Message from the Borough President BROOKLYN-USA.ORG Talking Trash
A message from Brooklyn Borough President Eric L. Adams
Borough President Adams addresses trash collection concerns during a walk-through in Sunset Park in September.
Borough President’s Offi ce/Evan Burr
ONE BROOKLYN | FALL 2019 3
From the ubiquitous plastic bags that
fl utter through the breeze and get
caught in tree branches, to trash
bins overfl owing with coffee cups, to
the proliferation of rat colonies that terrorize
families, it’s hard to deny Brooklyn’s
garbage problem is getting out of
hand.
The sight of litter and garbage bags
piled up on sidewalks has become so
common that it’s even spawned a viral
haswhtag: #trashcity. It speaks to the
City’s failure to develop a comprehensive
strategy to mitigate our sanitation
problems.
Trash is an inescapable fact of life in
a borough and a city as big as ours. According
to the most recent Waste Characterization
study by the Department
of Sanitation (DSNY), in 2017 New Yorkers
discarded on average 25 pounds of
waste per week - 16 of those at home,
and 9 at work. As a whole, the Department
of Sanitation picks up 14 million
tons of waste each year. And that only
accounts for half of the city’s total: the
other half, which is comprised of commercial
waste, is handled by private
carting companies.
We have made important strides
in reducing the waste we send to landfi
lls in recent years. The DSNY’s Waste
Characterization Study also found
that between 2005 and 2017, the overall
quantity of residential waste decreased
from 3.5 million tons per year to 3.1 million
tons - a signifi cant reduction. That
is thanks in part to our increasingly
digital world, which cuts down on the
amount of paper we use, and the expansion
of the curbside organics program,
which serves 3.5 million residents in
the fi ve boroughs and counting, among
other advances we’ve made.
Still, garbage remains a major issue
in Brooklyn, particularly in lowincome
communities, many of whom
have raised concerns about how trash
piles up on their sidewalks. That’s why
I started conducting walk-throughs
with local businesses and community
leaders in neighborhoods like Borough
Park, Canarsie, and Sunset Park.
During these walk-throughs, members
of the community raised several
issues to me that they believe are contributing
to the problem - from irregular
pick-up schedules to unclear signage
on how to dispose of certain items
properly. Every community, of course,
has its own set of challenges. But a common
theme is that the DSNY is simply
not doing enough to keep our streets
clean and garbage-free. In fact, in some
cases they’re actually making it worse.
To take a simple example, Eighth
Avenue in Sunset Park is a popular
commercial corridor, located in the
heart of Brooklyn’s Chinatown, with a
variety of businesses and around-theclock
activity. Not surprisingly, it produces
a lot of waste each day. But there
aren’t trash cans placed on each corner,
as there should be, which makes
garbage accumulate quickly in the limited
number of receptacles along the
avenue. One business owner I spoke to
said most cans fi ll up by noon - so by
the evening, they are usually overfl owing.
That means more litter, and more
quality-of-life issues for businesses and
residents alike. It also causes economic
hardship for the community: potential
customers are less likely to visit a business
district if most of the streets are
strewn with trash.
There are some obvious fi xes to
remedy this situation: add more trash
cans to fi ll the gaps, or increase the
frequency of pickups. Instead, DSNY
chooses to blame residents and businesses
for improperly disposing of
their waste. This mutual fi nger-pointing
while trash continues to pile up on
our streets gets us nowhere. While the
Council is currently debating reforms
to the Commercial Waste Zones, the
City can take immediate action to improve
responsiveness and cleanliness.
Solving our garbage woes starts
with a more responsive Sanitation
Department that is actually committed
to resolving our issues, instead
of dismissing them. We should create
a real-time model for monitoring,
predicting, and responding to garbage
complaints - similar in nature
to CompStat, the program that transformed
policing in the ‘90’s and made
New York the safest big city in America.
If we can predict when certain areas
of the city will experience garbage
problems, we can address problems
before they arise, just like we did in
the police department.
There are other, outside-the-box
ideas we should consider when it comes
to making our streets litter-free. Why
not “Adopt-a-Trash-Bin,” where businesses
pay a fee to put their names on
the receptacle closest to their location?
Or we could simply give store-owners
free garbage bags so they could empty
out the cans when they fi ll up. We also
have to expand our organics recycling
program to divert food waste from
landfi lls. And though it may seem like
a trivial change, we have to transition
away from mesh garbage baskets on
our streets, which don’t contain mess
so much as they diffuse it, attracting
rodents and other pests.
For too long, trash in our city has
seemed like an intractable problem.
We used to think about crime the same
way. But the walk-throughs we’ve done
in recent months have shown that
there are ways to deal with the garbage
bags lining our streets. And Brooklyn
is ready to lead the way.
/BROOKLYN-USA.ORG