New York City’s mountains of trash bags could be stored in European-style shared containers instead of languishing on sidewalks — but officials said in a report released Wednesday that a new type of garbage truck must be created for the idea to work.
The report, titled “Future of Trash,” released by the sanitation department lays out the possibility — and challenges — in reforming how the city’s 44 million pounds of trash are collected each day.
Sanitation officials laid out a vision where large shared garbage bins take up street parking spaces in many of the city’s densely populated neighborhoods. Those bins could be picked up by garbage trucks with mechanical arms on their sides, a shift from the city’s current trucks where Sanitation workers toss bags into rear.
The report states there is no model of truck in the U.S. with “side loaders” that could lift bins so heavy in a city as dense as New York. There are trucks in European cities that could do the job, but sanitation officials wrote “they do not meet federal, state, and local emissions and safety standards so they cannot be imported for domestic use.”
The report estimates that roughly 10% of the city’s 1.5 million residential street parking spaces would need to be replaced with containers in order to roll out the plan. Some areas could lose up to 18% of street parking spaces, according to the report.
For neighborhoods with lower population densities, like those in eastern Queens and Staten Island, the city aims to to rely on individual household bins for garbage collection that do not take up street space.
The report also said that high-density neighborhoods like the Financial District and Downtown Brooklyn will not be able to have street container bins.
“New Yorkers deserve clean, safe and vibrant neighborhood streets,” Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch wrote in the report. “We deserve the best waste management system in the world, but it has to be done right. This report is…
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