Labor Day weekend is usually about beach trips and cooking, the air tinged with sunscreen and barbecue. But on the flip side of smell, another tradition follows: mountains of hot, stinking garbage.
With no Sunday or Monday residential garbage collection, the inevitable three-day weekend dumps created a post-Labour Day ritual among New York City’s sanitation workers. It’s called the “holiday chase” – where extra workers are put on collection routes until the weekend’s accumulated waste is finally collected.
But this Labor Day, the Department of Hygiene will try something new.
For the first time in recent memory, the city will schedule residential garbage collection during the holiday, using a team of Sanitation Department volunteers.
The move comes from a political imperative: As of August 28, the city’s 311 helpline has received 25,754 complaints about trash contaminating sidewalks and streets, increased 23% compared to 2021 and more than doubled compared to the same period in 2020, when the pandemic was already active.
Mayor Eric Adams has vowed to address the issue head-on. The budget that he negotiated with the New York City Council put 22 million dollars for clean out corner bins more often, $7.5 million for targeting known litter problem spots, and $4.5 million for clearing vacant lots. City recently started experimenting with trash, a method that has been used in other countries. The mayor has revive Street cleaning twice a week in many neighborhoods.
Mr. Adams has also made a point about publicly targeting abandoned food warehouses, which can function as garbage depots and illegal activity, even wearing a hard hat and used a sledgehammer to help destroy one the previous August.
“People are tired of trash cans, bored of rats, tired of abandoned outdoor dining sheds, and they just don’t want trash around,” Mr. Adams said at the time.
The sanitation department said that since the additional trash-basket funding went into effect on July 1, complaints about overflowing trash baskets have dropped by more than 60 percent.
But the amount of trash released over the three-day weekend remains a tough challenge, even tougher than the standard Monday-issued piles.
Jessica Tisch, the city’s new sanitation commissioner, said the week after the long July 4 weekend was “unacceptably dirty”, and so was the city in general.
“The post-pandemic city is dirtier than the pre-pandemic,” she said — one condition she offered was budget cuts for cleaning services during the most pressing days of the health crisis.
On the average Monday of the past four weeks, New York City’s sanitation workers picked up about 9,300 tons of trash, compared with 7,000 tons on Thursdays on average.
This past Labor Day came after Hurricane Ida flooded New York City, disrupting garbage collection. In 2020, sanitation workers removed nearly 12,000 tons of residential trash on the Tuesday after Labor Day. By next Tuesday, garbage collection is back to normal.
Ms. Tisch hopes that this new initiative will save costs, as the cost of overtime on Labor Day could be offset by less overtime in the week after Labor Day.
If enough trash cans are collected to significantly limit “holiday chases,” the city plans to adopt a similar process for all federal Mondays in the future. , as long as the forecast doesn’t snow heavily.
But it remains to be seen whether enough New Yorkers will take out their trash on Labor Day and how many sanitation workers will sign up for the Labor Day change.
Harry Nespoli, president of the Uniform Hygiene Association, said Ms Tisch’s experiment was worth a try.
“Listen, I think it’s good,” he said. “Why is it bad? Not bad. It is good. The purpose is to dump trash on the street”.
Then again, Mr. Nespoli said, he doesn’t know how many sanitation workers will be working on Labor Day. About 6,300 of the city’s 10,000 sanitation workers pick up trash. The city is aiming for 800 volunteers to work on Labor Day.
“People are thinking differently these days,” Mr. Nespoli said. “They’re thinking, you know, maybe they want more time with their family.”
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