In the bustling city, where the annual trash Super Bowl between Thanksgiving and New Year's unfolds, sanitation workers face an arduous task. Despite their efforts to beat the rats, they still have to contend with the ever-present obstacle of private car storage getting in the way of their back-breaking work. The largely free curbside parking has long presented an obstacle course for these New York's Strongest, who haul as much as 20 tons per shift in some neighborhoods.

DSNY's Containerization Program: A Step Forward or Just a Hurdle?

DSNY recently rolled out the first citywide containerization program for residential waste in half a century. Under this program, buildings with fewer than 10 units are required to have wheeled bins on the sidewalk. Owners of buildings with 10 to 30 units can choose between wheeled bins or stationary containers in the street, while complexes with 31 or more units must get the street-side variety. This regime is set to be tested 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. However, due to the city's large number of parking spaces provided to motorists at no cost, these upgrades face challenges.Experts believe that this historic shift from bags to containers offers a chance to reduce the daily strain on refuse collectors. Robin Nagle, DSNY's anthropologist-in-residence and a clinical professor at NYU, emphasizes the physical toll that the job takes on the body. "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," she says.Nagle's book "Picking Up" provides an up-close study of the department. 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 city clean. She experienced firsthand 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. "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. "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."

The "100-Ton Club" in Sanitation District 7

New York's Strongest haul an average 10 tons per shift citywide, but that varies by neighborhood. In Sanitation District 7 in Bedford Park, Bronx, workers lug a whopping 20 tons a shift, earning them 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 that in Manhattan, where cars park bumper to bumper, it's very tough to get between them. Robert Casanovas, president of the Department of Sanitation Retirees who worked 30 years in the agency, mostly as a supervisor, said, "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. This decades-old method 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. "You had to weave in and out of the equivalent of parked cars without dinging anything on the way," Nagle said.

Dedicated Space for Trash

Advocates say the answer to this issue is clawing back space from cars for better uses. Christine Berthet, the founder of the Chelsea and Hells Kitchen-based pedestrian advocacy group CHEKPEDS, said, "What they should do is reserve some parking space to put the containers, even the wheelies."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 like Paris and Vienna have long figured out ways to containerize and mechanize their collection. Clare Miflin, executive director of the Center for Zero Waste Design, said officials abroad have been baffled that 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. 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 lift them. This kills the option of allowing fewer, larger receptacles up to 96 gallons, which would mean not as many trips back and forth to the curb. " [That] would be more time efficient for them and more space efficient for bigger buildings," Miflin said.Her organization recently released a report showing how the city could provide more shared containers in the street to prevent the new bins from cluttering the sidewalk.