00:20:46 · Joshua Goodman, Joshua Goodman, Tracy Alloway
[00:20:46] S1: Yeah, absolutely. [00:20:47] S5: So when you look at one thing that I think is important to remember as we talk about this is that even though New York has a reputation for being behind the curve, there's actually no city in North America that does on-street containerization. [00:20:59] S2: Right? [00:20:59] S5: It's a purely European, South American, and Asian thing. And when this program is implemented, New York will have gone, I would never say worse, but have gone from the back of the pack to first. And that means that we had to develop a system that would work for us specifically, right? As we first started to confront this, I heard a lot from sort of two groups, urbanists who would say, this is a solved problem, copy-paste Barcelona, copy-paste Amsterdam, and also community leaders in the city who said this would never work here, right? And when we did this study, what we really found was that both of those groups were wrong. It is, of course, achievable and it is. [00:21:33] S1: Of course, difficult. So when we had all this. [00:21:36] S5: Data about the weight of the trash, what we wanted to do was, again, as I mentioned, that there's a finite amount of street space. You want to establish a containerization model that can hold all the waste, but that is not oversized because then. [00:21:52] S1: You're wasting that space.
00:21:52 · Joshua Goodman, Joshua Goodman
[00:21:52] S1: You're wasting that space. [00:21:53] S5: So we planned for one extra day. You mentioned Christmas. And we planned for basically one extra day above their collection. And we went out and measured piles of trash. We eventually were able to come up with conversion formula to use. But it was a lot of on-the-street work measuring both the trash itself and also the streetscape. Because you might know the length of a block, but you know that you can't put the bin in front of a curb cut. You know it can't go in front of a fire hydrant. We had determined that we were going to go with a side-loading model. There are different ways the trucks can be serviced. That meant that we had to think about tree canopy height. The bin can't go up into the tree. There are so many factors in really four dimensions on this to consider. And in Europe in particular, what you see are open shared bins. And this is what had kind of been contemplated in earlier pilots that we had done going back to 2021-2022. okay, just a European style, basically a dumpster on the street that everybody on the block is to use. We always had a lot of issues with that as an at-scale solution because a few reasons. First of all, in New York City, we provide this free unlimited service for residents. Businesses have to pay for trash collection and through a network of private carters. And so there was a concern about, well, if it's a free open bin, why wouldn't a business just steal space in that bin. [00:23:15] S1: With their trash in there?
00:23:15 · Joshua Goodman, Joshua Goodman
[00:23:15] S1: With their trash in there? [00:23:16] S5: So we didn't want to go forward with that model. We also knew that there are many neighborhoods in the city where an on-street container was not going to improve the situation. If you think about a low-density neighborhood, making everybody all of a sudden walk down to the middle of the block, that doesn't help just in the name of saying, well, we've done the whole city. So the model we eventually came up with after we had this volumetric data was a containerization system for low-density buildings, one to nine residential units, so a single-family home up through a small apartment. using a wheeled trash bin and then eventually a specific wheeled trash bin. The largest buildings, 31 or more units, is the point we came up with where they can certainly support at least one of what we call empire bins, the on-street containers. And then the 10 to 30s, the mid-sized buildings, was where we found there's a lot of variety. Might be 11 studios, there's 11 people in the building, versus 29 two-bedrooms. They have to use one or the other, but they choose. [00:24:14] S1: And that program....
00:24:14 · Joshua Goodman, Joshua Goodman, Joe Weisenthal, Joe Weisenthal, Tracy Alloway
[00:24:14] S1: And that program.... [00:24:16] S5: With that model was implemented, the city's divided into 59 community districts. We began in one community district, Manhattan 9, which is West Harlem, Amsterdam to the river, 111 to 155 in June of last year, 2025. And now, fall 2026, this is coming to a second district, Brooklyn Community District 2, which is downtown Brooklyn through Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Brooklyn Heights. That is the point that this really moves beyond a pilot and becomes a real program that New Yorkers can expect to see in their neighborhood. And the mayor has actually committed to funding this program for a full rollout by the end of 2031. [00:24:56] S4: I'm kind of curious, like, I actually don't know which, what I have right now. [00:25:01] S0: So what I have right now. [00:25:02] S2: In my- It's a damning indictment of how often you take out the trash. [00:25:05] S0: No, I take out the trash every day. But like, so the way, like- You take it to a central location, right? No, no, no.
00:25:05 · Joe Weisenthal, Joe Weisenthal, Joshua Goodman, Joshua Goodman
[00:25:05] S0: No, I take out the trash every day. But like, so the way, like- You take it to a central location, right? No, no, no. [00:25:11] S4: We have like this sort of like, I live in a building that's like four units. It's like fairly small in the East Village. And I don't just like put my trash out on the street. We have like this closed container and then I lift it up and then et cetera. Walk me through from the perspective of the sanitation worker. So what are they doing now to get that trash out of it? And then how will their day be different under the container? Like walk me through that when they're going down my block. What does it look like today and what does it look like when this is implemented? [00:25:41] S5: East Village is a great example because you'll have every kind of building within a single round there. So a sanitation worker is not servicing the container that you're describing. [00:25:53] S1: It's like up against the building wall. [00:25:55] S0: Yeah, it's up against the building. [00:25:56] S5: Someone that your landlord is paying is coming and moving the material out. [00:25:59] S1: To the curb. That's actually one of the things that we were able to build it. Well, someone is coming and moving it out. [00:26:06] S0: Our building hires this person. [00:26:07] S5: In New York City- Most buildings are required to have a professional waste manager, someone who takes the trash out. And we wanted to maintain that system because they do a lot of things and. [00:26:18] S1: Because it builds cleanliness in the neighborhood in general.
00:26:18 · Joshua Goodman, Joshua Goodman, Joe Weisenthal
[00:26:18] S1: Because it builds cleanliness in the neighborhood in general. [00:26:21] S5: So right now, those bags are coming out of your sealed container. [00:26:24] S1: They're going to the curb. [00:26:25] S5: Sanitation workers are taking them out and putting them in the back. They should be going out because you have fewer than nine units in an official NYC bin. And if they are not, you are subject to a summons as. [00:26:37] S0: Of September of this year. [00:26:41] S1: Let's slow down. [00:26:42] S5: But the trash is essentially not supposed to, from a building of your size, not supposed to sit on the ground directly anymore. [00:26:48] S1: It never does, actually. [00:26:50] S0: So it goes out in a bin. [00:26:51] S5: Sanitation workers can either tip the bin manually, or soon the trucks will have a rear tipper for the small buildings. [00:26:58] S0: Yeah, we have the real bins. [00:27:00] S1: So they.