The Big Lift: City Starts Containerized Collection with Mechanical Trucks Uptown

Now an entire neighborhood has joined the trash revolution.

Residential trash collection — with stationary containers in the curbside lane where the city used to allow drivers to store their private property — will reach all of Manhattan’s Community Board 9, which covers Hamilton Heights, Manhattanville and Morningside Heights, starting today.

After decades of letting people leave piles and piles of messy dripping garbage bags on the sidewalk, the Department of Sanitation can, as of today, say that its plan to change that forever has started in earnest, albeit in one neighborhood.

Finally, the Big Apple’s waste management is up to speed with other world cities from Buenos Aires to Barcelona which have boxed up their trash for years.

“When we said four years ago that we were going to have cleaner streets and fewer vermin, the cynics rolled their eyes and said, ‘New York City is too big, government moves too slow, and no one will ever beat the rats.’ But we refused to take no for an answer,” said Mayor Adams in a statement issued on Monday, as Hizzoner announced the new policy.

DSNY has been setting up the nearly 1,100 trash containers, dubbed Empire Bins, outside apartments and schools in the upper Manhattan neighborhood for months, and now they’re a go.

Each bin can fit about 25 full-size rubbish bags and two containers take up the space of about one parked car. So for each car storage space, 50 fewer stinky bags line the sidewalk.

The city also deployed 16 all new side-loading trucks in the northern Manhattan neighborhoods to hoist and empty the enclosures.

The machines chart a way forward that no longer relies on the back-breaking labor of refuse workers, who have one of the most dangerous jobs in the country, one that is essential to keeping the Big Apple clean.

“When I started as a Sanitation Worker in 1999, the idea that we could get where we are today seemed impossible,” said DSNY’s Acting Commissioner Javier Lojan in a statement. “In the 26 years since then, I’ve seen too many good people get hurt from throwing bags or sick with leptospirosis, and I’ve seen too many neighborhoods asked to live with garbage juice and rats all over their sidewalks. It doesn’t have to be that way.”

Buildings with 31 or more units had to get the street bins while those with 10-30 dwellings could choose between those or smaller wheelie bins on the sidewalk. Around half of the buildings that got a choice opted for the street containers. Housing with nine units or fewer have had to switch to wheelie bins across the Five Boroughs since late last year. Recycling still goes in bags on the sidewalk.

The agency two years ago piloted more flimsy curbside trash bins on wheels that a retrofitted truck could lift into the back on 10 blocks in the area, but the stationary versions are less likely to move out of place between collections and are now assigned to specific buildings with key cards for their supers.

In a detailed 2023 report on containerization, DSNY officials estimated that some 150,000 car spaces would have to be repurposed to make way for 300,000 containers citywide for trash and recycling — still less than 5 percent of the city’s total parking spots.

Removing the private vehicle spaces will be a heavy political lift to pull off citywide in the face of the entitled driving class, but Mayor Adams has said it’s a “small price to pay” for cleaner streets.

The city’s so-called “Trash Revolution” still leaves much of the waste stream including recycling and organics on the city’s already congested pedestrian spaces, however, and advocates and experts have urged the agency to move more containers into the curb and allow smaller buildings to share containers to prevent a “Berlin Wall” of wheelie bins.

First look at trash history

Streetsblog got a sneak peak of an early collection along W. 147th Street late last month.

The new trucks pulled up next to the bins, where one Sanitation worker directed the driver to lift the containers with a fork extending out the side, before emptying them into the top.

New York’s Strongest covering the route that morning said that the bins were a welcome change bringing cleaner streets and reducing the strain of hauling heavy and stinky bags around rows of parked cars.

“The bin is in the parking lane, as opposed to before where the garbage was on the sidewalk and we would have to walk between the parked cars to get it to the back of the truck,” said Anthony Martin, a 19-year veteran with the agency.

Martin was the loader, monitoring the truck’s lift operated by driver Marvin Hernandez with a joystick and cameras from the cab.

“So far so good,” said Hernandez about the first-in-the-city initiative. “This truck is pretty cool, it has a lot of moving parts, it has screens all over.” 

The pair of San-men had to shake some containers several times to get all the bags out.

A second truck with an arm on the other side has to come by afterward to pick up containers on the opposite side of the street.

Motorists have not complained to them about the new bins, according to Martin, who said they have gotten used to the agency’s pilots over the last years.

“We instituted that about two years ago so they’re pretty used to it now,” Martin said.  

Double-parked cars still get in the way of the trucks, according to a supervisor, but the agency has stepped up ticketing against scofflaws in the area.

“We are strictly enforcing. We can’t have double-parked cars over here because the truck needs to get by,” said Theresa Lievano.

Building workers have said they appreciate the more flexible way to bring out garbage, compared to having to set it out on specific evenings, according to Lievano.

“They don’t have to come back here at eight o’clock at night to bring the trash out, they don’t have to bring 20 bags of trash out at the same time,” she said.