City Is Expanding Anti-Rat Pilot Program That Requires European-Style Metal Containers

The rats were not invited to testify.

The Sanitation Department submitted for public reaction its plan to launch a pilot in West Harlem next year to eliminate those ubiquitous piles of plastic bags at the curb by requiring every large apartment building to use European style metal containers.

Experts say those plastic bags, easily ruptured or punctured, are the single largest source of food for the city’s rat population.

Many other cities are way ahead of New York, which is why neither rats nor piles of trash bags are ubiquitous there, said New York’s Sanitation Commissioner, Jessica Tisch.

“New York City’s exceptionalism cannot be used as an excuse to accept the status quo when the status quo is mediocrity,” Tisch said. “We can have the clean, trash-free streets that other cities have, if we are willing to do the work. There isn’t some secret to winning the Trash Revolution; It just takes careful planning, thoughtful management and a commitment to finally getting it done.”

The department invited New Yorkers, except rats, to comment on the new plan at a public online hearing Tuesday November 12 at 10 am. The email to sign up in advance is mliquori@dsny.nyc.gov.

The plan dramatically expands and adapts an earlier pilot program that, the department said, successfully curbed rats along Hamilton Heights. That program used closed bins with wheels to hold trash from apartment buildings and private homes for the Sanitation Department to pick up. Rat sightings called in to 311 were down “a staggering 60 percent,” the department said.

The new pilot, set to begin June 1 of next year, will require that all trash from residential buildings within Community Board 9 be placed in closed bins while awaiting collection.

Apartment buildings of more than 30 units will be required to use what were dubbed Empire Bins, large stationary metal bins placed in the street at curbside.

There are about 400 of these large apartment buildings in Community District 9, which runs from 110th street north through West Harlem to 155th street. Bins will not be shared, as they are in some cities. Each building will have its own. The buildings representative will have locked access to their bin and be responsible for placing their building trash in the bin.

One advantage of this new system, the department said, is that buildings will no longer have to store trash inside the building until collection times. They can put trash out in the sealed bins as they need to.

The department is buying new side-loading collection trucks that will be able to lift these bins and dump their trash even in narrow side streets.

The 700 midsize buildings in district 9 of between 10 and 30 units will be given the choice of using Empire Bins or wheelie bins of the sort used in the Hamilton Heights pilot.

All buildings of 9 units or less, including single family homes, anywhere in the city will be required to use wheelie bins, starting this month. There are about 1000 such buildings in district 9.

Commercial buildings are already required to use metal containers for their trash. The West Harlem pilot will make Community District 9 “the first part of the City that is fully containerized.” The goal is to fully containerize all trash in the city, but a timeline for this will depend on the results in West Harlem, a department spokesman said.

The containerization project is part of a radical reordering of the use of one of the city’s most valuable and least appreciated assets, the space along curbs. The containers will, in most cases, take curb space currently used by residents and visitors to park their cars.

“The quantity and size of the containers have a high impact on the streetscape,” Miles Nelligan, an architect, said in comments submitted in advance of Tuesday’s hearing. “Placing this many permanent large scale garbage receptacles along the street, makes them the most noticeable feature of the street since they are higher than the cars. They frequently have garbage that ‘missed’ the container around them and the lids are frequently not closed. I have seen this type of arrangement in Europe, but never this amount of containers. They take over the street more than bags did.”

The Sanitation Department said each building will be held responsible for keeping the area around the curbside bins clean.

But another respondent, Nick Frost, took a more container-half-full view. “This seems like a well thought-through proposal,” Frost wrote. “I’m looking forward to living in a city that doesn’t put bags of rat food on the sidewalk.”