Sanitation workers collect trash in Harlem.
Nickolai Hammar/NPR
It was two years ago. Morningside Heights resident Carl Mahaney was walking with his kid to the first day of school, when they came across heaps of trash bags lying on a sidewalk.
“The rats would come from where the rats come from, and they would just tear the bags apart, Mahaney said.
The trash was their late-night snack, perhaps an early breakfast. An all-you-can-eat buffet. And Mahaney was fed up. So, naturally, he took to X, which was called Twitter at the time, and tagged his district councilmember.
“What are we going to do about this? Like, parents and families shouldn’t have to deal with this on their way to school,” he remembered feeling at the time.
A rat scurries out from under a pile of garbage bags on a sidewalk in Harlem as sanitation workers are about to collect the trash.
Nickolai Hammar
It feels like every New Yorker has had to deal with rats in one form or another.
Minko Burgos, a resident of the lower east side of Manhattan, remembered coming across a rat king — which is when a bunch of rats’ tails are all intertwined, leaving them stuck in a tangled mess — on a late night walk back to her house a couple months ago. That’s why she’d rather not walk alone late at night around her block anymore. Paul Walker, who lives in Bushwick, said he thought he saw a dead rat on the road and went over to clean it up for the betterment of his neighborhood, only to discover it wasn’t dead when it proceeded to jump on his arm.
Mahaney’s district councilmember, Shaun Abreu, also knows a thing or two about rats. When he was younger, rats chewed up his grandmother’s furniture and infested his uncle’s closet.
“Rats are a very New York City problem,” he said.
So when Abreu saw Mahaney’s tweet, he met with the New York City Department of Sanitation to discuss what to do.
“The best way to handle it is by shutting off the food supply,” Abreu said.
Which is why the department decided to pilot a trash program, which had been in the works, in Abreu’s district — part of West Harlem — where people dump trash into large containers the size of about two parking spaces. Since the pilot launched last September, the number of rat complaints have gone down by 66% in the neighborhood, according to the Sanitation Department. Mahaney was elated.
The city launched a pilot program in West Harlem last September, in which people dumped their trash into large fixed containers along curbs. Carl Mahaney, who lives in the area, holds a piece of paper with images of what one sidewalk looked like before and after the pilot bins were installed.
Jeongyoon Han/NPR
“It seems so simple,” Mahaney said. “Why didn’t this happen 23 years ago when I moved to the city? I have no idea.”
Trash cans in one of America’s densest, busiest cities? Jessica Tisch, the commissioner for the New York City Department of Sanitation, openly acknowledges that the idea is not rocket science.
“We are literally copying what virtually every other major city around the globe has been doing for decades,” she said.
To be fair, the city makes 44 million pounds of trash every day. It tried out trash cans in the 1960s and 1970s — but because they were metal, the city got a lot of noise complaints. Sanitation workers also launched a strike in 1968 demanding higher wages and benefits. The culmination of these events prompted New York to can the cans, and let the trash bags pile up. That is, Tisch says, until now.
Workers from the New York City Department of Sanitation collect trash deposited in large bins used in West Harlem’s pilot program. The large bins can be picked up by the collection trucks, which mitigates certain risks for workers, like being cut by broken or sharp objects thrown out.
Nickolai Hammar/NPR
As of this March, the city has containerized all trash from commercial businesses in the city. And its next step is containerizing trash for buildings with one to nine units with wheelie bins starting this November. Once this happens, Tisch says, New York will have containerized 70% of all of its trash.
But Tisch says the mayor, Eric Adams, is adamant that New York containerize all of its trash. To get there, the city is taking inspiration from Barcelona’s trash management system by eventually installing large bins, made by Spanish company Contenur, in parking lanes in denser areas of the city. Soon, Tisch says, New York will be the first city in the country to use trucks that can lift these large bins to empty them out.
Critiques to the containerization plan
There are several critiques to the city’s plan. Clare Miflin, who leads the Center for Zero Waste Design, said the bins will take up parking spaces and sidewalks. “It’s bad for streetscapes,” she said.
Plastic trash bags have essentially become a built-in feature of the city’s streetscapes, including in this part of Harlem.
Nickolai Hammar/NPR
While Miflin said it’s important for the city to be pursuing trash containerization, she said the plan would have trash bins and cans take up sidewalks, which she believes should be for multipurpose public use. According to 2023 projections from the city’s sanitation department, even with the containerization plans in place, some neighborhoods still won’t be able to keep up with the trash. She also said the city did not incentivize recycling and composting enough.
“I think they’ve missed valuable opportunities to get us closer to our zero-waste goals,” she said.
The department says the city’s curbside composting program is the largest of its kind ever, by diverting 260 million pounds of compostable material from landfills, while that diversion rate is up for the third year in a row. The staffer said containers are required for trash, but not for recycling, though recycling bins are available for purchase through the city.
Tisch says this phase of containerization more broadly steers the city in the right direction.
“We don’t want change just for the sake of change,” Tisch said. “We want change for the sake of restoring order and dignity to our streets.”
For the rat czar, education is key
And for the first citywide director of rodent mitigation, Kathy Corradi, that means educating people.
Standing in the middle of a patch of shrubs in Collect Pond Park one August, Corradi, who’s often referred to as the “rat czar,” gives a tour of this part of lower Manhattan — from the rat’s eye view.
New York City’s first director for rodent mitigation, Kathleen Corradi, points her flashlight to the opening of a rat burrow in Collect Pond Park.
Nickolai Hammar/NPR
It was Corradi’s first time giving a tour as part of the city’s Rat Academy, which offers tours and educational opportunities about how to mitigate the rodent problem. About 20 people showed up for the event, which she called a “Rat Walk.”
Corradi led the group to a small hole in between the shrubs, and pointed her flashlight towards it.
“So here we have a pretty healthy burrow system. And there are some tell-tale signs,” she said.
And then, as if on cue, a rat scurried over Corradi’s foot. The crowd gasped, then chuckled at their own shock. “A rat!” Corradi said. And then she kept talking.
Brooklyn resident Marisa Beckley said the tour was eye opening.
New York City’s appointed Rat Czar, Kathleen Corradi, educates attendees of her “Rat Walk” on rats’ preferred habitats, food sources and behavior.
Nickolai Hammar/NPR
“I, for instance, had no idea that there were certain types of shrubs that were more attractive to rats and that the park was phasing out the use of a certain type of ivy that rats really like to hang out in,” she said.
That’s what Corradi’s job is really all about.
“We need humans bought in, changing their behaviors, thinking about their interactions in our city in a different way,” Corradi said.
Then, just maybe, Corradi said, New Yorkers can make rats’ lives in the Big Apple just a little bit harder.
