With the city\u2019s bumpy return to life in the third year of the pandemic, comes the resurgence of street trash cans with piles of garbage spilling out \u2014 and city leaders are pushing the Adams administration to address the issue.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe second things started to turn around, we were back to overflowing garbage cans,\u201d said Andrew Fine, the Vice President of the East 86th Street Association on the Upper East Side.<\/p>\n
Council Member Erik Bottcher and other elected officials in Manhattan recently sent a letter to the city calling for the restoration of slashed funding<\/a> to the Department of Sanitation so that street cans can be picked up more frequently, street sweeping returned to twice-a-week in residential neighborhoods, and a faster rollout of the composting program<\/a>.<\/p>\n Bottcher, who represents a tourist-heavy district including Chelsea, Times Square, and Hell\u2019s Kitchen, said he hears many constituents complaining about streets filled with garbage especially after former Mayor Bill de Blasio cut more than $106 million in funding to sanitation amid the pandemic\u2019s financial blow to city coffers.<\/p>\n \u201cWe get a lot of foot traffic both from tourists, to office workers, to New Yorkers from elsewhere in the city \u2013 particularly on the weekends with tourists and visitors from elsewhere in the city,” Bottcher said. \u201cAnd when people walk around, they put trash in the corner baskets. And what we’ve seen is that the number of pickups aren’t frequent enough to keep up with the amount of trash that’s being put in those baskets.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cPeople get really bothered by overflowing baskets,\u201d Bottcher added. \u201cThere’s a certain amount of understanding that sometimes they’re just going to overflow \u2013 that’s life, things happen. But when it’s chronic, and when it’s a daily occurrence, that’s not acceptable to people.\u201d<\/p>\n According to Bottcher, before the pandemic, Manhattan was served by an average of 736 Sanitation trucks. In 2020, that was cut to 272 trucks \u2014 and service is currently still lower than normal, with 440 trucks working in the borough.<\/p>\n A sanitation department spokesperson said the street cans are cleaned and districts seeing heavier volume can lobby their council members to pay for additional pickups with their discretionary budget.<\/p>\n \u201cAll litter baskets across the city are serviced regularly \u2014 some even multiple times per day \u2014 and we are grateful to Council Members who allocate discretionary funds for additional pickup,\u201d said spokesperson Vincent Gragnani in an email statement. \u201cThe Department of Sanitation is proud of our work removing 12,000 tons of trash and recycling every day to keep our city safe and clean, including during the worst days of the pandemic.”<\/p>\n Bottcher said the discretionary funds each Council member receives are nowhere close to the millions of dollars he\u2019s asking the city to return to the sanitation budget. Bottcher is also pushing the city to resume twice-weekly residential street sweepings, and to fast-track the return of the compost program that was suspended by the pandemic.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople are putting their food scraps in the trash that they put out on the sidewalk, the landfill-bound trash. And that’s one of the things that’s contributing to the rat problem<\/a>, because when you put the trash out on the sidewalk for several hours on trash collection night, oftentimes for a whole night, that’s like putting a buffet out for the rodents,\u201d Bottcher said.<\/p>\n Having the sealed compost bins available across the whole city will eliminate much of the rats\u2019 food source, he said.<\/p>\n \u201cOnce snow season<\/a> wraps up, we plan to continue to expand our curbside organics collection to new Community Board districts, based on signup data from interested residents,\u201d Gragnani of the sanitation department said.<\/p>\n Fine, the Upper East Side resident, said his organization has successfully lobbied to add additional street cans in the middle of the long stretches of the East 86th Street commercial corridor.<\/p>\n \u201cBy giving people the option to put garbage somewhere, we’re actually seeing a really nice reduction in the amount of garbage that is just ending up on the street,\u201d Fine said.<\/p>\n \u201cCleaner streets beget cleaner streets,\u201d Fine added. \u201cWhen somebody sees a clean street, they’re more reluctant to litter than if the place is a pigsty. So I feel like the more effort we put into it, the more the return is.\u201d<\/p>\n