By Forum Staff
Mayor Eric Adams and City Department of Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch on Wednesday opened up a new front in the Adams administration’s war on rats, launching a plan to containerize waste at approximately 95 percent of residential properties across the five boroughs. Beginning in the fall of 2024, buildings with nine or fewer residential units will be required to place all trash in secure containers, and in specific, official NYC Bins beginning in the summer of 2026. The official NYC Bins will be available from a vendor through a request for proposal process that begins today, with prices capped substantially lower than they would be in retail stores.
The new residential garbage containerization rule will cover all 765,000 New York City buildings with nine or fewer units, continuing the Adams administration’s work to move towards containerization of all waste citywide. It follows Adams and Tisch’s expansion of containerization rules to get all commercial trash bags off city streets. Between the commercial containerization effort and these sweeping new residential rules, 70 percent of the city’s trash is headed into containers. As a result of the Adams administration’s efforts in recent months, this past summer, 311 calls about rat activity dropped by 20 percent citywide from the previous summer and 45 percent in Rat Mitigation Zones.
“Our administration is winning the war on rats, and we are keeping up the fight,” said Adams. “With this new plan to put residential trash in containers, 70 percent of trash in our city will be off our streets and out of rat buffet lines. We are moving aggressively to execute our ambitious vision and deliver the clean, safe city New Yorkers demand and deserve.”
The official NYC Bins will be designed for mechanized collection. DSNY will retrofit or replace hundreds of collection trucks, adding mechanical tippers compatible with the new bins. This upgrade will speed up collection and minimize the possibility of street mess from manual collection. It also brings New York City in line with other world-class cities that have abandoned the practice of throwing bags from the curb into a truck by hand in many or all cases.
NYC Bins will be available from one authorized concessionaire, which will be selected through a process beginning Wednesday, Oct. 11. DSNY has mandated that the concessionaire produce the bin in multiple sizes to accommodate different types of buildings and to match a number of specifications around aesthetics, rat resistance, ease of use by sanitation workers, and compatibility with mechanized collection.
In most major U.S. cities — where bins are required for trash — property owners pay a fee for sanitation service that covers the cost of the bin. Because New York City provides free, unlimited residential waste collection, property owners are responsible for purchasing the bin, but DSNY has set a maximum price far below what one would pay at a retail store. The request for proposals states that official NYC Bins, which will be designed to last at least 10 years, will start at no more than $50 for the most common size — and the competitive vendor selection process may bring the price down even further.
