By Steven Cohen, Ph.D., Director of the M.S. in Sustainability Management program, School of Professional Studies
The city’s rats are against them, as are people trying to park their cars on the streets, but containerized garbage bins will soon be visible throughout New York City. We already have them in Morningside Heights, and they have eliminated the mountains of plastic garbage bags piled high on our sidewalks and streets on garbage pick-up days. Many of those bags, filled with food, were easily opened by rats and even raccoons, who once proliferated but are now less visible in my home neighborhood. This success story will gradually spread throughout the five boroughs. According to Liam Quigley of the Gothamist:
“Large trash bins will soon dot the curb across New York City, replacing piles of garbage bags that have blocked sidewalks for decades. Mayor Zohran Mamdani said Friday that the city will roll out the Spanish-made Empire Bins for the first time in the Bronx, Staten Island and Queens, and expand their use in Manhattan and Brooklyn, by the end of 2027. The move represents a major expansion of a program first implemented in Manhattan last year by former Mayor Eric Adams. The bins are serviced by specially made garbage trucks that have a system to lift the bins into their compactors. City officials say they have led to a significant reduction in rat sightings in West Harlem, where residents already use roughly 1,100 of the bins. Mamdani said the city will deploy more than 6,500 bins in the planned expansion, which will be mandatory for residential buildings with 30 or more units. Sanitation officials have said the bins could one day replace thousands of the city’s parking spots… The bins can only be opened by building staff with a keycard, or by sanitation workers. Side-loading garbage trucks pull up to the bins and dump their contents into the compactor, avoiding the need for sanitation workers to heave trash bags from the curb and around parked cars.”
Modernizing residential waste collection is a necessary but not sufficient piece of bringing New York City’s non-commercial waste management into the 21st century. Our larger problem is that we only manage to divert 21.8% of our waste from landfills. Of the waste diverted, about one-third is burned in waste-to-energy plants located outside of the city. Since the start of the 21st century and the closing of Staten Island’s Freshkills Landfill, nearly all of our waste has been disposed of outside of New York City. The only exception is some organic waste that we manage to use locally for compost or methane. In fiscal 2025, we spent about $1.7 billion on disposal and about $700 million on recycling. Over half of the garbage collected by the Sanitation Department ends up in landfills in Virginia and South Carolina, and most of our waste exports (86%) are shipped by rail. In addition to these southern states, some of our waste is dumped in upstate New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
According to New York City’s 2026 Solid Waste Management Plan, the Sanitation Department only deals with about a third of the city’s garbage. The plan notes that:
“New York City’s solid waste comes from many sources. About one-third of that waste (36% in 2023) is publicly managed. Most of the publicly managed waste (28% of the total waste stream) is MSW [municipal solid waste], recycling, and organics collected from residents. The remaining amount of publicly managed waste is generated by the private sector, or both private and public sectors, and managed by the public sector. This includes biosolids from wastewater treatment, recycled asphalt pavement and concrete aggregate, and yard waste from private contractors. In 2023, 48% of the city’s waste was classified as commercial/industrial, which includes C&D [construction and demolition] debris and fill, scrap metal and automotive waste, and privately managed special waste such as used oil and medical waste. C&D debris and fill (soil and rock) account for 40% of the city’s waste generation…”
If New York City is to develop into a sustainable city, it needs to begin to develop a much longer-term plan for waste management. The cost of exporting waste will increase over time, and as land gets scarcer, communities will start resisting siting new dump sites. In the coming decades, waste disposal outside the city will become even more expensive and difficult to manage than it is today. Land in New York City is far too expensive to site new landfills, and even waste transfer and waste-to-energy facilities are impossible to site within the five boroughs. In 2023, I wrote that:
“To achieve environmental sustainability, we will eventually need to use most of what we now call waste as raw materials for new products. The implementation of a circular economy—where all materials are reused, and there is no waste—is essential to the future of our species and our planet. Recycling is a building block on the road to a circular economy, but as important as it is as a first step, it is deeply flawed as a long-term solution. As a first step, it educates the public about waste and its potential reuse, and it can reduce the volume of waste that is dumped in our landfills. The problem though is that recycling rates tend to be low in the United States, and the market for the waste we recover is unstable. The long-term answer is an automated system of waste management that uses artificial intelligence and automation to sort waste and mine it for resources. That technology is under development, but the capital to pay for these facilities and the political noise that must be addressed to site them make waste mining a long-term solution. The idea is that some of the capital cost of waste facilities could be recovered by generating a revenue stream for resources mined from the waste stream. This would also require an organizational effort to market the products of waste, likely a private firm with experience in mining and marketing raw materials. Sanitation departments are not known for expertise in sales and marketing.”
The City spends about $500 million a year on exporting solid waste. Those funds might be used to capitalize a waste mining operation, possibly located on an island we might construct in New York’s harbor. The city would not face too much Not in My Backyard (NIMBY) opposition to siting such a facility, and the city’s five existing marine waste transfer stations could be used to barge the waste out to “garbage island.” If the resources recovered prove valuable enough, the cost of financing and operating the facility might someday be liberated from taxpayer support.
Like many issues faced by city government, merely coping with the present makes it difficult, if not impossible, to push a vision for the long-term future. Consider the difficulty we now face in containerizing residential waste management and eliminating the world of leaking plastic bags, lifted by New York’s Strongest. We know that automation can do the same job, and we could come up with a new motto for the department, like “New Yorkers smart enough to let machines haul the garbage.” Maybe shorten it to “New York’s Smartest.” The lost parking spaces will be an issue in a city that is making middle-class auto ownership more and more difficult. There are parts of the city where mass transit is inconvenient and off-street parking is either expensive or unavailable. Still, if we are ever going to modernize waste transport and disposal, it really must start with automated waste collection.
A massive waste management factory could include methods to mine waste for resources, including metals, rare earth minerals, fertilizer, methane, and other valuable raw materials. It could also include a non-air polluting closed system waste-to-energy plant, and a facility that used whatever remained from the waste stream as a building material. Some of these technologies now exist, and with advances in artificial intelligence and robotics, more are on the way. New York City has the size and scale to lead this endeavor, perhaps a decade from now. Imagine if our waste generated revenue instead of costing $2 billion dollars of expense each year.
Views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Columbia School of Professional Studies or Columbia University.
About the Program
The Columbia University M.S. in Sustainability Management program offered by the School of Professional Studies in partnership with the Climate School provides students cutting-edge policy and management tools they can use to help public and private organizations and governments address environmental impacts and risks, pollution control, and remediation to achieve sustainability. The program is customized for working professionals and is offered as both a full- and part-time course of study.
