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No more trash piles: City to install garbage bins in hundreds of Brooklyn parking spaces
By
Liam Quigley
Published Sep 16, 2025
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Liam Quigley
By
Liam Quigley
Published Sep 16, 2025
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Large on-street garbage bins are set to be installed in hundreds of parking spaces across some of Brooklyn’s most densely populated neighborhoods over the next year, Mayor Eric Adams announced Tuesday.
The rollout continues a pilot program that has over the last two years brought trash containers to streets in parts of Harlem. Residents in the area no longer pile their garbage up on sidewalks, but building supers instead toss their bags in the bins in a change city officials said has reduced rat populations by eliminating a key food source for pests.
Sanitation officials said roughly 1,100 of the bins have been deployed in Upper Manhattan. Now, the city plans to add 1,500 more of them in Brooklyn’s Community Board 2, which includes neighborhoods like Boerum Hill, Brooklyn Heights and Fort Greene.
Adams said schools in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill will get the bins as soon as this fall while sanitation officials conduct door-to-door outreach to plan the wider rollout. Officials said the use of the containers in the Brooklyn community board will be mandatory for residential buildings with more than 30 units once they’re installed next year.
Landlords of buildings with 10 to 30 units can either request a container to be installed on their street or use city-sanctioned wheeled trash bins to put out their garbage.
The “Empire Bins,” which are made in Spain, sit at the curb and are emptied by new $500,000-a-piece garbage trucks purchased by the sanitation department that are equipped with lifts. They can only be opened with special keys held by building supers or sanitation department crews.
They’re central to the mayor’s vision for a “trash revolution” that gets all of the city’s trash in containers and off sidewalks. Parts of Upper Manhattan have been fully containerized since April. Buildings citywide with nine or fewer units, as well as every business in the five boroughs, are already required to containerize their trash and are forbidden from stacking garbage bags on the sidewalk.
Sanitation officials said they need to complete a lengthy environmental review process before the bins can be rolled out on streets across the city.
There is not yet a concrete timeline for the full rollout, putting the decision over the future of the initiative in the hands of whoever wins the mayoral election in November. Front-runner Zohran Mamdani has indicated that he would continue the effort if he wins.
Adams credited containerization for helping him deal with rat problems at the four-unit building he co-owns in Brooklyn, which has received several citations for the evidence of rats since he took office at the start of 2022.
“On my block on Lafayette Avenue, we were having a severe rodent problem until the containerization,” the mayor said. “It’s a massive, massive success and we’re going to continue in the right direction.”
Sanitation officials said the bins in Upper Manhattan replaced just 4% of the area’s on-street parking spaces, which sparked frustration among some car owners.
Fort Greene resident Rome Lockett, 35, was excited for the containers to come to his neighborhood, and said the rollout seemed reasonable, but warned drivers would be upset.
“ I don't have a car, so I think it's a worthy trade-off, but if I had a car, I'd be kind of upset,” he said. “ There's not enough space in here for cars, people, trash cans, so something's gonna give. If we're complaining about the rats, then let's get the trash cans in.”
Kathleen Corradi, the city's "rat czar," said that getting piles of trash bags off the streets makes life harder for the city’s rat population.
“Every time we can deny rats access to food, it increases their stress level, increases competition, reduces their ability to reproduce,” she said.
Tagged
Politics
brooklyn
manhattan
new york city
sanitation
transportation
Liam Quigley
Liam Quigley is a reporter covering parks & sanitation for Gothamist and WNYC. Got a tip? Email [email protected]
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