Clarisa Alayeto was patient, but when the snow started to melt, she expected the mountain range of trash bags crawling with rats on her block in the South Bronx to be picked-up and taken around the corner to a “transfer station” where New York City Dept. of Sanitation (DSNY) trucks drop-off garbage from the entire borough.

“You mean to tell me that trucks just go by and by and by,” she fumed, “and no one can pick up the trash?” 

When a truck did stop, she recorded on her phone as a DSNY worker in a yellow fluorescent coat grabbed a half-empty waste basket from the corner. 

“Are you guys grabbing this garbage?” Alayeto asked, turning her phone to show bags crowding the sidewalk. “No, we’re doing baskets,” the man replied. “Other trucks are picking up garbage.” 

In a call for help, Alayeto posted the exchange to her social media account. “This is not the worker’s fault,” she told a Pix 11 reporter who responded. “This is the system we’ve built that’s been in place for a pretty long time.”

It has been decades, perhaps more than a century, since New York City last saw dramatic sanitation improvements. In 1895, reform-minded Mayor William Strong chose Civil War veteran Colonel George Waring to be Street Commissioner. He soon deployed literal armies of armies of men in white uniforms to sweep streets shin-deep layers of filth, shocking lifelong residents who didn’t realize they were actually paved. Known as “White Wings,” the sanitation workers also helped clean blocks of overcrowded tenement buildings, prompting muckracking journalist Jacob Riis to write: “It was Colonel Waring’s broom that first let light into the slum.”  

Fast-forward to 1969. Talk of revolution and a different kind of militancy was in the air, especially in El Barrio, or East Harlem. Mickey Melendez and other founding members of the Young Lords were reading Marx, Lenin, Che and Mao. Like the city’s new mayor who has vowed to “govern as a Democratic Socialist,” they too dreamed of creating a society free of injustice and exploitation, but found people mostly asked them to accomplish a seemingly more mundane goal. 

“They would say, ‘Why don’t you look behind you? Look at the garbage in the street! Why don’t you just have the garbage picked up?’,” Melendez told The Indypendent (see sidebar).  

Their resulting “Garbage Offensive” started with sweeping and escalated to direct action. When the city refused to let them use DSNY bags and brooms to collect the garbage, they dragged it across Third Avenue near 111th Street to block traffic. Someone set it on fire. After that, DSNY began to pick up the area’s garbage almost as frequently as it did south of 96th Street, and Melendez said the Young Lords saw “a surge in membership.” But the city’s disinvestment in the community resumed. “The unfortunate thing is that there’s still a garbage issue in East Harlem,” he concluded.

Now for the first time in generations, Mayor Zohran Mamdani may have the commitment and momentum to finally push forward a “Trash Revolution” that stalled under past administrations. Success could help rebuild confidence that government can be an instrument for advancing the common good, laying the groundwork for even more ambitious initiatives in the future. 

Clean the Damn Streets

In his April 12 speech celebrating the “pothole politics” of his first 100 days in office, Mayor Mamdani highlighted how “sewer socialists used government to build a better Milwaukee. Bernie Sanders used government to build a better Burlington,” and vowed to similarly “use government to build a better New York City” by making the modernization of trash storage one of his top three priorities. He announced he would start by establishing “one fully containerized community district in each borough by the end of next year” and all of the districts by 2032.

“In the wealthiest city in the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, no New Yorker should have their sidewalks covered in garbage,” Mamdani proclaimed. “We have the plan, we’re investing the money and we’re delivering on the promise of clean, healthy streets for every neighborhood.”

At a press conference days later in Crown Heights, he stood at a podium emblazoned with the message “Put a Lid on It,” flanked by his Sanitation Commissioner Gregory Anderson, who played a key role in designing and advancing DSNY’s waste containerization and public space cleanliness initiatives.  A founding board member of DSNY’s nonprofit partner, the Sanitation Foundation, Anderson knows education and outreach can induce compliance as much as enforcement. 

The drive to containerize the city’s trash began in 2022 with a carrot-and-stick approach. Residential buildings that did not bin their trash had to wait two extra hours to set-out bags on the curb. City-branded wheeled bins have since been encouraged for trash, food waste, paper, and mixed plastics. They will finally be mandatory starting in June. 

For larger residential buildings and schools, DSNY is providing “Empire Bins” made by the Spanish company Contenur, which it says hold about 45 trash bags and can only be opened by key card holders, like a superintendent. They sit in the street, not on the sidewalk, and get emptied by side-loading trucks. 

At the Crown Heights presser, Mamdani announced a pilot project of 1,100 Empire Bins in Manhattan’s Community District 9 was now expanding. Some 6,500 new Empire Bins would be installed for new pilots in Brooklyn Community District 8, Bronx Community Districts 2 and 5, Manhattan Community District 2, Queens Community District 2, and Staten Island Community District 1. 

One of the Councilmembers next to him was Justin Sanchez, who campaigned on the slogan “Clean the Damn Streets” and now chairs the Committee on Sanitation and Solid Waste Management. His Bronx council district includes Hunts Point and Longwood, and is part of Bronx Community District 2. He nodded as Mamdani called containerization “an issue for each and every New Yorker, no matter your politics. Frankly, the only disappointed constituency will be rats.” 

Empire Bins in Demand

Back in Mott Haven, Clarisa Alayeto welcomed the expansion but recalled how rats once chewed threw the wires of her car and caused $3,000 in damages and wondered why “my neighborhood, my backyard, my favorite place in the world” was not included. 

“What about Bronx Community District 1?,” she demanded. “Where is the data that says what community should have been expanded into and how this decision was made?” 

Alayeto recently turned 44 and has spent many of those years fighting the endless onslaught of trash, starting in the Patterson Houses, a 23-acre NYCHA complex in her community district with 4,500 residents where she was raised by her grandparents. Her first job as a teenager was to roam the grounds “with my broom and my dustpan.”  

“I remember one day I was cleaning up the neighborhood, and someone threw a ziploc bag of feces out the window,” Alayeto laughed. “Craziest thing, I’ll never forget it.” Most of the time her job involved less dramatic, repetitive chores like sweeping cigarette butts out of sidewalk cracks. “Back then the garbage wasn’t as bad,” she said. “Now it’s a totally different ball game.”   

As she learned to advocate for her community she joined Bronx Community Board 1, created its Environmental Justice and Sanitation Committee, and became the chair of the board in 2023. When Alayeto recently sat on a bench outside Patterson Homes, a woman walked by and exclaimed, “I remember you! You helped me get a bed.” Last year, Alayeto ran for City Council District 8, which includes parts of the South Bronx and East Harlem, but lost in the Democratic primary.

When it comes to the new Empire Bins, Alayeto insists, “this area should have been expanded into.”

While Mamdani says his administration will “aggressively” work to secure more of the containers and side-loading trucks, his ambitions for future roll outs could falter unless funding is allocated. The Adams administration did not set aside any money. Discussions are underway now with City Council on the budget for Fiscal Year 2027, which starts July 1. 

Community District 9 Pilot

Majority Leader Shaun Abreu, a member of the Council’s 20-member Budget Negotiating Team which meets behind closed doors, told The Indypendent: “Given that the council passed a law to require trash containerization, we received his commitment on trash containerization very well, and so we anticipate that’s going to be something we will stick with in the budget.” 

Governor Kathy Hochul didn’t mention solid waste in her State of the State address, but did back a proposal to tax wealthy New Yorkers who own a second home worth more than $5 million as part of calls to tax the rich to pay for key initiatives. “Even if we don’t get substantial support from Albany, I think this is a priority both the council and the mayor share,” Abreu insisted. 

Abreu can personally vouch for containerization. He headed the Sanitation Committee from 2024 through 2025, and helped launch the Empire Bins pilot program in Manhattan Community District 9, which includes part of his council district on the Upper West Side that stretches from Washington Heights to Hamilton Heights to Morningside Heights.  

Early news reports on the pilot in 2023 had headlines like “Hamilton Heights rat mitigation zone rolls out residential trash bins for blocks” and the past two years have seen a major drop off in 311 calls to report rat sightings in an area that had some of highest rates in the city.

He conceded “it was met with a lot of resistance” at first due to the loss of parking spots where the bins went. “But we also were able to see the bigger picture. We understood the benefit cost analysis. We were willing to absorb a loss of a few parking spots, relatively speaking, in exchange for a net positive impact on our environment and our city, especially the reduction of rats and cleaner streets.” 

“I think this by far has been the best idea ever by the Sanitation Department,” a Hamilton Heights superintendent named Gabriel proclaimed in a social media video about the new bins. “The rat population has declined drastically. For the last five or six years we have had a huge rat epidemic here.” As he tossed bags of trash into the bin, then slid the door closed to seal it, he repeated: “This baby is the best thing ever.”  

Large cities that already containerize their trash include Paris, Amsterdam, Milan, Shenzhen, Buenos Aires, Madrid, Barcelona, and Singapore. The last three use the same model DSNY chose. In addition to rat reduction, the automated trucks that empty the bins require much less physical strain for DSNY workers, leading to fewer injuries. They also reclaim sidewalk space for pedestrians and, with parking being harder to find, could promote the use of public transportation like the fast and free buses Mamdani has also promised to deliver.

Curbside Compost Begins

DSNY is the largest sanitation department in the world. It accounts for about 2 percent of the city’s budget and has more than 10,000 workers. Their job is to clear snow, remove derelict vehicles, clean vacant lots, and use 2,000 trucks to collect about 24 million pounds of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) daily. Private contractors haul about the same amount of commercial waste. On top of this, the city generates an estimated 6 million tons of construction and demolition debris every year.

This waste is hauled to spots like Waste Management’s Harlem River Yard Transfer Station, near Alayeto’s apartment in Mott Haven, which takes in MSW from as far away as Riverdale in the northwest part of the borough that borders Yonkers. The South Bronx is home to a quarter of the city’s private waste stations. Other communities of color such as North Brooklyn, Sunset Park and Southeast Queens are similarly saturated. 

Exporting waste out of the city from these transfer stations accounts for roughly one quarter of DSNY’s budget, and is one of the few non-personnel increases in its proposed FY2027 budget. This cost continues to push officials to focus on reducing waste that cannot be reclaimed through recycling or composting. 

In 2023, the city council passed a legislative package called the Zero Waste Act that addressed “organics” – the single largest part of the waste stream. It then launched voluntary curbside composting in brown bins that get emptied on recycling day with green and blue bins. DSNY has five mascots to help it educate residents about the change: bins named Zero the Hero, Pattie Paper, Bobby as well as Scrappy and a bag called “Leif.” Pilot programs in Queens and Brooklyn included multilingual outreach and then expanded to Staten Island, the Bronx and Manhattan. 

In April 2025, the Adams administration made curbside composting mandatory. But the move followed his budget cuts that ended city-funded education efforts by groups like GrowNYC, the Lower East Side Ecology Center, and Big Reuse. DSNY issued about 4,000 fines for non-compliance in one month that generated so much outrage that Adams backed off the enforcement while he ran for re-election. 

 “We saw composting rates go down with that action,” recalled Bushwick City Councilmember Sandy Nurse who chaired the Sanitation Committee 2022 through 2023 and is a longtime composting booster who in 2011 founded a “youth-of-color-run bike-based compost pickup service” called BK ROT to bring scraps to community gardens in her community. 

About a year after Adams halted enforcement of the curbside composting program, the Mamdani administration resumed it along with outreach and an advertising campaign encouraging renters to call 311 if their building still needs a brown bin. 

“We want to make sure we actually achieve the promise of our curbside compost program,” new DSNY Commissioner Anderson said at a recent hearing on finalizing the City’s Draft 2026-2036 Solid Waste Management Plan. “That does mean leaning on enforcement at some point, though it won’t be the first tool in our tool box.”  

What Happens to Food Waste?

Debate over the best way to process organic waste is ongoing. Most of New York City’s food scraps get are turned into a slurry which is trucked to the Newtown Creek Wastewater Resource Recovery Facility, a sewage treatment plant in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where it is added to wastewater sludge and “digested” into biogas by eight massive egg shaped containers that then helps power the plant. 

The environmental justice group WeAct welcomed the progress on diverting food waste from landfills where it emits the greenhouse gas methane. But its 2026 policy agenda notes the city seems “poised to create a waste infrastructure whose primary use for food waste is as a feedstock for the creation of biogas, specifically biomethane, which produces harmful emissions when used as an energy source.”  

Meanwhile, the city’s compost community is growing. It includes “micro haulers,” close to 200 community gardens, groups like Compost Power that build out compost sites in “underserved and marginalized” communities, and many midscale composter sites that could scale-up. 

Restaurants and commercial kitchens are not required to separate out food waste yet, and DSNY says they now have just a 4 percent organics diversion rate. As the city unrolls a Commercial Waste Zone reform plan to cut down on truck traffic, it has tried to financially incentivize diversion by requiring the haulers chosen to service these zones to charge less for composting and recycling than for trash collection. 

City council springboarded off of the success of curbside composting in April by passing a measure Nurse sponsored to “designate organic waste as a recyclable material for City agencies” such as public schools, shelters and city jails, which generate tons of it from meal preparation and discarded leftovers. 

“We want to see this material diverted from the landfills” or incinerators near low-income communities with high cancer rates, Nurse told The Indypendent. “We are paying a lot of money right now to truck and barge it out of the city.”

Nurse says it is also “time to update” New York state’s 1982 Bottle Bill. On Earth Day, she joined a community recycling organization called SureWeCan to demand state lawmakers pass the Bigger, Better, Bottle Bill (S.5684) to raise the deposit from five to ten cents, doubling the income of predominantly immigrant “canners” who collect bottles and cans, most of which are processed in Brooklyn at the Sunset Park Material Recovery Facility situated on an 11-acre pier to provide waterfront access and reduce truck traffic. 

Anderson has said as compost collection rates ramp up, the city would need more capacity. He may  support a vision for Renewable Rikers that would close the notorious jail and replace it with infrastructure that helps the city meet its environmental goals.

Challenges to scaling up surfaced for some residents who live near Staten Island’s West Shore compost facility after DSNY  increased its capacity in 2024 to take in more food waste and introduced aerated static piles to speed up the composting process “without the need for daily turning and repositioning.” This has attracted unwanted winged visitors to the city’s largest permitted compost facility, and DSNY’s Anderson said he has a plan to build an anti-bird structure and had reduced the use of bird-deterring sound cannons. 

The Office of Circularity

Many of Mamdani’s supporters hope he will push even more to integrate the city into a “circular economy” focused on diverting more waste from landfills through the reuse and repair of materials instead of discarding them. 

“Keeping useful items in service is a win-win and building community and changing attitudes among New Yorkers is the cherry on top,” said Leon Feingold, co-founder of the House of Good Deeds, when he recently asked City Council for more funding for groups like his. Half of the five tons of goods they redistribute to residents each month is food.  

The draft of the 2023-2032 New York State Solid Waste Management Plan incorporates this concept and is even subtitled “Building the Circular Economy Through Sustainable Materials Management.” But Anderson has argued it could go further. 

“The plan should be strengthened,” agreed Eric Goldstein, New York City Environment Director at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “The organics section in particular needs some help.” He said the plan can’t be submitted to the state until the city authorizes it, which provides “an opportunity the Council only gets on very rare occasions to influence policy in a broad and big direction. 

Anna Sacks, a member of the Manhattan Solid Waste Advisory Board, has urged Mamdani to seize the “opportunity to create a landmark Office of Circularity, one that transforms circularity from a buzzword into a set of concrete, practical systems and offers a model other cities can replicate.” In a March essay in City Limits she said the city should stop spending nearly $500 million annually to bury or burn trash, and instead use it to recirculate usable items to New Yorkers in need, “offering a model the rest of the world could follow.” 

She pointed to the city-supported nonprofit Materials for the Arts in Queens that gave away more than 4 million pounds of donated goods valued at over $27 million in 2023, to public school teachers, nonprofits, and even city agencies. “Public school teachers and nonprofits in Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Staten Island deserve the same convenient access to a free reuse center, and there is more than enough material currently being discarded by businesses and residents to keep these centers well stocked,” she wrote.

Sacks also put forth the fascinating idea that the city’s 1,600 schools – with nearly a million students who daily discard about three million single-use disposable cups, forks, and plates –  transition to a reusable system. A “dedicated Office of Circularity could figure it out, starting with a feasibility study (examining whether dishwashing could occur on-site, off-site, or through a hybrid model, and at what cost), followed by pilot programs, and then a three- to five-year implementation plan.” In the process, students would learn “it’s not normal to eat from a plate and then throw it ‘away’ 15 minutes later.”

When Business Gets Involved

When Clarisa Alayeto helped establish an Environmental Justice and Sanitation Committee on Bronx Community Board 1, part of her goal was to help with community clean-ups. At the board’s April meeting, the Third Avenue Business Improvement District (BID) executive director Pedro Suarez distributed “Adapt-a-Spot” kits. 

“Obviously we still need the city services,” Suarez said. “So this is in no way meant to replace that, and there continues to be further investment needed in this community around that.” 

The Third Avenue BID has its own sanitation workers who clean-up trash and litter in The HUB, one of the city’s busiest commercial corridors. It conducted a Commercial District Needs Assessment and found neighborhood cleanliness was a top priority “in attracting more businesses and talent to the area.”

Saurez thinks for Mamdani to deliver on making the city more affordable, he will have to make “significant, bold investments in low-income communities that are struggling because that’s where the impact is going to be affected the most.”  With a $5 billion budget deficit, he acknowledged it is hard to push for major overhauls. “We continue to need leaders that realize it might be expensive short term, but it’s gonna save us money.” 

Suarez bought the cleaning kits from the Sanitation Foundation, which once surveyed more than 1,000 residents across the five boroughs and found 80% said littering is a problem, while nearly half of Bronx residents admitted they sometimes litter. The Foundation focuses on education from kindergarten to adults, and runs a popular Trash Academy. Suarez invited them to do a presentation to the board and take questions. 

“Much of the Bronx is in a flood zone,” Johari James, Community Engagement Manager for the Foundation, explained to the board members. “Litter clogs are storm drains, right? Which creates flooding, right? So this is one of the many reasons why we want to remove litter from our streets.” 

A member raised her hand to describe how a building with three schools “is the biggest offender of garbage and stuff on my block, and if it’s a windy day, it’ll come all the way down the block.” 

“The issue with schools is that they are a city of their own,” James responded, and said he often works with them to conduct a waste audit training. “We like to bring education and advocacy to people to let them know these are the rules, right? These are the ramifications of breaking those rules, and it’s best to comply, obviously, if you want to have a safe and clean city to live in.”

Some board members said they wished there was more enforcement, but everyone seemed interested in helping out too. 

Doing Your Doggie Duty

“Can I have something that would allow me to pick up the dog poop without actually touching it?” another board member asked. “If it’s in a bag, this works,” James said, pointing to a scooper branded with the logo, “Don’t Do NYC Dirty” that comes in the Adapt-a-Spot kit. “Otherwise your best bet is to get a shovel and broom.” The kit also comes with 10 garbage bags and a pair of gloves.

Suarez used to work for DSNY and told The Indypendent he suspects many people assume dog poop is “organic and not harmful and that these animals are in sort of in harmony with the environment. When it comes to dogs, you can’t do that. So it is also about changing a lot of our assumptions about why people do things, and getting them to feel like they belong, so that then they care about the community.” 

When it comes to enforcement, DSNY has said people who know they are being watched tend to pick up their dog’s poop. There is always the option of calling people out. Brooklyn Councilmember Chi Ossé posted on social media for people to “PICK UP YOUR F—ING DOG SHIT.” Meanwhile Councilmember Shanana Hanif posted a how-to  video pleading with dog owners. The city now has messaging on kiosk and bus stops and even church signs that alternate mass times with calls for people to “CLEAN UP AFTER YOUR DOG. IT’S REQUIRED BY LAW.” 

Any improvement would make a huge difference, said Robert Karran, who commutes from Harlem to work at Democracy Now! in midtown and uses a wheelchair. He told The Indypendent if he accidentally rolls over a pile of dog turds “it goes around your feet, it goes around your chair and comes back in your hands, and it just stays in there. It’s the fresh ones you really gotta watch out for.” He lives in a pet friendly building, “so there’s always shit in front and I’ll watch out. But there’s some people who are responsible. My neighbor has a dog, and picks up its poop.” 

Dumps, Gardens & Parks

Mayor Mamdani marked his 100th day in office by donning a fluorescent yellow DSNY vest and picking up trash at an illegal dump in Soundview in the Bronx, after the task won his Municipal Madness competition for which problem he would tackle himself. 

Far from the TV cameras that trailed his every move, Alayeto once again took out her phone to record rats crawling in a massive illegal dump in her own neighborhood. Residents had called 311 to get the garbage removed, but DSNY said it was at the worksite of ConEd and its contractor CAC Industries, so it was their responsibility. After Ayleyeto’s video went viral, she posted a second video of DSNY at the site, thanking them for clearing it.

“These companies hire these contractors who do a sloppy job in our communities and could care less about what the quality of life is” and blow off repeated fines, Alayeto told The Indypendent.

Meanwhile the Saavedra family, whose award-winning Mexican restaurant La Morada is known for its Oaxacan cuisine, just a few blocks from Alayeto have chosen to steward a community garden by the highway that had been used as a dump site. On the corner of Bruckner Boulevard and East 136th Street, the Bruckner Mott Haven Garden was started in the 1980s by residents who reclaimed the space. 

“This was all trash, it was very abandoned. Glass bottles everywhere. Mattresses,” Carolina Saavedra said in a 2021 report by Sonyi Lopez for Bronxnet. “Within three months we were able to flip this place completely upside down and now there is so much greenery happening. So many vegetables are growing, of all kinds of varieties.” 

Nieves Ayress, a community activist and original garden co-founder, was thrilled to help re-inaugurate it. “Anything is possible,” she said. “The dreams we have can be built, starting with a garden, or the house or the streets.” 

Just before Earth Day, City Council passed a measure to “study how to best increase green spaces in underserved communities.” Some could be food scrap drop-off sites; others could use free compost from DSNY’s Staten Island facility like volunteers do now when they clean up parks and street trees, making the soil healthier and capturing rainwater to reduce flooding while the trees offer shade. 

On a recent sunny Saturday afternoon, Doreyde Aguirre joined a group of volunteers with the Montefiore Park Neighborhood Association in Hamilton Heights to replenish the park’s tree and flower beds with new compost after cleaning up a dozen trash bags worth of litter.

“I love participating,” she told The Indypendent, “so people can enjoy the park without looking at the garbage.” She acknowledged “it is hard to maintain” the cleanliness for long because some parkgoers will almost immediately litter again instead of using trash cans throughout the park, especially those struggling with addiction.

As volunteers rested in the shade, Izzy Sanchez stopped to thank them and say he was “stunned by the beauty” of the tulips they had planted last winter that were now blooming. Raised in the Bronx, now living in Harlem, he was canvassing for Conrad Blackburn, a DSA candidate for New York State Assembly’s 70th District in Harlem, who he described in part as “an eco-socialist who cares a lot about the environment.”

“I’m out here supporting candidates and our mayor who cares about these things,” Sanchez told The Indypendent. “When we invest in people and public resources, everyone benefits.” 

Renée Feltz lives in Manhattan Community District 9 where she has seen Empire Bins make rats and trash scram and loves the cleaner streets. 

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