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Comment by vrc | Hacker News Reader

No space for dumpsters especially in Manhattan. No alleys. Same for bins. They’d either be too big or too small. That’s the rub.

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I live in Tokyo: there's no dumpsters here either, nor alleys. Trash is left on the curb for the trash trucks to take on the appropriate day. Until then, the trash is kept inside usually; condo buildings for instance have trash rooms on the ground floor for storing and sorting trash. There are almost no rats.

I think the issue is just basic cleanliness. NYC doesn't have it. There's trash everywhere, so that breeds rats.

There's plenty of space, it's just all occupied by cars.

Whoa buddy, we gotta keep our priorities here. Cars are more important than pedestrians, cyclists, and human lives. What makes garbage so special?

> What makes garbage so special?

It accumulates fast.

So, biofuel?

Sure. Which brings us back to the problem: NYC lacks the infrastructure to efficiently collect the trash and turn it into biofuel, because all the space is taken by cars. It's a bad balance of priorities between fuel production and fuel consumption.

We can put these on every street corner. The problem, as always, is that our city streets are car-centric and people would never give up any amount of parking. https://c8.alamy.com/comp/DCWEJ4/recycling-bins-on-a-street-...

Underground bins are a potential solution. This is what The Netherlands use: https://youtu.be/0JtoSafhvLM

They also work well for dumping used glass bottles etc. since they reduce the noise you hear when the class breaks inside

We use these all over the city: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhbhvdvTWUg

Uneducated view from a single video, but this seems incredibly inefficient? How many of these have to be processed on a weekly basis? I'd expect for such a size of vessel, the truck is in and out in < 15 seconds.

There are a lot of them but they also hold a lot of trash. The big ones can hold up to 12m3 while a rolling container holds 770L or around 12 35L bags. [1]

Some are emptied on a schedule while others send a signal when they are full. It would also take a similar amount of time to pickup a long street full of rolling steel containers holding around the same amount of trash.

At ~USD 1.70 for one 35L bag people also recycle a lot.

[1] https://www.zh.ch/content/dam/zhweb/bilder-dokumente/themen/...

It's not as if NYC is unique in its space problem. Most dense cities face the same issue. In SF each building has a trash room, with bins or dumpsters, the trash truck drivers pull the bins out, empty them into the truck, put them back. It's just that building owners need to devote about one apartments worth of space to a trash room. I suspect that is the challenge, getting property owners to do so.

On one hand, SF is probably 1/4 as dense as Manhattan. On the other hand, plenty of international cities have solved this problem. NYC just refuses to address it because they're NYC and nobody tells them what to do, politically.

From some quick googling Manhattan itself is also considerably denser than Tokyo or Hong Kong or London or Singapore. There are probably other international ones denser (21,646 people per mi2 for Singapore is the closest I found, but 72K for Manhattan), but a quick search suggests it's not necessarily that commonly easily solved. There are probably some sizeable specifically dense areas in those places, at least in the Asian cities (especially Hong Kong just from "feel"), but I don't have that sort of granular knowledge.

Seems unlikely that trash is the only source of food for the rat population, too. Or that dumpsters or bins magically keep out the rats from the trash. Rats can be crafty!

In New York you can literally watch the rats eating the garbage through the bags. Bins and dumpsters are indeed not perfect but anecdotally after living in both NYC and SF I can say the issue is far worse in NYC and I've seen lots of rats eating garbage in NYC because the garbage is literally piled up on the sidewalk for half a day or more, 3 times a week. In SF I see plenty of rats, but there aren't piles of garbage sitting out, so it's just far less of an issue. This is admittedly my own experience amd observation, I'm no rat expert.

If you're going to carve out Manhattan, for apples to apples comparison:

Shinjuku: 50000/mi2

Hong Kong island: 91500/mi2

kowloon: 111450/mi2

Yeah, honestly the density numbers are tough to find because "NYC" always includes Queens,etc....so you kinda have to go look at subsections of major cities.

The point is that Manhattan isn't particularly dense when compared to other world-class cities major population centers, and these other places have solved the problem of trash collection. NYC exceptionalism seems to be the fall-back explanation for why it "can't be done"....but to me it fails under further inspection....literally fails the smell test :)

Finally, you're correct that the trash bins aren't a panacea, but not allowing a literal rat buffet to fester on the sidewalks 3 nights a week is a good first step.

Yep, this is exactly how it is in Tokyo. There's a giant trash room downstairs for people to deposit trash and sort it (cardboard, plastic, PET bottles, burnables, metals, etc., plus they frequently have a bunch of hand tools and stuff you might need to borrow). The building management puts the appropriate trash out on the appropriate day to be picked up, so it's only outside for a few hours.

For the same amount of surface space, dumpsters would take up less space than loose bags of garbage. Other cities with comparable population densities have no problem doing this.

They could definitely build in some trash compacting trash cans that have underground storage(built below the sidewalk); then just add the ability to collect and service those systems to whatever waste collection service the city gives the bid to. It would just be initially expensive and probably take a few years to bring online but would probably end up being an effective solution to clear the streets of waste as long as the waste management company doing collection was good at servicing the bins and people actually used them. The challenge in the US is often getting people to use the services that are provided...

I don't think it is that easy. I can't even get local governments to build out municipal fiber Internet...

In theory, the city should own the physical fiber and be able to rent it out to anyone who wants to offer last mile service...

I think it could be, as long as there is a political will within the city to fix the problem and the funds that would need to be allocated are there(which in NYC they have the money for this). I think it would be easier than you think, municipal waste management contracts are generally posted by cities every 3-10 years and they can very in scope of work whether it be collection, recycling services, landfill, compost... and within all of these services different cities will have different wants and needs and then generally companies post bids to compete for these contracts. Usually when a new contract is posted it is updated with the updated expectations of the cities; if the cities installs these new bins and expects trucks that can collect from them it will be done by the companies that make bids. These processes happen frequently and are B to B interactions so they get done a lot more efficiently than headaches with the city as an individual resident.

Oh common! Medieval European cities all find space to put dumpsters everywhere.

NY has simply learned to accept filth.

https://s3files.core77.com/blog/images/1103794_81_102208_N_A...

These are pretty cool, but I think you underestimate how much trash a 600 unit residential complex creates.

You could always install two of them.

There’s plenty of space for dumpsters, we just prefer to give it away to car owners.

they could do retrofit https://untappedcities.com/2020/04/09/inside-roosevelt-islan...

will take probably 100 years or so

If there is room for the bags, there is room for the bags to be in a sealed container.

Either too big or too small? Certainly they could build bins that are the right size

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