A Next-Generation Trash Can
citylab.com
citylab.com
About 25 years ago I watched a documentary that focused on how the IRA were using litter and the bins themselves as shrapnel to ensure that small devices had a larger impact radius, especially in busy areas.
At the time this lead to a removal of bins in major public places (and they are still 100% absent from the tube system for this reason), and for those areas that required bins new designs were sought that were blast resistant.
Blast resistance in this context typically meant that the shell of the bin acts like a cannon, and the blast is directed upwards so that the impact radius is greatly reduced and the worst case is that trash rains down on people.
A lot of bins were replaced over the following decade, but this is not a requirement I see mentioned much any longer. Are other major cities factoring terrorism into their street furniture and garbage designs?
The explanation that they were a good place to hide a largish bag so no-one would get suspicious about them seems entirely sufficient to explain why they were used, and why it might be a good idea to remove/disable them and replace them with something you can see the inside of.
> The area was crowded with shoppers. Witnesses said that shoppers fled from the first explosion into the path of the second. It was later found that the bombs had been placed inside cast-iron litter bins, causing large amounts of shrapnel
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1991/feb/19/northernireland.d...
> Forty minutes later, a bomb hidden in a litter bin on the main concourse at Victoria exploded as police were carrying out a search, and while the rush hour was at its height.
> The dead man, a commuter, was the father of a 16-month-old child. He was killed by a shrapnel wound to the chest
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/two-young-boys-murdere...
> Hundreds of pieces of cast iron shrapnel from two litter bins, which had been blasted apart by Semtex, littered the shopping precinct
[EDIT] I mean I guess I hadn't counted on the bins so strongly resembling actual bomb casings. Heh. Yeesh, that sucks.
[EDIT EDIT] doesn't break fast enough and is brittle. I was thinking something like sheet steel.
Open hoop style trash cans (bag holders really) are faster and more efficient for the janitor to assess the fullness of a bag from across the station (and for the supervisor to assess the quality of the janitor's assessment) and if needed to grab the full bag out of the hoop and toss on a new one. The hoop cans themselves are cheaper too. Any benefit to the police is likely secondary to the day to day cost savings from making it easier (and therefore faster and therefore cheaper) for the janitors to do their jobs.
When the IRA were using american funds to blow our kids up in the 80s and 90s, it was a more innocent time - nobody really considered a threat where the bomber would be willing to kill themselves as part of the attack - not in the west (and there'd only been the one suicide attack by the Palestinians), and much of the time there were warnings phoned in. Typical bombings were abandoned car/vans, bags or litter bins.
Nowadays the attack vector seems more knife crime or suicide bombing. There's far less now too.
I googled it and discovered that the pIRA did use human bombs, except that the human involved was under coercion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_bomb
You're right about there being far fewer terrorist incidents now. I believe the London tube bombings of 2005 and Manchester arena bombing of 2017 were the only suicide bombings in the UK this side of the millenium.
You can still see in lots of stations where old bin were, often moulded into the walls and covered over with plates. Often they still say "Litter" above them.
I'm not sure if shrapnel projection avoidance was the number one reason in those instances since the bombs were already prepared with nuts and bolts as shrapnel but they definitely allowed large devices to be easily hidden in plain sight.
I can't remember how long it lasted but for what felt like decade most trash cans in Paris became metal circles with transparent plastic bags awkwardly hanging from them so the contents could be easily seen and it would be much harder (in theory) to hide a large explosive device in them. This resulted in a lot of mishaps with trash dropping all over the floor. Apparently it also worsened rat infestation since Paris' most recent trash can redesign focused on tackling this issue [2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1995_France_bombings
[2]: https://www.cnews.fr/france/2019-06-02/paris-3600-nouvelles-...
Honestly there’s a number of good reasons you might want that design though, e.g. needles have been an issue around San Francisco.
Interesting. This might explain why in Chicago subways the "trashcans" aren't cans at all but collars with naked plastic bags suspended from them.
Chicago is laid out with an extensive alley system, even in the downtown parts of the city. In New York, garbage ends up on the sidewalk. In Chicago, all of that is tucked into alleys. Garbage trucks and dumpsters are all tucked behind the scenes.
That layout was done generations ago, and is probably the biggest reason that downtown Chicago smells like chocolate instead of trash.
Is Bloomer's still violating EPA particulate regulations during chocolate manufacturing? I would've thought their new Japanese owners would've clamped down on that by now.
This was for safety reasons: alleys provide many poorly-lit, poorly visible locations to commit crimes: mugging, illegal transactions (drugs etc.) and worse.
So just to be clear that alleys aren't necessarily a net benefit. New York may very well have been much safer, at the price of late-night garbage out visibly for pickup.
Ex: https://www.google.com/search?q=barcelona+trash+bins+parking...
https://www.broxap.com/derby-standard-litter-bin.html
https://www.broxap.com/derby-e.html
Cuboids or cylinders, with a closed top and large openings on each side. There's a plastic bag inside, accessed by a door in one face.
This seems to solve all New York's problems better than their new design. Dustmen only have to lift the bag, not a heavy bin. The openings are narrow, keeping rubbish safe from wind and bulky waste. They look tidy. The bin is fixed to the ground, so it can't blow over. Rain can't get in in the first place (much), so drainage is not a worry.
However, they are a bit expensive: the cheap one there is £200, which is (just about!) more than the $200 limit New York has set, and councils often install more expensive ones.
Ideally the city would require stand bins that could be lifted by an arm on the truck (like many other cities in the US).
When you get above a few kilograms there's also a biomechanical issue - the same reason the world record for clean and jerk is much higher than the world record for bicep curls, despite moving the weight a lot further.
Lifting something from waist height to chin height quickly, using big leg muscles to give it momentum, is easier than lifting it slowly using only arm muscles.
And nobody lifting 10kg trash bags for 8 hours a day is doing it the difficult way :)
I wonder if there's anything that can be done about overflowing trash cans. I feel like most of the litter I see in Manhattan comes from when a can is full so it accumulates next to it.
Is there any way to build a reliable sensor that could somehow be powered without a (non-existent) ground connection, communicate, and reliably survive without destruction for years, that could alert the closest sanitation workers?
It definitely seems like a tall order. I'm not even sure what kind of basic sensor would be applicable. Unless it was just CCTV feeds with coverage of all trash cans that could be fed into machine learning to identify "full" cans.
I'm not sure what it would cost to retrofit a city with a system like this. Possibly more than implementing the sensors you mention, but it's one potential solution.
We have space for dumpsters, we've just elected to use them for free private automobile parking instead.
Of course, Philadelphia has maybe 1:10 of the amount of street cans as NYC so there is still trash everywhere. But the bins are very nice!
What really stood out to me was the fatal injury rate of 33 per 100,000 for trash collectors (in general, obviously). That seems incredibly high.
I imagine the injury/casualty rate is dramatically higher.
> Lam: Do you feel like you still need to be careful, even though you’re doing the same task every day?
Veloz: Absolutely. Every time you get out of the truck and go to the [trash] box: Don't become complacent. In this business, if you become complacent, you're looking for death. It's very dangerous because the cable bringing up the box is like a slingshot. If you make one mistake, and break the cable, it'll come through the window behind you and it's not going to be a good situation. You've got wires overhead, you've got trees you could hit that could fall on the truck. I take every load like it's my first time. We also get safety bonus $10,000 every three years, which I’ve won.
I remember reading the book "Ghost Map" (great book, BTW) and it said that Victorian London had "pure collectors" who collected dog waste and sold it to tanneries, but apparently that's not a resource stream anymore. :-D
Then there are the “recycling stations” [1] littered across the larger train stations. They too cost somewhere between $3100 and $3800. At least they seem to work quite well.
[0] https://www.nzz.ch/zuerich/abfallhai-der-zuercher-kult-kuebe...
[1] https://www.drawag-tech.ch/recycling-systeme/drawag-recyclin...
I am also not sure this over-engineered and presumably quite expensive device (plus their ongoing maintenance) actually solves any real problems besides being political ammo to please environment fanatics due to its solar panel.
Yes, I also share your aversion towards soiled handles. Fear not as these ones also have a foot pedal, which can be actioned with a light step and works lovely and nice and fluid, actually a pleasure to use and well thought out and engineered upon that aspect from my experience of them.
It does seem to address issues like heavy load, but new yorkers with large amounts of trash will definitely just continue to throw it directly on the sidewalk.
Is it just me or is anyone else exhausted by things like this? Every design has to take into account bad faith actors.
It also assumes that the household garbage dumper is going to carry their trash back to their house and wait for garbage day, when really they'll just drop their garbage back next to the trash can that it doesn't fit in. There's another solution to that problem, and they might have the wrong angle entirely here.
Sometimes pondering the natural world for a while is healthy. There's a lot of deceptive, underhanded trickery animals get up to.
So no public bins and no private bins.
The host concluded that this would never work in USA.
I mean, maybe it could be implemented over time, but merely proposing it would guarantee election losses.
I was talking about the design of public trash bins.
It does not mean this is the only thing they are working on.
Your comment is 100% whataboutism.
It doesn't mean this is the only thing they're working on. Nevertheless it is a fact that they're not working on solving the underlying problem. They are working on marginally better traps that don't actually reduce the population effectively.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/05/nyregion/rats-new-york.ht...
> “New Yorkers need to understand that they have a role in stopping this,” said [Professor Munshi-South of Fordham University Department of Biological Sciences]. “I don’t believe we have built in a right culture of how to dispose of our garbage. People have not made the connection between what your neighbors are doing with their garbage, and how this feeds the problem.”
What proposal do you have in mind for the city to solve this?
To your points, most brownstones in, say, Park Slope, do have bins in their yard, and the trash collectors remove waste from that bin. This is at least marginal rat resistance. Midrise buildings that are further out than that will have room for dumpsters if they are required.
(Multi-family apartment buildings are a form of commercial real estate, though they are neither office nor retail.)
I live in a neighbourhood not too far from park slope. You have to put your trash on the curb no matter what you live in and where in the city you live. Garbage men dont even want to pick up the trash that falls from then while picking up trash from the curb so I find it incredulous that they enter your yard and take it from a bin.
"Place your items curbside on the curb between 4 PM and midnight the evening before your scheduled pickup".
time variation means people's different work schedules get covered - whether you're at home in the morning, afternoon or evening you'll catch the truck 2x a week
if you live in an apartment building, it makes really good sense to collectivize and hire the work out to someone or share the shore between neighbors depending on socioeconomic bracket
https://www.haringey.gov.uk/environment-and-waste/rubbish-an...
Places where they leave rubbish in plastic bags on the street for hours (even overnight) seem filthy in comparison.
Rats spreading disease has been disproven.
They are one of the few species who still manage to survive in the concrete.
Residents’ needs should be considered in matters like these.
> New York City unveils a next-generation human who never litters
So no next-gen needed, just need to live somewhere it's not culturally acceptable to throw trash on the ground.
Wonder why places like New York City are so different.
Tourist/more HCOL areas are often very clean, though.
But, despite that I think it's totally fixible. Either just change the law to force setting aside some ground floor real estate, or put bins where parked cars used to be. I think the latter is more politically feasible.
Nobody likes the filth, but the litter won't stop until the buildings lead the way with the bulk of the problem.
Oh, and I think food delivery caused tons of pointless trash. We need some system to return reusable containers to the restaurants. Very sad their is a restaurant loophole for the new plastic bag ban.
It's a tough sell though. A lot more work for the restaurant and almost certainly higher costs. There will be constant shrinkage of the reusable containers to deal with as well as having to pay someone to wash them.
It would probably work best if the containers were generic and everybody used the same ones, so no matter who you ordered from this time you could return your containers from last time. But that's an even harder sell: why pass up the opportunity for advertising?
I still like the idea, but acknowledge that it would probably struggle to gain traction in the real world.