Cars still hinder garbage collection in containers

They beat the rats, but still have to take on the cars.

As the city hosts its annual trash Super Bowl – the period between Thanksgiving and New Year’s – sanitation workers still have to do their backbreaking work, lifting tons of trash by hand as private car parking lots get in the way.

The city’s largely free curbside parking has long presented an obstacle course for New York’s “fittest,” who in some neighborhoods haul up to 20 tons per shift. But the recent move to containerize all trash bags hasn’t changed the basic methodology: Garbage collectors still manually remove the bags from new containers when they can’t maneuver around rows of vehicles, agency leaders revealed at a council hearing Wednesday.

“The sanitation workers have two options: They can manually remove the bags from the trash can … or if there is space between the cars, they can roll the trash can out,” Jessica Tisch, the DSNY commissioner at the time, told lawmakers. (Tisch has since become a police commissioner.)

DSNY recently implemented the first citywide municipal waste containerization program in half a century, requiring roll-off containers on the sidewalk for buildings with fewer than 10 residential units.

Under its future plans, owners of buildings with 10 to 30 units will be able to choose between these containers or stationary containers on the street, while complexes with 31 or more units will have to get the street-side option, a system that DSNY plans to test in a Manhattan Community Board from next June.

The agency is equipping some of its approximately 2,000 rear loaders with dump trucks to mechanically lift the newly required trash cans. But because they are on the sidewalk, these upgrades hit the steel wall of the city’s roughly 3 million parking spaces, most of which are free for drivers.

Parking cars has stood in the way of a cleaner city for decades. It has saddled New Yorkers with the ritual of evasive parking, in which drivers are supposed to move their cars out of the way of DSNY street sweepers – something drivers often ignore and simply absorb the cost of a ticket because it can be cheaper than a garage .

Historic opportunity

The agency’s historic switch from bags to containers offers a chance to reduce the daily burden on trash collectors who have one of the most dangerous jobs in the country, said experts who have studied the agency.

“The physical toll, literally the weight that the body has to support and swing for hours, months, days and years, is very high,” said Robin Nagle, DSNY anthropologist and clinical professor at NYU.

Nagle is the author of the book “Picking Up,” a detailed study of the department for which she immersed herself in the agency, hauling trash for months to gain on-the-ground insight into the strenuous work of cleaning up the Big Apple.

There, she witnessed firsthand the wear and tear that DSNY employees endure throughout their careers.

“Everything between my neck and my knees hurt,” she remembers the feeling after her first few shifts. “And I was in pretty good shape back then. I ran marathons, I lifted weights, I wasn’t a couch potato.”

Containerization would ease at least one of the burdens on workers, Nagle said.

“If it could help the workers get through their time in the sanitation facilities, their 20-odd years, and still stay healthy,” Nagle said, “Hallelujah, let’s do it.”

“100-ton club”

According to Nagle, New York’s heaviest haulers move an average of 10 tons per shift across the city, but that varies by borough. One part of the Bronx, Sanitation District 7 in Bedford Park, is known as the “House of Pain” because workers there hauled a whopping 20 tons per shift, she said, earning people who work there for a week the honor of being im House to be a “100-ton club.”

In more populated parts of the city, drivers park bumper to bumper, leaving little room to roll out the new cans, sanitation workers told Streetsblog.

“In Manhattan, these cars are parked bumper to bumper, it’s sometimes very difficult to get between these cars,” said Robert Casanovas, president of the Department of Sanitation Retirees, who worked at the agency for 30 years, mostly as a supervisor. “Forget it in high-density, high-traffic areas.”

Cleaners routinely have to toss the bags over cars, and the garbage truck driver gets out and loads them into the back of the truck, a decades-old method that remains largely unchanged as long as the city doesn’t make room at the curb.

“Reaching into a bag and pulling it out of a can is not much different than picking up a bag from the street,” said another sanitation worker who wished to remain anonymous. “(Parked cars are) definitely something you have to deal with on a daily basis. … It’s just something you have to deal with.”

If they get through, they still have to worry about scraping their legs on bent license plates or banging their knees on the trailer hitch.

The Strongest training even involves successfully hauling trash over a course with car-sized obstacles at a warehouse in Queens, Nagle said.

“You had to weave in and out like parked cars without damaging anything along the way,” she said.

Special room

The answer to that problem is to take space away from cars for better use, advocates said, calling on sanitation officials to work with the Department of Transportation to mark sections of the streetscape to throw away the trash.

“They should reserve a parking space to put the containers, even the wheelies,” said Christine Berthet, founder of the Chelsea and Hells Kitchen-based pedestrian advocacy group CHEKPEDS.

Berthet was part of a stunt in which Manhattanites set up their own guerrilla corral on the street four years ago. It recently worked with DSNY on an earlier pilot project to containerize trash collection on a midtown block, but those dumpsters still relied on trash collectors to take out the bags.

According to Clare Miflin, executive director of the Center for Zero Waste Design, other cities such as Paris and Vienna have long found ways to store and mechanize their collection in containers. Officials abroad told the researcher they were amazed that the city still expects its garbage collectors to shoulder more than five tons a day.

“Everyone else I talk to, they’re amazed,” Miflin said.

“It doesn’t improve labor if they’re still pulling out bags,” she added. “It’s a real compromise that doesn’t solve half the problems it could.”

The city’s new garbage regulations also limit the size of trash cans to 55 gallons, allowing workers to continue lifting them. That negates the possibility of allowing fewer but larger containers with a capacity of up to 96 gallons, which would mean there wouldn’t be as many trips back and forth to the curb, Miflin said.

“(That) would be more time efficient for them and more space efficient for larger buildings,” she said.

Her organization recently released a report showing how the city could provide more community containers on the street to prevent the new trash cans from clogging the sidewalk.