#EVEN BETTER TRASH WINDOWS#

Besides adding to traffic, this can be bad for the environment and public health. Trucks crisscross each other, often several times a night, as they drive overlapping routes around town.

It worked, more or less: the mafia no longer dominates commercial waste, and the booming number of haulers kept options plentiful-and trash-collection fees low-for businesses around town.īut those efforts had an unintended consequence: in an already congested city, unrestricted competition has coaxed a whole lot of garbage trucks onto the streets-more than four thousand. The commission set maximum garbage-collection rates to prevent extortion, and launched other anti-corruption initiatives. In 2001, the city created the Organized Crime Control Commission, which was later renamed the Business Integrity Commission (BIC), to promote competition and discourage criminal control of the commercial-waste industry. The commercial-waste industry was traditionally lucrative and not very transparent, so it was an attractive venue for organized crime. If there was a pattern, I couldn’t grasp it: the Starbucks at Ninety-third and Broadway uses a different commercial-waste company from the Starbucks at Ninety-fifth and Broadway.īenjamin Miller, a former director of policy planning for the Department of Sanitation (and the author of “Fat of the Land: Garbage of New York, the Last Two Hundred Years”), told me this is rooted in the New York garbage world’s mafia past.

#EVEN BETTER TRASH WINDOWS#

Licenses in windows listed the commercial-waste haulers they use-at least fourteen in all, by my count, for a stretch that covers only a fifth of a mile. When I recently walked down a four-block stretch of Broadway on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I identified about forty businesses-restaurants, clothing shops, bodegas, banks. More than two hundred and fifty licensed commercial-waste haulers operate in New York. Still, it has only about fifteen commercial-waste haulers Chicago and Houston, also free-market cities, have fourteen and a hundred and forty-one, respectively. Philadelphia uses a free-market system, as does New York, in which private haulers negotiate directly with businesses. These cities have government-regulated commercial-waste systems. Los Angeles is transitioning to a system in which eleven districts will be serviced by one hauler each. Seattle is divided into four waste-collection zones, handled by two garbage companies.

In San Francisco, a single waste hauler has an exclusive contract to collect trash. New York City has a crowded system for collecting businesses’ garbage.

Even better trash