New York City rolls out new, sleeker waste bins

New York City is rolling out its latest weapon in combatting trash—a new waste receptacle that will replace the green mesh litter baskets currently seen around the city. The three-part bin has a concrete base (making it tough to tip over), a hinged metal lid and a removable plastic basket.

“The wire litter baskets are iconic, but they are well past their useful life in New York City,” Jessica Tisch, the city’s sanitation commissioner, tells The New York Times. “They are vestiges of a different time.”

Tisch notes that the wire baskets were made up of a series of holes: “That’s the fundamental design feature which allows the rats to get in them,” she says.

The new trash cans, alongside efforts to require certain residences and businesses to put their garbage on the streets in containers and to mandate composting, are part of a broad push to clean up the city.

There are 22,000 litter baskets on the streets of New York City and the plan is, over time, to replace all of them with what Tisch calls “new, more modern litter basket of the future.”

As reported by The New York Times, this is not the first time New York City has attempted to revolutionize street trash.

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The city held a litter basket design contest in 1930 and stated that the baskets “would serve as the emblem of their work for outdoor cleanliness and would tend to make every citizen ‘litter conscious.’”

In 1951, the city experimented with wire mesh baskets—and in 1956, a giant wire wastebasket was placed in Times Square. It was regularly filled with detritus swept from the street, and a sign affixed to the bin read: “This litter belongs to you.”

In 2002, the city put out newer, lighter wire models, and the green mesh Corcraft baskets became emblematic of New York.

The new 2023 basket started with a design competition, launched in 2018. A winner was announced in 2019. However, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, a transition to a new mayor and other events, the rollout of new baskets took a pause.

The Department of Sanitation (DSNY) has since tweaked the design from the contest, making the basket bigger, adding a coating of graffiti-resistant paint, and moving the perforations up higher to deter rats.

Three hundred baskets are part of the first phase of the replacement plan, but another thousand are on the way. The city will order more in the months to come.