Let's talk some more about garbage.
Manhattan Community District 9 has just become the first neighborhood in New York City to containerize 100% of its trash. This is being done through a pilot program that now requires all residents to dispose of their trash into either an individual bin (the kind you'll find in most cities) or a new "Empire Bin." Empire Bins are required for buildings with more than 31 units in the pilot district. Properties with 10-30 units can choose whichever bin they want. And properties with fewer than 10 units have to go with the smaller individual bins.
The new Empire Bins look like this.
These are stationary bins that live on the street and take up about half a parking space each. Each bin is also assigned to a specific property and can only be accessed by building staff using an access card. So these are not general purpose bins. In the pilot area, there are some 1,000 bins, replacing hundreds of parking spaces. And if this were to be expanded citywide, it is estimated that it would require the removal of more than 50,000 on-street parking spaces.
In this instance, the use case is different than what we spoke about last week. The problem is not that large garbage trucks are taking up too much space inside of main street buildings. The problem is that these spaces don't exist, and so NYC has had to default to an approach that is remarkably efficient for fostering a vibrant rat population: collect rat food, place it in easily accessible plastic bags, and then set it out on the street like a buffet.
These efforts are about containerizing the city's trash. And yeah, that makes a lot of sense.