By Michael V. Cusenza
Mayor Eric Adams on Tuesday announced three milestones in the City’s efforts to clean up Gotham and fight rats.
First, the City Department of Sanitation’s Highway Unit has removed more than 15 million pounds of litter and debris from highway shoulders and medians. Second, nearly a year ahead of a June 2026 deadline for buildings with one to nine residential units to start utilizing new bins, residents and building managers have ordered more than 800,000 official NYC Bins online, along with 80,000 more purchased at Home Depot. And since residential containerization requirements took effect eight months ago, reported rat sightings have declined each month, as shown in 311 data. Year to date, reported rat sightings are down 16.4 percent citywide.
Still, many borough neighborhoods remain overrun by rodents as soon as the sun sets.
“It’s garbage to think we can’t have a cleaner city, and thanks to our ‘Trash Revolution’ we don’t have to; we are announcing three major milestones in our ongoing quest for a cleaner and more livable city for all New Yorkers,” said Adams. “When we declared that trash and filth would no longer be normalized, many doubted it could be done, but we took bold, immediate action and are proving the doubters wrong. We’ve now removed more than 15 million pounds of litter and debris from highway shoulders and medians, moved trash off our streets and into containers, reduced rat sightings — and that’s just the beginning. We’re proving what’s possible when government leads with urgency and purpose, and when that’s paired with an unmatched hatred for rats and trash.”
DSNY Acting Commissioner Javier Lojan added, “As a 26-year veteran of this department, I can say from experience that the city is cleaner than it has been in at least a generation. Think back to just a few years ago, when mounds of black bags were a fixture on our sidewalks, swarming with rats at night, and many of our public spaces were cleaned inconsistently by a patchwork of entities. Thanks to Mayor Adams, New York’s Strongest now have the tools we need to clean our city, and we are delivering.”
Adams this week also touted his administration’s “Trash Revolution”—a citywide effort to move trash from black bags on the sidewalk to rat-resistant, closed containers. In October 2022, the City kicked off the Trash Revolution by changing set-out times for both residential and commercial waste to 8 p.m. from 4 p.m. beginning the following April, while allowing for earlier set-out times if materials were in a container. This incentivization of containerization was paired with major changes to DSNY operations, picking up well over a quarter of all trash at 12 a.m. rather than 6 a.m., particularly in high density parts of the city, and ending a practice by which up to one-fifth of trash had been purposefully left out for a full day. Also, in April 2023, DSNY published the “Future of Trash” report, the first meaningful attempt to study containerization models in New York City and the playbook to get it done.
