The city handed over the largest number of coveted zones for collecting business waste to private haulers with the worst safety records — undermining a key goal of industry reform, City Comptroller Brad Lander charged on Wednesday.
The Adams administration's much-delayed changes to the way commercial trash is collected aims to rein in the chaotic carting industry by reducing reckless driving and cutting truck mileage. But Lander's office raised serious qualms about how Mayor Adams has overseen the process.
"By awarding contracts to bad actors with terrible safety records, the Department of Sanitation is undermining the goals of the program," Lander said in a statement. "The city must ... be willing to hold bad carters to higher standards to ensure this law actually improves the conditions for workers and our environment.”
New Jersey-based Action Carting had by far the most safety violations yet won the right to operate in the largest number of zones. Meanwhile, several smaller companies with zero safety infractions but did not get permits to operate in any zones, according to enforcement records reviewed for the report.
"This report shows how far we still have to go to hold these companies accountable, and how urgently we must fully implement commercial waste zones for the safety of New Yorkers," said Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, who drafted the law mandating the overhauls as a Council member.
The program legislated by the Council in late 2019 divided the city into 20 zones to better regulate an industry where as many as 50 different companies served one neighborhood, and truck operators drove around recklessly under pressures to collect from large areas.
DSNY in early 2024 finally picked 18 companies to operate in all the zones, opting to phase them in, starting with central Queens this year, two more zones in the Bronx this November, and citywide coverage expected by the end of 2027.
The agency blamed the setbacks on the Covid-19 pandemic, but the delays allowed for the industry to continue wreaking havoc on the city's streets for years.
The companies chosen to operate in many of the zones had poor records on safety, despite DSNY reviewing four years of data before awarding the contracts, according to the report.
Violations included behavior like illegal backing up, U-turns, violating traffic signals, speeding, wrong-way driving and blocking bike and pedestrian spaces, according to enforcement records by the NYPD and the private carting watchdog agency known as the Business Integrity Commission.
Private carting has long been synonymous with reckless driving in general, as the comptroller's report once again showcases with the baffling statistic that 31 applicants logged safety violations out of the 34 companies that DSNY considered for the zones, or 91 percent. They collectively counted nearly 5,500 infractions between 2018 and 2022, but some operators stood out even among this checkered field of candidates.
Action Carting racked up a whopping 1,924 violations before being selected – more than one infraction a day, and nearly four times as many as the next highest offender, Waste Connections of New York, which logged 494 violations.
Yet those companies were awarded 14 and 12 zones, respectively, at least double the amount of any other firm.
Overall, the 18 awardees faced a raft of civil litigation, with 159 complaints about crashes and injuries involving a carter vehicle. The two top safety violators also ranked highest for the number of labor violations.
A driver for Action Carting killed cyclist Neftaly Ramirez in Greenpoint in 2017, and the report slammed the company's track record as "egregious," questioning whether traffic safety played any role in choosing the awardees.
"Action Carting’s violations history is particularly egregious, outstripping Waste Connections by nearly four times, and outstripping many others exponentially," reads the report. "The auditors found no evidence that the carters’ violation histories were a significant variable in determining their suitability for the program."
Three carters — Rubicon Global, Kings County Carting Corp., and 1 Take All Corp, — had no safety violations at all, but none was approved for the Commercial Waste Zone program. Those companies, however, also had very few staff or trucks, the report notes, while Action is a giant in the industry, second only to New York Recycling Solutions in workforce and fleet.
Companies could also hire up to two subcontractors to cover their zones, and the 15 subcontractors that signed on also have a collective 1,490 violations over the same period, with three companies accounting for nearly 70 percent of those, Century Waste Services, Metropolitan Paper Recycling, and Winters Bros. Waste Systems Of NYC.
The city gave more weight to the size of the companies and how much they planned to charge their customers.
DSNY argued in a response that they wanted to put "greater emphasis on affordability," according to the report, to prevent what happened with the troubled rollout of a similar initiative in Los Angeles, California, where prices skyrocketed and businesses suffered delays in trash collection.
The agency has complied with the Council's law and is working to meet its purposes, according to the report. New York's Strongest wrote in their response that they require carters to equip their trucks with GPS telematics sensors so officials can monitor safety information and vehicle miles traveled in real time, and that all vehicles will have to have backup cameras by January 2026.
DSNY spokesperson Vincent Gragnani emphasized in an email that the issues with contractors predate the reforms that are designed to address them. Gragnani noted that the agency issued fewer safety violations in the first zone in Queens since it kicked in at the beginning of the year. Sanitation enforcers gave out 91 notices of violation over the last eight months, compared to 156 in just the four months leading up to the change at the end of 2024.
The rep noted that larger companies have more "exposure to enforcement," but also a greater capacity to operate in a large number of zones.
"Carters with the largest fleet would have the greatest exposure to enforcement and higher capacity to serve more zones, while conversely, carters with smaller fleets would have lower exposure to enforcement and a lower capacity to server fewer zones," Gragnani said. "That said, all awarded carters would be held to the same standards and safety obligations and would be subject to strict oversight and steep penalties for failing to comply, including the establishment of monitorships in cases where risk warranted closer review and scrutiny."
