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A few street corners in Bay Ridge where residents complained about the accumulation of household garbage are now notable for their lack of trash baskets, according to an article in the Times. At the urging of the Community Board, the Sanitation Department removed 14 trash baskets on 4th Avenue between Ovington and 68th Street about a month ago because “community leaders were tired of households using corner trash baskets meant for candy wrappers and soda cans to dump plastic bags full of smelly leftovers and other personal discards.” Is the “counterintuitive” experiment working? The jury’s out. A couple business owners near the basket-less corners say there’s more street litter, though others say it’s made the area cleaner. “People are just starting to look more because there’s no litter baskets,” says Gregory Ahl, the environment committee chairman of Community Board 10, who came up with the idea of removing the waste receptacles. The Sanitation Department is going to decide whether to reinstall the baskets next week.
Fighting Litter in Bay Ridge by Getting Rid of the Litter Baskets [NY Times]


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  1. >tburg, trash in ones house for three days is even gross! i take out the trash and recycling twice a day

    Rob, not everyone is as oddly and overly fastidious as you. Recyclables can easily be stashed for a week.

  2. It’s not a rationalization, its a reason.

    First, you are correct that trash can be put out in heavy duty trashbags (or even in white plastic kitchen bags so long as it it closed and secured). However, it cannot appear on the sidewalks prior to 6pm the night before a scheduled pickup day. If trash is not picked up on a scheduled day, it is supposed to be removed from the sidewalk and put back onto the property or a landlord is in jeopardy of receiving a ticket from sanitation. Trash CANNOT be stored on the street until a pickup day. Landlords are routinely ticketed for violations of this law, especially on commercial streets.

    I said nothing about recycling materials as I agree with you that they can be kept for weeks on end. But the article isn’t talking about recycling it specifically mentions household TRASH (decomposing foodstuffs, etc.) That is what is appearing in corner garbage cans, and its appearing there because garbage pickups occurr too infrequently for those few homes.

    Get off your high horse and admit that the concept of keeping a garbage bag full of baby diapers in a home for 5, 6 or 7 days is pretty disgusting as is the thought of having last week’s chicken dinner decomposing by the front door. Solutions are not impossible (for example, the city could alter the administrative code to allow select buildings to have small enclosed plastic or metal containers placed outside of their building that are big enough to hold 3-4 plastic lidded garbage cans so tenants have a place to store trash until pickup days).

    But calling tenants scummy, filthy and inconsiderate because they are not storing 3-4 days of garbage in their homes when you clearly live some place where that is not your reality is very much blaming the victims here. Everyone agrees this problem didn’t start occurring until after the trash pickup days were changed. So fix that problem and you’ll solve the houshold trash in corner garbage can problem.

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