New York to require garbage bins for rubbish

New York City’s tradition of piling garbage bags on the sidewalk for pick-up is going the way of the dinosaur.

As of Friday, all 200,000 businesses in the Big Apple are required to put out their bags of rubbish in garbage bins, as communities across the country and the world have long done.

The requirement is the next phase in the city’s efforts to curb what NYC Mayor Eric Adams’ administration has called a “24-hour rat buffet” of rubbish on sidewalks.

The city in August started requiring restaurants, convenience stores and bars to use a sturdy trash can with a secure lid and extended the requirement to chain stores the following month.

Now every city enterprise, including “mom-and-pop shops”, must comply. In the fall, residential buildings with nine or fewer units will come under the mandate.

Eliminating the mounds of rubbish that come from larger residential buildings is still a work in progress. Starting in spring 2025, all buildings in a handful of neighbourhoods in Manhattan will be required to use outdoor receptacles as part of a pilot project.

Adams announced last month the city will eventually roll out trucks capable of lifting and emptying large on-street containers, which will be needed to accommodate all the waste from high-density buildings. While common elsewhere, they will be a departure for New Yorkers accustomed to the sight of sanitation workers tossing in bags by hand.

Commercial trash makes up nearly half of some 44 million pounds of refuse collected by the city each day, according to Adams, who has made combating the city’s rodents a focus.

City officials will issue warnings to businesses for the first month of the new mandate, and will begin issuing summonses in April, sanitation commissioner Jessica Tisch said in media appearances on Friday morning with Adams.

Joshua Goodman, a spokesperson for the city’s sanitation department, said the only requirement for businesses is that they use a solid bin with a secure lid.

Businesses must work with their waste haulier to find out what kind of receptacle they should use because business trash is collected by private hauliers, not the city.