New York City's tradition of piling garbage bags on the sidewalk for pickup is going the way of the dinosaur. As of Friday, all 200,000 businesses in the Big Apple are required to put out their bags of trash in garbage bins, as communities across the country and world have long done. The requirement is the next phase in the city's efforts to curb what Mayor Eric Adams' administration has called a "24-hour rat buffet" of trash on sidewalks, the AP reports. The city in August started requiring restaurants, convenience stores, and bars to use a sturdy trash can with a secure lid and extended the requirement to chain stores the following month.
Now every city enterprise, including mom-and-pop shops, must comply. Then in the fall, residential buildings with nine or fewer units will fall under the mandate. Commercial trash makes up nearly half of the some 44 million pounds of refuse collected by the city each day, according to Adams, who has made combating the city's rodents a focus. City officials will issue warnings for the first month of the new mandate but will begin issuing summonses in April, Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch said Friday.
The commissioner called it "trash revolution day." "For decades, major cities around the world have been putting their trash in wheelie bins or other types of containers, and New York City just hasn't, Tisch said, per the New York Times. "It's such a basic thing for so many reasons—the look and feel of the streets, odors in the summer, the rats. We have 44 million pounds of trash on the streets every day, and then we wonder why there's a rat problem." (The city has also pushed back the time when residents and business can leave trash outside.)
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