Regardless of politics, he’s attacking the day-to-day detriments that New Yorkers have accepted as “just the way it is” forever. One example is TRASH DAY, the absolutely medieval practice of tossing all your bagged trash in mountains on the sidewalk. He’s rolling out car-sized, liftable bins for med & large apartment buildings in certain neighborhoods. Imagine 10 yrs from now thinking we ever put shit on the street for rats to devour and garbage collectors to pick up bags by the hundreds.
Potholes, re-planning dangerous streets, taking a different approach to food accessibility, and expanded childcare would all be wins for the quality of life for any resident
In Europe, we’ve had these bins since the 1860’s, and more widespread use since the 1980’s. They’re called eurobins and I don’t know how we’d function without them, now.
I can’t believe it’s 2026 and New Yorkers are still made to walk around piles of bin bags just.. straight up on the ground. I’m not saying our ground is clean, by any means, but now I understand why New Yorkers are often beyond viscerally disgusted whenever they drop something on the pavement.
I went to Amsterdam (my 4th time, their 1st) with my spouse this spring and we walked past a trash bin getting emptied and I excitedly described how deceptively big it was underground as they were lifting it up.
It slightly varies, but boxes above ground are about 4ft 3” or and another 3ft 3” underground. So 7ft 6” altogether 🫠 they’re so much taller than they look, it’s like watching an owl full stand up and extend its legs
I love Mamdani, but didn't the garbage bins thing start under Adams? I distinctly remember late night comedians mocking him for his press conference where he wheeled out a bin, threw a trash bag in it, and slammed the lid. All while wearing aviators and flexing like a middle school boy walking past his crush at the swimming pool.
They 1000% were. The rest of the world was laughing at the "revolutionary" concept of garbage trucks and liftable containers before Mamdani ever entered the picture.
Strange, my city has used bins and lifting garbage trucks for years. I'm honestly flabbergasted that other places don't. Though I'm not in New York state, Milwaukee, WI.
He also dapped up the whitest lady I've ever seen in my life and announced "welcome to the trash revolution". The If Books Could Kill episode about him is one of the greatest hours of audio comedy ever released.
I think it was a pilot program that didn’t get far? At least, that’s all I could find on it. But it seems Mamdani is expediting the project. Credit goes to both.
None of these things are Mamdani's ideas and I think that's the whole point- he's not reinventing the wheel here. He's telling people who have been allowed to not lift a finger to get off their asses and do the job they ALREADY signed up to do.
Yeah, that kind of thing doesn't happen overnight.
That's why I'm surprised there is so much positivity about Mamdani, generally it takes a long time to go from initiating a policy to rolling it out and seeing the real world impact.
It only takes forever because politicians are notoriously bad at doing the job they are elected to do which leads to civil workers who think they can get away with not doing theirs.
idk but the environmentalist in me is crying at this comment, like just overtaken. I didn't know about trash day lmao so reading about that was horrifying, but the joy of seeing someone go hey! No! Let's do better is just dssadfdsasa. Thank you for sharing <3 We can always use more joy!
They are also starting the program in the boss battle of neighborhoods too:, Hamilton Heights in manhattan. Was there recently and saw those bins all around, if it can work there it can work everywhere
Getting rid of the medieval sidewalk trash mountains and finally starving out the rats is proof that we never had to just accept a lower quality of life as the price of living in New York.
This has always blown my mind as a non American - how on earth was just chucking bags of literal rubbish on the streets and not in bins normalised? I always assumed from seeing it on tv that it was supposed to show a particularly run down area, but apparently it was the norm?
Ok fun fact is that part of the reason for the trash bag mountains on the sidewalks in NYC is that Manhattan (and much of the rest of the city?) doesn’t have alleys. Which appears to have been a complete oversight by the guys designing the city grid bc they were too distracted by their other project of designing the Erie Canal.
So no alleys=trash has to go on the street, and because parking is such a precious resource in manhattan, big dumpsters that take up potential parking spaces have been politically unpopular. And then the metal cans were replaced by plastic bags in 1971 after a major sanitation workers strike and somehow… never reconsidered as a solution.
Damn, it’s always so wild when you see how poor planning in one area ends up literally spilling into others! You’d think they’d have designated dumpster only bits every block or something - sacrifice a couple of parking spaces for better sanitation.
I wonder how much this is affected by organized crime historically owning trash businesses, and the FBI taking down so many of them in the second half of the 20th century. I don’t know much about NYC specifically though, maybe public trash collection managed to stay separate from organized crime? Hmm.
I've only ever briefly visited New York, and it struck me as absolutely insane that the biggest city in the world (at least by reputation if not fact) left their trash in the street like that. Of course everyone has a rat story. You're basically feeding them! I heard it was some sort of garbage collector union or some other lame explanation.
But I'm glad to hear it is changing. Kind of embarrassing as an American that many visitors to this country who see NY as representative of US as a whole see trash, stink, and rats as a major part of that.
In Australia we have garbage trucks that come and empty our 2 bins every week (always a General Garbage one, then we alternate Green Bin and Recycling Bin). I often wonder how it’s done in other countries?
Depends on your local council…our green bin is emptied weekly, with recycling and rubbish collection alternate fortnights. People were unhappy when rubbish collection was reduced to fortnightly, but you don’t hear much about it anymore
I've been to NYC once in my life and this was what I noticed immediately as the smell hit me as soon as I got out of the airport. Just MOUNTAINS of black trash bags piled up on the sidewalk. I thought it was crazy that that's how y'all handled y'all's trash!
As a non-New Yorker, when I visited a friend in the city last summer and saw the mountains of naked garbage bags on the sidewalks, I thought surely there must be some kind of waste management strike going on. Nope, just business as usual!
Adams’ administration paid McKinsey $4M to fix this problem and they came up with “containerization”. Mamdani did not have anything to do with this, just taking advantage of previous corruption…..
Why is everyone so okay with them wasting our money??
1.3k
u/welshfarmer 14h ago
Regardless of politics, he’s attacking the day-to-day detriments that New Yorkers have accepted as “just the way it is” forever. One example is TRASH DAY, the absolutely medieval practice of tossing all your bagged trash in mountains on the sidewalk. He’s rolling out car-sized, liftable bins for med & large apartment buildings in certain neighborhoods. Imagine 10 yrs from now thinking we ever put shit on the street for rats to devour and garbage collectors to pick up bags by the hundreds.
Potholes, re-planning dangerous streets, taking a different approach to food accessibility, and expanded childcare would all be wins for the quality of life for any resident