanitation Department every day. How did this happen? How did the single unifying issue for 8.5 million people - getting unsightly and unsanitary trash out of the public square - become a sorry example of New York exceptionalism? Why are black garbage bags on the sidewalk New York’s 5 o’clock shadow? The mountains of garbage bags waiting for collection that clog our curbs and sidewalks and serve as edible yurts for millions of rats are now as much of a New York City institution as the dollar slice and 24-hour subway service. These scenes play out every day in every borough. “I walk my daughter to school every morning and we have to weave in and out, or cross the street, or walk in the middle of the street,” Vyas said. It’s terrible.”įor Sunil Vyas and his young daughter Layla, trash days offer a sort of grim obstacle course. “The bags take up the whole sidewalk, you can’t even use the sidewalk. “Every single time I’m on this block, it’s like this,” Ali Marconi, a Financial District resident, told Streetsblog, as vermin darted in and out of the black plastic buffet put out by the luxury residential building 63 Wall Street. on a recent Friday afternoon, but the rats on Beaver Street were having the Early Bird Special. ![]()
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