The design looks like it ticks some of the requirement boxes. But from my time in NYC I see two primary problems: 1) the garbage crew literally throw the cans. Can plastic withstand a daily beating of being thrown against concrete? 2) the garbage cans often find new spots on the same corner when it’s convenient for the garbage crew to just put it there. Are they really going to spend time putting the interior containers back in their holders?
They throw the cans because they're heavy steel monsters weighing 30 lbs or 13.6 kg. One thing I learned being in a family business that dealt with portable entertainment, the heavier something is the less tolerance a person has for being gentle with it. They're mad that the object is heavy so they take it out on it by banging it down or tossing it because "screw you, you heavy piece of crap!" A lighter pail will be less of a burden and the worker hopefully won't be as annoyed with it.
Thankfully they throw them into the truck. But the same heavy thing problem applies with bags too. A bag of wet restaurant trash can weigh upward of 50 lbs or 22.6 kg. And of course do you think all business owners buy strong quality trash bags? Half of them are ripped before they even make it to the curb and the rest are torn up by rats. Trash workers can't help these things. I worked with a small trash compactor company and owners skimping on bag quality was an issue.
I'm strictly referring to residential trash, often in half filled bags. My experience observing this is limited to a few neighborhoods, but I regularly see it in Crown Heights and Prospect Heights. The workers there often carelessly toss around bags and leave large piles of loose trash on the sidewalks that then sits there for weeks at a time. Surely the city/building owners/business have a role to play, but let's not pretend that the trash workers are all doing a great job.
Ideally the city would require stand bins that could be lifted by an arm on the truck (like many other cities in the US).
When you get above a few kilograms there's also a biomechanical issue - the same reason the world record for clean and jerk is much higher than the world record for bicep curls, despite moving the weight a lot further.
Lifting something from waist height to chin height quickly, using big leg muscles to give it momentum, is easier than lifting it slowly using only arm muscles.
And nobody lifting 10kg trash bags for 8 hours a day is doing it the difficult way :)
You joke? but go to Japan. They don’t even toss their cigarette butts (the smokers I saw carried a sealable ashtray) and when I asked how everyone could be so clean, they looked at me funny and said “Uh, we live here? Do you throw trash on the ground at home”
So no next-gen needed, just need to live somewhere it's not culturally acceptable to throw trash on the ground.
You can walk around just about any city in my state and see no trash on the ground. Even homeless camps tend to be cleanish. The only place you’ll find trash is the occasional rural road where some asshat has thrown their house garbage in a ditch to spread in the wind. But most people have agreed not to shit on their floor.
Wonder why places like New York City are so different.
Not sure what state you're in, but in every major city I've visited in the Midwest (and in SF, Seattle, San Jose, Denver, etc.) I've always seen some areas in the city where litter is everywhere, often collecting against fences and curbs.
Tourist/more HCOL areas are often very clean, though.
New York has been dirty for hundreds of years, often with organized crime or corruption involved. Read about the 1890s turnaround of the sanitation department for some interesting history.
But, despite that I think it's totally fixible. Either just change the law to force setting aside some ground floor real estate, or put bins where parked cars used to be. I think the latter is more politically feasible.
Nobody likes the filth, but the litter won't stop until the buildings lead the way with the bulk of the problem.
Oh, and I think food delivery caused tons of pointless trash. We need some system to return reusable containers to the restaurants. Very sad their is a restaurant loophole for the new plastic bag ban.
That food delivery thing is an interesting idea. Delivery place switches to reusable sturdy containers. When delivering the delivery guy asks if the people have old containers to return and takes them. They're washed back at the restaurant.
It's a tough sell though. A lot more work for the restaurant and almost certainly higher costs. There will be constant shrinkage of the reusable containers to deal with as well as having to pay someone to wash them.
It would probably work best if the containers were generic and everybody used the same ones, so no matter who you ordered from this time you could return your containers from last time. But that's an even harder sell: why pass up the opportunity for advertising?
I still like the idea, but acknowledge that it would probably struggle to gain traction in the real world.
You just gotta tax the externalizes. Markets don't care unless you make them. The City needs to just make the ban/tax and trust that the private sector can stop moping and figure it out.
These are the public trash cans that live on the corner? Okay, I mean, it doesn't hurt, but this city has a massive rat problem, and they're still not doing anything about the mountains of trash outside commercial buildings in piles on the sidewalk.
> It does not mean this is the only thing they are working on.
It doesn't mean this is the only thing they're working on. Nevertheless it is a fact that they're not working on solving the underlying problem. They are working on marginally better traps that don't actually reduce the population effectively.
> “New Yorkers need to understand that they have a role in stopping this,” said [Professor Munshi-South of Fordham University Department of Biological Sciences]. “I don’t believe we have built in a right culture of how to dispose of our garbage. People have not made the connection between what your neighbors are doing with their garbage, and how this feeds the problem.”
Commercial buildings?
The issue would very much exist for residential buildings(especially Brooklyn) even if the commercial building did not put out their trash on the sidewalk so that would not solve the rat issue.
What proposal do you have in mind for the city to solve this?
It isn't incumbent upon me to solve a public health crisis for the city before I comment on its existence and the official attitude of neglect towards the problem.
To your points, most brownstones in, say, Park Slope, do have bins in their yard, and the trash collectors remove waste from that bin. This is at least marginal rat resistance. Midrise buildings that are further out than that will have room for dumpsters if they are required.
(Multi-family apartment buildings are a form of commercial real estate, though they are neither office nor retail.)
I read this like you had an obvious idea on solving the issue that the city could not think of, hence me asking just in case it was so.
I live in a neighbourhood not too far from park slope. You have to put your trash on the curb no matter what you live in and where in the city you live.
Garbage men dont even want to pick up the trash that falls from then while picking up trash from the curb so I find it incredulous that they enter your yard and take it from a bin.
"Place your items curbside on the curb between 4 PM and midnight the evening before your scheduled pickup".
the extremely radical move would be to pull a Taipei - you can't leave your garbage on the street, the truck just comes everyday at different times and you walk to the truck with your garbage
time variation means people's different work schedules get covered - whether you're at home in the morning, afternoon or evening you'll catch the truck 2x a week
if you live in an apartment building, it makes really good sense to collectivize and hire the work out to someone or share the shore between neighbors depending on socioeconomic bracket
On commercial streets where i live there's a slightly easier version of this - hour-long slots in every day the morning, evening, and possibly afternoon where you're allowed to put rubbish in bags on the street, which gets collected at the end of the slot:
Here in Copenhagen, large bins for commercial and apartment buildings are either kept in the courtyard, or in a garbage room (either in the basement, or a small room on the ground floor with a separate entrance).
Places where they leave rubbish in plastic bags on the street for hours (even overnight) seem filthy in comparison.
>A cross bar at the top of the basket functions as both a hinge for the lid and a barrier to stop people from dumping bulk and household trash—which often overflowed the bins.
Is it just me or is anyone else exhausted by things like this? Every design has to take into account bad faith actors.
I guess it's just part of why something as seemingly simple as a street corner trash can is such a challenging problem to solve. I wish I didn't need 500 lbs of safety features in my car but you need to account for bad actors, idiots on the road, and accidents. I appreciate when thought goes in to the worst-case misuses of everyday objects, even a trash can.
It also assumes that the household garbage dumper is going to carry their trash back to their house and wait for garbage day, when really they'll just drop their garbage back next to the trash can that it doesn't fit in. There's another solution to that problem, and they might have the wrong angle entirely here.
They work on the side of the road, in proximity to heavy equipment, moving heavy objects, in all weather and the state doesn't go out of its way to make life a living hell for anyone who happens to harm them (accidentally or intentionally). It's no surprise that they have a higher fatal injury rate than cops and tow truck drivers who both only work under a subset of those conditions.
I wonder if those statistics include repetitive stress injuries as well? Lifting bulky heavy objects all day long is an excellent way to develop back injuries.
Those stats are purely fatalities per year, which is why I found it so remarkable -- work in the industry for 3 years and you have had a 1 in 1000 chance of dying on the job.
I imagine the injury/casualty rate is dramatically higher.
the rate is for general trash collection, not just those cans. From the link in the article:
> Lam: Do you feel like you still need to be careful, even though you’re doing the same task every day?
Veloz: Absolutely. Every time you get out of the truck and go to the [trash] box: Don't become complacent. In this business, if you become complacent, you're looking for death. It's very dangerous because the cable bringing up the box is like a slingshot. If you make one mistake, and break the cable, it'll come through the window behind you and it's not going to be a good situation. You've got wires overhead, you've got trees you could hit that could fall on the truck. I take every load like it's my first time. We also get safety bonus $10,000 every three years, which I’ve won.
One of the factors in UK bin design in certain public places / spaces is blast resistance.
About 25 years ago I watched a documentary that focused on how the IRA were using litter and the bins themselves as shrapnel to ensure that small devices had a larger impact radius, especially in busy areas.
At the time this lead to a removal of bins in major public places (and they are still 100% absent from the tube system for this reason), and for those areas that required bins new designs were sought that were blast resistant.
Blast resistance in this context typically meant that the shell of the bin acts like a cannon, and the blast is directed upwards so that the impact radius is greatly reduced and the worst case is that trash rains down on people.
A lot of bins were replaced over the following decade, but this is not a requirement I see mentioned much any longer. Are other major cities factoring terrorism into their street furniture and garbage designs?
The shrapnel thing really trips my "that doesn't seem right" intuition WRT how explosions work, unless those bins had some really unfortunate design features. I believe someone official may have said that at some point and it may have been picked up in popular culture as a reason, but it strikes me as kinda "truthy", pending more info—I'd expect a container of that sort, especially with a bit of a gap between most of it and the device, to tend to break into a small number of large pieces with terrible aerodynamics, much of it bound generally upward and slowing a ton before reaching human-height again (assuming the bins were fairly big and the bags/bombs tended to end up at the bottom or middle), making shrapnel that's at best (well, worst, but you know) very marginally more effective than the bomb sans same shrapnel, if at all. Shrapnel that's big (tending to strike over a large surface area) and rapidly-slowing is fairly useless shrapnel.
The explanation that they were a good place to hide a largish bag so no-one would get suspicious about them seems entirely sufficient to explain why they were used, and why it might be a good idea to remove/disable them and replace them with something you can see the inside of.
> The area was crowded with shoppers. Witnesses said that shoppers fled from the first explosion into the path of the second. It was later found that the bombs had been placed inside cast-iron litter bins, causing large amounts of shrapnel
> Forty minutes later, a bomb hidden in a litter bin on the main concourse at Victoria exploded as police were carrying out a search, and while the rush hour was at its height.
> The dead man, a commuter, was the father of a 16-month-old child. He was killed by a shrapnel wound to the chest
>I presume this is to make it easier to spot explosives?
Open hoop style trash cans (bag holders really) are faster and more efficient for the janitor to assess the fullness of a bag from across the station (and for the supervisor to assess the quality of the janitor's assessment) and if needed to grab the full bag out of the hoop and toss on a new one. The hoop cans themselves are cheaper too. Any benefit to the police is likely secondary to the day to day cost savings from making it easier (and therefore faster and therefore cheaper) for the janitors to do their jobs.
Leaving a bag in the UK has always raised suspicion, hence leaving bombs in bins which were invisible. The added death and mayhem from the shrapnel was just a bonus.
When the IRA were using american funds to blow our kids up in the 80s and 90s, it was a more innocent time - nobody really considered a threat where the bomber would be willing to kill themselves as part of the attack - not in the west (and there'd only been the one suicide attack by the Palestinians), and much of the time there were warnings phoned in. Typical bombings were abandoned car/vans, bags or litter bins.
Nowadays the attack vector seems more knife crime or suicide bombing. There's far less now too.
I suppose the IRA was motivated more by real-world issues whereas Islamic (or otherwise) suicide bombers are often motivated by some kind of mythology involving an afterlife. Of course, IRA members were (almost all?) Catholic, but Christianity's notions of martyrdom are much more passive than those of Islamic fundamentalists.
You're right about there being far fewer terrorist incidents now. I believe the London tube bombings of 2005 and Manchester arena bombing of 2017 were the only suicide bombings in the UK this side of the millenium.
Tube stations do have bins now, but they're just clear bags on a hoop so that its easy to see the contents and so that there is nothing there to act as shrapnel.
You can still see in lots of stations where old bin were, often moulded into the walls and covered over with plates. Often they still say "Litter" above them.
Same in France, I still remember being young in Paris and seeing all metal trash cans disappear some time after the 1995 terrorist bombings [1] (which I feel not too many people outside of France remember).
I'm not sure if shrapnel projection avoidance was the number one reason in those instances since the bombs were already prepared with nuts and bolts as shrapnel but they definitely allowed large devices to be easily hidden in plain sight.
I can't remember how long it lasted but for what felt like decade most trash cans in Paris became metal circles with transparent plastic bags awkwardly hanging from them so the contents could be easily seen and it would be much harder (in theory) to hide a large explosive device in them. This resulted in a lot of mishaps with trash dropping all over the floor. Apparently it also worsened rat infestation since Paris' most recent trash can redesign focused on tackling this issue [2].
Hmm. I didn’t consider it like this, but the new Transbay Transit Center has trash cans of a similar design all around the rooftop park. They are enclosed, but the enclosure is completely transparent so you can easily see in the bags.
Honestly there’s a number of good reasons you might want that design though, e.g. needles have been an issue around San Francisco.
I have seen those underground trash containers in Marseille, France, which also has tiny (old) streets.
I suspect that NYC could benefit from those underground trash containers, especially in the most popular places, including the park. Picking those underground containers could eventually be automated (https://hackaday.com/2017/07/13/automate-the-freight-the-rob...).
According to underground garbage site (https://www.elkoplast.eu/underground-containers), advantages are:
- a significantly higher collection point capacity, all the container capacity is moved underground,
- collection frequency reduction, leading to lower costs and reducing negative impacts on the environment (less CO2 emissions, less noise and traffic),
- all the waste is stored below the ground level with lower and more stable temperature, slowing waste decomposition and odor reduction,
- waste is stored up to a height of 2.7 m, resulting in better compaction by its own weight,
- reduction of vandalism and the possibility of re-collecting waste, incl. access of animals,
- aesthetic appearance and cleanliness of the collection point that does not overflow with garbage,
- access restriction using a card (option),
- remote filling monitoring (option).
Yeah, too bad America is essentially a developing country these days and doesn't know it.
Edit: as written, the comment is unkind to developing countries, which are actually developing very rapidly, which is not my critique of America. Rather, I'm trying to be unkind towards the "too hard to do here" and "things are fine as they are" mentality that seems pervasive -- and totally un-American in principle.
>At least one report has named the Big Apple the dirtiest city in America.
Chicago is laid out with an extensive alley system, even in the downtown parts of the city. In New York, garbage ends up on the sidewalk. In Chicago, all of that is tucked into alleys. Garbage trucks and dumpsters are all tucked behind the scenes.
That layout was done generations ago, and is probably the biggest reason that downtown Chicago smells like chocolate instead of trash.
> and is probably the biggest reason that downtown Chicago smells like chocolate instead of trash.
Is Bloomer's still violating EPA particulate regulations during chocolate manufacturing? I would've thought their new Japanese owners would've clamped down on that by now.
It was a very deliberate decision in planning NYC not to have alleys.
This was for safety reasons: alleys provide many poorly-lit, poorly visible locations to commit crimes: mugging, illegal transactions (drugs etc.) and worse.
So just to be clear that alleys aren't necessarily a net benefit. New York may very well have been much safer, at the price of late-night garbage out visibly for pickup.
New york could sacrifice a few parking spots per block and put garbage bins there. But the city has spoken and rather have the sidewalks covered with stinking trash than give up parking spaces.
In many parts of the city, dog waste bags make up a significant portion of street trash. It would be wonderful if there was a way to compost or otherwise remove dog crap from the landfill.
I remember reading the book "Ghost Map" (great book, BTW) and it said that Victorian London had "pure collectors" who collected dog waste and sold it to tanneries, but apparently that's not a resource stream anymore. :-D
There was. I think the host was sharing how things work in Korea (or Taiwan)? Where everybody brings their trash/recycling out when the trucks come by.
So no public bins and no private bins.
The host concluded that this would never work in USA.
I mean, maybe it could be implemented over time, but merely proposing it would guarantee election losses.
Im a new yorker and i disagree, for what its worth, with the quoted internet commenter who said they're ugly. They seem reasonably nice to look at relative to the status quo.
Cuboids or cylinders, with a closed top and large openings on each side. There's a plastic bag inside, accessed by a door in one face.
This seems to solve all New York's problems better than their new design. Dustmen only have to lift the bag, not a heavy bin. The openings are narrow, keeping rubbish safe from wind and bulky waste. They look tidy. The bin is fixed to the ground, so it can't blow over. Rain can't get in in the first place (much), so drainage is not a worry.
However, they are a bit expensive: the cheap one there is £200, which is (just about!) more than the $200 limit New York has set, and councils often install more expensive ones.
"Nagle is skeptical that the litter basket’s redesign will change people’s behavior, but she says these competitions aren’t futile"
It does seem to address issues like heavy load, but new yorkers with large amounts of trash will definitely just continue to throw it directly on the sidewalk.
In my area of London, UK. We have a bin design that equally and maybe more so designed to discourage bulk disposal and would also alert when full and needing emptying. But with anything, things will go wrong. Though when a full waste bin is headline stuff, you know life is good: https://www.yourlocalguardian.co.uk/news/16974419.anger-at-n...
I hate these because of how you need to grab and pull a handle hundreds of people touched before while handling their trash. And you can’t even try and work around that by using a single finger covered with a piece of paper or receipt because you need to pull on it relatively hard, making sure there is full contact between your hand and the contaminated surface, almost like it’s by design.
I am also not sure this over-engineered and presumably quite expensive device (plus their ongoing maintenance) actually solves any real problems besides being political ammo to please environment fanatics due to its solar panel.
>"I hate these because of how you need to grab and pull a handle hundreds of people touched before while handling their trash"
Yes, I also share your aversion towards soiled handles. Fear not as these ones also have a foot pedal, which can be actioned with a light step and works lovely and nice and fluid, actually a pleasure to use and well thought out and engineered upon that aspect from my experience of them.
I wonder if there's anything that can be done about overflowing trash cans. I feel like most of the litter I see in Manhattan comes from when a can is full so it accumulates next to it.
Is there any way to build a reliable sensor that could somehow be powered without a (non-existent) ground connection, communicate, and reliably survive without destruction for years, that could alert the closest sanitation workers?
It definitely seems like a tall order. I'm not even sure what kind of basic sensor would be applicable. Unless it was just CCTV feeds with coverage of all trash cans that could be fed into machine learning to identify "full" cans.
One possible solution is to provide enough volume that they just don't overflow. In Portugal the trash cans are really just chutes attached to a hinged "door" in the ground that lifts up to provide access to large underground dumpsters that can be extracted and emptied by specialized garbage trucks.
I'm not sure what it would cost to retrofit a city with a system like this. Possibly more than implementing the sensors you mention, but it's one potential solution.
NYC already has enough going on underground (in the form of basements, cellars, subways, infrastructure) that the idea of underground dumpsters here is pretty ridiculous.
We have space for dumpsters, we've just elected to use them for free private automobile parking instead.
Downtown Lisbon has all of those things as well, including lots of streetside parking space. Presumably they make it work because large above-ground dumpsters are unsightly, impede pedestrian traffic, and hinder visibility.
In Sydney, Australia (Bondi at least) we have solar powered trash compactors. The mouth of the bin isn't large enough to put bulk waste, and, of course, it compacts the trash so you can fit 3-4 times as much before needing to be emptied.
Bins in Zürich [0] are neat. They look about as decent as a rubbish bin can. Naturally, one unit costs 3100chf / $3200. Alas, it’s going to be gradually replaced by a different model.
Then there are the “recycling stations” [1] littered across the larger train stations. They too cost somewhere between $3100 and $3800. At least they seem to work quite well.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 178 ms ] threadIdeally the city would require stand bins that could be lifted by an arm on the truck (like many other cities in the US).
When you get above a few kilograms there's also a biomechanical issue - the same reason the world record for clean and jerk is much higher than the world record for bicep curls, despite moving the weight a lot further.
Lifting something from waist height to chin height quickly, using big leg muscles to give it momentum, is easier than lifting it slowly using only arm muscles.
And nobody lifting 10kg trash bags for 8 hours a day is doing it the difficult way :)
> New York City unveils a next-generation human who never litters
So no next-gen needed, just need to live somewhere it's not culturally acceptable to throw trash on the ground.
Wonder why places like New York City are so different.
Tourist/more HCOL areas are often very clean, though.
But, despite that I think it's totally fixible. Either just change the law to force setting aside some ground floor real estate, or put bins where parked cars used to be. I think the latter is more politically feasible.
Nobody likes the filth, but the litter won't stop until the buildings lead the way with the bulk of the problem.
Oh, and I think food delivery caused tons of pointless trash. We need some system to return reusable containers to the restaurants. Very sad their is a restaurant loophole for the new plastic bag ban.
It's a tough sell though. A lot more work for the restaurant and almost certainly higher costs. There will be constant shrinkage of the reusable containers to deal with as well as having to pay someone to wash them.
It would probably work best if the containers were generic and everybody used the same ones, so no matter who you ordered from this time you could return your containers from last time. But that's an even harder sell: why pass up the opportunity for advertising?
I still like the idea, but acknowledge that it would probably struggle to gain traction in the real world.
It does not mean this is the only thing they are working on.
Your comment is 100% whataboutism.
It doesn't mean this is the only thing they're working on. Nevertheless it is a fact that they're not working on solving the underlying problem. They are working on marginally better traps that don't actually reduce the population effectively.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/05/nyregion/rats-new-york.ht...
> “New Yorkers need to understand that they have a role in stopping this,” said [Professor Munshi-South of Fordham University Department of Biological Sciences]. “I don’t believe we have built in a right culture of how to dispose of our garbage. People have not made the connection between what your neighbors are doing with their garbage, and how this feeds the problem.”
What proposal do you have in mind for the city to solve this?
To your points, most brownstones in, say, Park Slope, do have bins in their yard, and the trash collectors remove waste from that bin. This is at least marginal rat resistance. Midrise buildings that are further out than that will have room for dumpsters if they are required.
(Multi-family apartment buildings are a form of commercial real estate, though they are neither office nor retail.)
I live in a neighbourhood not too far from park slope. You have to put your trash on the curb no matter what you live in and where in the city you live. Garbage men dont even want to pick up the trash that falls from then while picking up trash from the curb so I find it incredulous that they enter your yard and take it from a bin.
"Place your items curbside on the curb between 4 PM and midnight the evening before your scheduled pickup".
https://portal.311.nyc.gov/article/?kanumber=KA-01801
time variation means people's different work schedules get covered - whether you're at home in the morning, afternoon or evening you'll catch the truck 2x a week
if you live in an apartment building, it makes really good sense to collectivize and hire the work out to someone or share the shore between neighbors depending on socioeconomic bracket
https://www.haringey.gov.uk/environment-and-waste/rubbish-an...
Places where they leave rubbish in plastic bags on the street for hours (even overnight) seem filthy in comparison.
Rats spreading disease has been disproven.
They are one of the few species who still manage to survive in the concrete.
Is it just me or is anyone else exhausted by things like this? Every design has to take into account bad faith actors.
It also assumes that the household garbage dumper is going to carry their trash back to their house and wait for garbage day, when really they'll just drop their garbage back next to the trash can that it doesn't fit in. There's another solution to that problem, and they might have the wrong angle entirely here.
Sometimes pondering the natural world for a while is healthy. There's a lot of deceptive, underhanded trickery animals get up to.
What really stood out to me was the fatal injury rate of 33 per 100,000 for trash collectors (in general, obviously). That seems incredibly high.
I imagine the injury/casualty rate is dramatically higher.
> Lam: Do you feel like you still need to be careful, even though you’re doing the same task every day?
Veloz: Absolutely. Every time you get out of the truck and go to the [trash] box: Don't become complacent. In this business, if you become complacent, you're looking for death. It's very dangerous because the cable bringing up the box is like a slingshot. If you make one mistake, and break the cable, it'll come through the window behind you and it's not going to be a good situation. You've got wires overhead, you've got trees you could hit that could fall on the truck. I take every load like it's my first time. We also get safety bonus $10,000 every three years, which I’ve won.
Residents’ needs should be considered in matters like these.
About 25 years ago I watched a documentary that focused on how the IRA were using litter and the bins themselves as shrapnel to ensure that small devices had a larger impact radius, especially in busy areas.
At the time this lead to a removal of bins in major public places (and they are still 100% absent from the tube system for this reason), and for those areas that required bins new designs were sought that were blast resistant.
Blast resistance in this context typically meant that the shell of the bin acts like a cannon, and the blast is directed upwards so that the impact radius is greatly reduced and the worst case is that trash rains down on people.
A lot of bins were replaced over the following decade, but this is not a requirement I see mentioned much any longer. Are other major cities factoring terrorism into their street furniture and garbage designs?
The explanation that they were a good place to hide a largish bag so no-one would get suspicious about them seems entirely sufficient to explain why they were used, and why it might be a good idea to remove/disable them and replace them with something you can see the inside of.
> The area was crowded with shoppers. Witnesses said that shoppers fled from the first explosion into the path of the second. It was later found that the bombs had been placed inside cast-iron litter bins, causing large amounts of shrapnel
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1991/feb/19/northernireland.d...
> Forty minutes later, a bomb hidden in a litter bin on the main concourse at Victoria exploded as police were carrying out a search, and while the rush hour was at its height.
> The dead man, a commuter, was the father of a 16-month-old child. He was killed by a shrapnel wound to the chest
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/two-young-boys-murdere...
> Hundreds of pieces of cast iron shrapnel from two litter bins, which had been blasted apart by Semtex, littered the shopping precinct
[EDIT] I mean I guess I hadn't counted on the bins so strongly resembling actual bomb casings. Heh. Yeesh, that sucks.
[EDIT EDIT] doesn't break fast enough and is brittle. I was thinking something like sheet steel.
Open hoop style trash cans (bag holders really) are faster and more efficient for the janitor to assess the fullness of a bag from across the station (and for the supervisor to assess the quality of the janitor's assessment) and if needed to grab the full bag out of the hoop and toss on a new one. The hoop cans themselves are cheaper too. Any benefit to the police is likely secondary to the day to day cost savings from making it easier (and therefore faster and therefore cheaper) for the janitors to do their jobs.
When the IRA were using american funds to blow our kids up in the 80s and 90s, it was a more innocent time - nobody really considered a threat where the bomber would be willing to kill themselves as part of the attack - not in the west (and there'd only been the one suicide attack by the Palestinians), and much of the time there were warnings phoned in. Typical bombings were abandoned car/vans, bags or litter bins.
Nowadays the attack vector seems more knife crime or suicide bombing. There's far less now too.
I googled it and discovered that the pIRA did use human bombs, except that the human involved was under coercion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_bomb
You're right about there being far fewer terrorist incidents now. I believe the London tube bombings of 2005 and Manchester arena bombing of 2017 were the only suicide bombings in the UK this side of the millenium.
You can still see in lots of stations where old bin were, often moulded into the walls and covered over with plates. Often they still say "Litter" above them.
I'm not sure if shrapnel projection avoidance was the number one reason in those instances since the bombs were already prepared with nuts and bolts as shrapnel but they definitely allowed large devices to be easily hidden in plain sight.
I can't remember how long it lasted but for what felt like decade most trash cans in Paris became metal circles with transparent plastic bags awkwardly hanging from them so the contents could be easily seen and it would be much harder (in theory) to hide a large explosive device in them. This resulted in a lot of mishaps with trash dropping all over the floor. Apparently it also worsened rat infestation since Paris' most recent trash can redesign focused on tackling this issue [2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1995_France_bombings
[2]: https://www.cnews.fr/france/2019-06-02/paris-3600-nouvelles-...
Honestly there’s a number of good reasons you might want that design though, e.g. needles have been an issue around San Francisco.
Interesting. This might explain why in Chicago subways the "trashcans" aren't cans at all but collars with naked plastic bags suspended from them.
Edit: as written, the comment is unkind to developing countries, which are actually developing very rapidly, which is not my critique of America. Rather, I'm trying to be unkind towards the "too hard to do here" and "things are fine as they are" mentality that seems pervasive -- and totally un-American in principle.
Chicago is laid out with an extensive alley system, even in the downtown parts of the city. In New York, garbage ends up on the sidewalk. In Chicago, all of that is tucked into alleys. Garbage trucks and dumpsters are all tucked behind the scenes.
That layout was done generations ago, and is probably the biggest reason that downtown Chicago smells like chocolate instead of trash.
Is Bloomer's still violating EPA particulate regulations during chocolate manufacturing? I would've thought their new Japanese owners would've clamped down on that by now.
This was for safety reasons: alleys provide many poorly-lit, poorly visible locations to commit crimes: mugging, illegal transactions (drugs etc.) and worse.
So just to be clear that alleys aren't necessarily a net benefit. New York may very well have been much safer, at the price of late-night garbage out visibly for pickup.
Ex: https://www.google.com/search?q=barcelona+trash+bins+parking...
I remember reading the book "Ghost Map" (great book, BTW) and it said that Victorian London had "pure collectors" who collected dog waste and sold it to tanneries, but apparently that's not a resource stream anymore. :-D
So no public bins and no private bins.
The host concluded that this would never work in USA.
I mean, maybe it could be implemented over time, but merely proposing it would guarantee election losses.
I was talking about the design of public trash bins.
https://www.broxap.com/derby-standard-litter-bin.html
https://www.broxap.com/derby-e.html
Cuboids or cylinders, with a closed top and large openings on each side. There's a plastic bag inside, accessed by a door in one face.
This seems to solve all New York's problems better than their new design. Dustmen only have to lift the bag, not a heavy bin. The openings are narrow, keeping rubbish safe from wind and bulky waste. They look tidy. The bin is fixed to the ground, so it can't blow over. Rain can't get in in the first place (much), so drainage is not a worry.
However, they are a bit expensive: the cheap one there is £200, which is (just about!) more than the $200 limit New York has set, and councils often install more expensive ones.
It does seem to address issues like heavy load, but new yorkers with large amounts of trash will definitely just continue to throw it directly on the sidewalk.
I am also not sure this over-engineered and presumably quite expensive device (plus their ongoing maintenance) actually solves any real problems besides being political ammo to please environment fanatics due to its solar panel.
Yes, I also share your aversion towards soiled handles. Fear not as these ones also have a foot pedal, which can be actioned with a light step and works lovely and nice and fluid, actually a pleasure to use and well thought out and engineered upon that aspect from my experience of them.
I wonder if there's anything that can be done about overflowing trash cans. I feel like most of the litter I see in Manhattan comes from when a can is full so it accumulates next to it.
Is there any way to build a reliable sensor that could somehow be powered without a (non-existent) ground connection, communicate, and reliably survive without destruction for years, that could alert the closest sanitation workers?
It definitely seems like a tall order. I'm not even sure what kind of basic sensor would be applicable. Unless it was just CCTV feeds with coverage of all trash cans that could be fed into machine learning to identify "full" cans.
I'm not sure what it would cost to retrofit a city with a system like this. Possibly more than implementing the sensors you mention, but it's one potential solution.
We have space for dumpsters, we've just elected to use them for free private automobile parking instead.
Of course, Philadelphia has maybe 1:10 of the amount of street cans as NYC so there is still trash everywhere. But the bins are very nice!
Then there are the “recycling stations” [1] littered across the larger train stations. They too cost somewhere between $3100 and $3800. At least they seem to work quite well.
[0] https://www.nzz.ch/zuerich/abfallhai-der-zuercher-kult-kuebe...
[1] https://www.drawag-tech.ch/recycling-systeme/drawag-recyclin...