Mayor Mamdani’s plan to litter New York City with dumpsters must be stopped
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The year is 2032. You are on a date walking down a picturesque, tree-lined street in Brooklyn. On the next block, the vibe is ruined by a standing army of fetid plastic dumpsters. Your date says, “Wow, I miss the days when there were black trash bags strewn across the sidewalk!”
Believe it or not, this will happen if we don’t stop Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s misguided Empire Bins plan.
The cure (dumpsters everywhere) will be worse than the disease. Mamdani announced this week that the “containerization” rollout is slated to wrap by 2031. This plan builds off Eric Adams’s prior “ Trash Revolution ” and “ War on the Rats ” campaigns and is meant to eliminate the weekly piles of black bags on sidewalks. According the “ Future of Trash ” report, the plans were devised with support from McKinsey, a global consulting firm famous for making things more efficient and less human. Its researchers assisted with computing volumetric analyses about the amount of trash New Yorkers set out.
The proposed dumpsters are as tall as a person and as wide as a small car. They will create a permanent wall of garbage that blocks views across the street and hides pedestrians from distracted drivers. Any residential building over 30 units will be required to use the bins, which will be administered by the. (Buildings with 10 to 30 units can opt in to participate.) It is expected to take time, as it will require changing collection routes. More importantly the move stands to ultimately eliminate around 30,000 parking spaces, or about 1.5 percent of the city’s total.
The parking is an issue that will be hotly contested, but the real problem is the aesthetics. These dumpsters —it is important to use this word, because that is what they will be in practice—will drastically alter the visual streetscape of the city.
The main problem is that these dumpsters will be on the street 24/7. Currently, trash bags are typically on the street two mornings each week, with only a handful of weekend routes. Yes, these bags smell and attract rats, but there is no guarantee that the dumpsters will fully alleviate either problem. Instead, they will introduce worse problems.
The bins will contribute to the sense of New York becoming more “ sanitized ” each day, where it is gentrified and perhaps physically cleaner but losing its character and history.
The West Harlem pilot was launched with 1,100 dumpsters in an area with no historic district designation, a set of protocols designed to protect the visual character of the streetscape. While they reduced reports of rats, they are limited as a case study. Once enacted, the Empire Bins will destroy the character of neighborhoods. We will have fewer cars and more dumpsters.
The initial images of the pilot show pristine dumpsters on a non-descript street with scaffolding. This is not an accurate depiction of New York, nor what the dumpsters will look like on a typical street, even though the plan is to power wash them regularly.
New York’s streets are entropic. Nothing here can exist without promptly getting bashed in, graffiti-ed, or splattered with swill. Trash cans in busy areas all over the city overflow regularly, with adjacent heaps of garbage piling up beside them. These dumpsters, which will be only accessible to building staff using an access card that will definitely never break, undoubtedly will face the same fate. If the bins malfunction, they stand to welcome the very rats they are meant to stave off into a Whole Foods smorgasbord of fresh, artisanal garbage.
The dumpster pilot has launched in Brooklyn’s Community District 2—home to the desirable Brooklyn Heights, Fort Greene, and Boerum Hill neighborhoods—and as expected, is overwhelming streets with the large bins. Next up will be Manhattan’s Community District 2, which includes the Greenwich Village Historic District, one of the most beloved places in the city, and the topic of much debate about preservation.
The scale of this plan cannot be underestimated. “Trash containerization” sounds more like the ultimate sanitization of New York: A layer of dumpsters will descend and usurp even the grid itself. The only “trash revolution” is the one that will make a cartoonish number of dumpsters and the trash that will inevitably surround them a defining element of the streets of New York City.
True, these Contenur dumpsters have been used in European cities. (Barcelona has had success redesigning their receptacles to be more hospitable, and some cities have chosen to sink their receptacles below grade to avoid unsightly clutter.) But Paris and Madrid have a fraction of the density of many of New York’s neighborhoods. At 8 Spruce Street (that shimmering tower designed by Frank Gehry) in Lower Manhattan, its 904 units would result in 30 to 40 bins depending on volumetric calculations laid out in “The Future of Trash.” That’s an entire city block of dumpsters, similar to the setup already installed outside Brooklyn Tech High School.
As it stands now, DSNY and DOT will determine locations of the bins, not owners or residents. Will wealthy residents on Billionaire’s Row in Midtown pay to get preferential treatment or be exempted completely? Will having the old school pile of bags overnight become a luxury amenity? And will the green spaces in NYCHA blocks become sprawling trash zones?
These dumpsters will take a toll on our psyches. It attacks the human aspects of our cities. It is becoming increasingly difficult to make a qualitative argument about the character of a place; the beauty of a street has been lost in a sea of data and flooded by optimizing arguments about unit counts or parking spots. Technocratic solutions often unintentionally make the city worse. To believe in the city is to believe that aesthetics and humanity still mean something.
Can the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) help? Established in the wake of losing the original Penn Station, LPC is meant to protect the visual character and soul of the city’s streets. According to the NYC Street Design Manual, LPC will be able to stop them in historic districts unless they are deemed “artworks.” Unfortunately as it stands now, the dumpsters are not artworks or even artful. Perhaps Mayor Mamdani could organize a design competition to rethink the dumpsters, just like he did with modular public restrooms?
What happens when these things land on beautiful streets that serve not only those who reside there, but also the strolling public? Civic “progress” comes with consequences. Have we thought through what happens to the brownstone blocks of Brooklyn Heights or the Federal rowhouses of the West Village when rows of industrial plastic containers are plunked down permanently? So far, the answer appears to be no.
Matt Shaw is a New York–based critic and author. He is the former executive editor of The Architect’s Newspaper.
This article was updated on July 31, 2026.
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