Trash Containerization & the Empire Bin
New York bagged its rubbish on the pavement for a century. From April 2023 the Sanitation Department pushed trash set-out to 8pm, letting anyone using a lidded bin set out at 6pm instead; bins became mandatory for all businesses in March 2024 and for buildings of one to nine units that November. West Harlem has held all its trash since 1 June 2025 in about 1,100 on-street Empire Bins emptied by purpose-built automated side-loading trucks, at a cost of roughly 500 parking spaces. A November 2025 law extends containers citywide by 2032. Success is measured by 311 rat complaints.
📊 Impact
311 reports of rat sightings citywide fell from 25,230 in December 2023-November 2024 to 20,025 in the same months a year later, a 20.6% decline (DSNY, December 2025). These are complaint reports, not a rat count; the fall began before any district was fully containerised, so it cannot be attributed to on-street containers.
🎓 Lesson
New York rebuilt the collection truck to fit a standard container but put no instrumentation on the bins themselves — no fill sensors, no weighing, no per-household pricing — so its only evidence is a citizen-complaint dataset the city's own health department says cannot measure neighbourhood rat activity.
Sources
📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Trash Containerization & the Empire Bin” — New York City, United States. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/nyc-trash-containerization/ (last verified 2026-07-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.
🔗 Related projects
→ Open this project in the interactive atlas · → 🌱 Environment category · 🚩 Report an error