They beat the rats, but they still have to take on the cars.
As the city faces its annual trash Super Bowl — the period between Thanksgiving and New Year's — sanitation workers still have to do their back-breaking work of lifting tons of trash by hand, thanks to private car storage getting in the way.
The city's largely free curbside parking has long presented an obstacle course for the New York's Strongest, who haul as much as 20 tons per shift in some neighborhoods. But the recent shift to containerizing all the trash bags hasn't changed the basic methodology: Garbage collectors still take bags out of new containers manually when they can't maneuver around rows of vehicles, agency leaders revealed at a recent Council hearing.
"The Sanitation workers, they have two options, they can take the bags manually out of the wheelie bin ... or if there is space between cars, they can wheel the bin out," Jessica Tisch, then-DSNY commissioner, told lawmakers on Nov. 20. (Tisch has since become Police Commissioner.)
DSNY recently rolled out the first citywide containerization program for residential waste in half a century, requiring wheeled bins on the sidewalk for buildings with fewer than 10 units.
Under its future plans, owners of buildings with 10 to 30 units will be able to choose either those bins or stationary containers in the street, while complexes with 31 or more units must get the street-side variety, a regime DSNY plans to test out in one Manhattan community board starting next June.
The agency is equipping some of its roughly 2,000 rear-loaders with tippers to mechanically hoist the newly mandated wheelie bins, but because they're on the sidewalk, these upgrades will run up against the steel wall of the roughly 3 million parking spaces the city provides to motorists largely at no cost.
Car storage has for decades gotten in the way of a cleaner city. It has saddled New Yorkers with the ritual of alternate-side parking, where drivers are supposed to move their cars out of the way of DSNY's street sweepers — something motorists often ignore and simply absorb the cost of a ticket, since it can be cheaper than a garage.
Historic chance
The agency's historic shift from bags to containers offers a chance to reduce the daily strain on refuse collectors, who have one of the most dangerous jobs in the country, said experts who have studied the agency.
"The physical toll, literally the weight that the body has to bear and swing across hours and months and days and years, it’s a lot," said Robin Nagle, DSNY's anthropologist-in-residence and a clinical professor in the school of Liberal Studies at NYU.
Nagle is the author of the book "Picking Up," an up-close study of the department, for which she embedded herself in the agency and hauled trash for months to gain an on-the-ground insight into the strenuous work of keeping the Big Apple clean.
There, she experienced first-hand the wear and tear that DSNY's employees face over the course of their careers.
"Everything between my neck and my knees hurt," she remembers feeling after her first shifts. "And I was in pretty good shape at the time. I was running marathons, I was weight lifting, I was not a couch potato."
Containerization would reduce at least one of the burdens the workers face, Nagle said.
"If it could help workers get through their time in Sanitation, their 20-some-odd years, and get to the end of that and still be intact," Nagle said, "Hallelujah, let’s make it happen."
'100-Ton Club'
New York's Strongest haul an average 10 tons per shift citywide, but that varies by neighborhood, according to Nagle. One part of the Bronx, Sanitation District 7 in Bedford Park, is known as the "House of Pain" because workers there lug a whopping 20 tons a shift, she said, earning people who complete a week's work there the honor of being in the "100-Ton Club."
In denser parts of the city, drivers park bumper to bumper, leaving little room to wheel out the new cans, Sanitation workers told Streetsblog.
"In Manhattan, these cars park bumper to bumper, it’s very tough sometimes to get between these cars," said Robert Casanovas, president of the Department of Sanitation Retirees, who worked 30 years in the agency, mostly as a supervisor. "In high areas with high density and high traffic, forget about it."
Sanitation workers routinely have to throw the bags over the cars and the garbage truck driver gets out and loads them into the back of the truck, a decades-old method that remains largely unchanged as long as the city doesn't make room at the curb.
"Reaching in and pulling a bag out of a can is not much different than lifting a bag off the street," said another Sanitation worker who asked to remain anonymous. "[Parked cars are] definitely something you have to work around on a daily basis. ... It’s just something you gotta deal with."
If they can get through, they still have to worry about scraping their legs on bent license plates or knocking their knees on trailer hitches.
Training to become a Strongest even includes having to successfully drag trash around a course including car-sized obstacles in a warehouse in Queens, said Nagle.
"You had to weave in and out of the equivalent of parked cars without dinging anything on the way," she said.
Dedicated space
The answer to this issue is clawing back space from cars for better uses, advocates said, urging Sanitation officials to work with the Department of Transportation to mark sections of the streetscape to wheel out trash.
"What they should do is reserve some parking space to put the containers, even the wheelies," said Christine Berthet, the founder Chelsea and Hells Kitchen-based pedestrian advocacy group CHEKPEDS.
Berthet was part of a stunt where Manhattanites built their own guerrilla corral in the street four years ago. More recently, she partnered with DSNY on an earlier pilot to containerize rubbish collection on one Midtown block, but those bins still relied on garbage collectors pulling the bags out of them.
Other cities have long figured out ways to containerize and mechanize their collection, like Paris and Vienna, according to Clare Miflin, executive director of the Center for Zero Waste Design. Officials abroad have told the researcher they were baffled this city still expects its garbage collectors to shoulder upwards of five tons a day.
"Anywhere else I talk to, they’re amazed," Miflin said.
"It doesn’t improve labor if they’re still pulling bags out," she added. "It’s a real compromise that doesn’t solve half the problems it could."
The city's new trash rules also cap the size of the wheelie bins at 55 gallons, so workers can still reach in and lift out waste. That kills the option of allowing fewer, larger receptacles up to as big as 96 gallons, which would mean not as many trips back and forth to the curb, Miflin said.
"[That] would be more time efficient for them and more space efficient for bigger buildings," she said.
Her organization recently released a report showing how the city could provide more shared containers in the street in order to prevent the new bins from cluttering the sidewalk.
