With its new, later trash set-out times, the city’s sanitation department is aiming to “send rats packing!”
But building managers are scrambling to comply — and grousing about the new rules.
As of April 1, buildings must put their trash bags out for collection four hours later — 8 p.m. rather than 4 p.m. The change is meant to curb rats’ food supply.
But the change portends costly staffing and scheduling problems.
“How many porters and supers are working until 8 p.m. on a regular basis?” said Mark Elman, senior vice president of Citadel Property Management. “Are they supposed to go home and come back? Do you have to pay overtime for the existing staff or hire a second person just to do the trash?”
Property managers aren’t convinced the four-hour difference will even make a dent in the rat population.
“Rats still have eight-plus hours to get their food,” said Michael Rothschild, president of management firm AJ Clarke. “They will just be that much hungrier.”
The change will likely hit hardest at small buildings without a live-in super.
“Everything is going to get worse,” said Jose Rodriguez, a super who tends a handful of small buildings in different locations, from the East Village to the Upper East Side. “I can’t stick around and wait until 8 p.m. to take out the trash.”
He lives in The Bronx and drives to work.
“I am part-time in every building, but when they need me, I am there,” he said. If he has an early ConEd inspection, for instance, extending his hours to accommodate the new trash rules could have him working 14 hours a day.
If a super can’t start taking the trash out until 8 p.m., “a two-hour job would be done at 10 p.m., and he still has to travel home,” said Elman, Rodriguez’s boss.
Rodriguez fears he will need to store trash indoors as he struggles to rearrange his schedule.
“I am scared that rodents are going to be coming into my buildings,” he said.
Live-in supers expect problems, too. Victor Landeta lives in his 74-unit co-op building near Pelham Parkway in The Bronx. The change will force him to regularly work outside of his designated work hours, which he does anyway in an emergency.
The rules allow for set-out at an earlier hour — 6 p.m. — if the trash is enclosed in a tightly lidded bin.
But not all buildings have enough space.
“We would need a dozen bins to hold our garbage, especially when there is no collection on holidays and the garbage piles up,” Landeta said. “On heavy snow days they usually cancel collection. It never stops — there’s always garbage.”
Bins are impractical for buildings with stairs, too. Landeta and his porter handle up to 40 trash bags on recycling day, hauling it up a ramp with a hand truck.
And if a super shifts his hours toward the night, who will bring the lidded bins back in the next morning?
“This is going to be the best for people who do crimes in the street,” Rodriguez said. “They can grab a van and steal 100 buckets a day.”
The rules will likely drive up costs for co-ops, which is a concern for David Capaldo, president of his 140-unit Bay Ridge co-op, which employs one live-in super and one live-out porter.
The new rules are a “big burden,” he said. “Every co-op has a budget for trash pickup.”
His building might have to hire someone or change the porter’s hours. Or the super will need to interrupt dinner with his family to “run downstairs to spend two hours throwing the garbage out,” Capaldo said. “The super will want to be compensated for a mid-evening two-hour shift.”
After a one-month grace period, fines for setting out the trash too early will be $50 for the first offense, $100 for the second, and $200 thereafter.
Will the new, later set-out times actually help?
Rats have so far proven to be invincible. The city’s rat population has surged in recent years, possibly because of the feasts provided by outdoor dining sheds or the constant construction that drives them from their hidey-holes.
“Fighting crime, fighting inequality, fighting rats is something that we are focused on,” Mayor Eric Adams declared at a press conference last fall when he announced the new trash times, saying that they constituted a “once-in-a-generation change.”
Speaking metaphorically, the rat-hating mayor proclaimed that “there are many rivers that are feeding the sea of rodents in this city, and today we’re damming one of them.”
The city is expected to soon announce its new rat czar — or “director of rodent mitigation” — whose difficult mandate is to shrink the rodent population.
Pest-control experts agree that limiting the rat-food supply is key — and the sanitation department insists that “this drastic reduction in the time that trash sits on our curbs” will reduce the food supply, according to a spokesman.
But it’s not clear that the nocturnal critters — who can gnaw through plastic — won’t just chow down a few hours later. There has been little scientific research on urban rats.
“Rats will quickly chew through bags of garbage left on the street,” said entomologist Jim Fredericks, spokesman for the National Pest Management Association, “so we encourage businesses and individuals to utilize tightly sealed trash containers to keep rats from being able to access food.”
As for widespread containerization, Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch noted last fall that was “a really difficult thing to do,” and required further study about the frequency of collection, the size of containers and the need for trucks that could hoist them.
Keeping lids secure is another challenge. “My neighbors seem incapable of keeping the lids on,” said one Upper West Sider living in a small walkup with three bins beneath a front stoop.
“The lids on our bins are often loose,” she said, “even on the rare occasions when the trash is not overflowing.”
Buildings with nine or more units have an earlybird option. They can set out their trash in the wee hours of 4 a.m. to 7 a.m. — but they must wait until January to opt in so that DSNY has time to plan its routes.
The old 4 p.m. set-out time was “the earliest of any major city,” a DSNY spokesman said. “It is not acceptable that New Yorkers need to navigate around 24 million pounds of trash that goes to the curb just as pedestrian rush-hour begins.”