New York’s $1.6 million trash can revolution
New York City paid McKinsey to help it revamp its sanitation network
One of my favorite tropes is that organizations pay management consultants, such as McKinsey & Company, millions of dollars to create slide decks with obvious solutions, such as “reduce expenses and increase revenue.”
One of my favorite things about living in New York is that, despite being the largest city-wide economy in the world, New York’s sidewalks are covered with piles of trash bags every evening. It was only fitting, then, that in 2022, New York City’s Department of Sanitation (DSNY) paid McKinsey $1.6 million to conduct a 20-week waste containerization needs study, and earlier this week, New York City Mayor Eric Adams unveiled the city’s first-ever official NYC Bin.
The DSNY also put forth a proposed rule requiring that all buildings with one to nine residential units and all special use buildings that receive DSNY collection (e.g. city agency buildings, houses of worship, and professional offices located within residential buildings) put their trash in containers, effective November 12, 2024. This will, according to Mayor Adams, “containerize more than 70% of the city’s trash to protect our most valuable and limited resource — our public space.”
A few things to note here: first, plenty of NYC residents have already been using trash cans, and, assuming their current lids have securing latches, they’ll have until 2026 to switch to the NYC-branded containers. Second, this is part of a larger investment, which includes the development of new automatic side-loading trucks designed to service the new trash cans. For what it’s worth, many of New York’s streets are notoriously narrow, and curb space in busy areas is nonexistent, making the trash servicing process more difficult than in other, less densely populated areas.
If you’re curious, The DSNY published a 2023 Containerization Report, in which it cited McKinsey’s work, and the report is quite interesting. A few stats:
New Yorkers leave 44 million pounds of trash on curbs each day (!!!)
Choosing whether or not to use wheeled shared containers (the really big metal containers that trucks can pick up, not the smaller trash bins referenced above) would have a massive impact on the city’s entire sanitation system, including which trucks to invest in.
McKinsey studied the sanitation systems of dozens of cities across the US, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Australia when creating their report for New York.
Some of the slides, such as the one below, are hysterical:
While the “consultants get paid millions for obvious recommendations” is a fun trope, $1.6 million feels more than reasonable if it helps clean up our rat problem.
