Last week, New York City Mayor Eric Adams strode through the front gates of the historic Gracie Mansion sporting a pair of black aviators and wheeling a major announcement in tow. Triumphant music announced his arrival as he pulled up next to a podium with the precious cargo: NYC’s first official trash bin.

The announcement inspired heated reactions from New Yorkers and non-New Yorkers alike, the chief of which boiled down to one simple query: Why did it take New York City so long to put its trash . . . in cans?

Fast Company sat down with Joshua Goodman, deputy commissioner of public affairs and customer experience at the NYC Department of Sanitation (DSNY), to answer that question once and for all—and to address the rumor that DSNY paid McKinsey & Company $4 million to consult on whether trash should go in bags or cans.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

For those who are just finding out about it, could you explain DSNY’s Future of Trash report, and how it came to be?

Many people believed that New York City could just copy what exists in places like Barcelona or Amsterdam, and many other people believed New York City could enact no changes at all: “Our neighborhoods are too crowded, there’s too much trash, people will never change.” We suspected, and have since engaged in the research to determine, that both of those groups are wrong. Containerization is both extremely possible in New York City and extremely complicated. So when Mayor Adams and Commissioner Jessica Tisch started in 2022, there was a real interest from the two of them in getting serious about enacting waste containerization. 

The first step was figuring out what model could work in New York City. We began to do this study, which ended up being “Future of Trash” report [published in April 2023], that was a block-by-block analysis of waste volume in New York. This was a complicated process for a few reasons. We actually have decades of data about the trash, but the overwhelming majority of it, until recently, was focused on weight. But when you’re talking about containerization, what you need to know is volume. We had almost no data about the volume of the trash. We got to work putting together this study looking at best practices from around the world and using volumetric analysis. 

What the study found is that, broadly, containerization is viable throughout the city, using a combination of wheelie bins for low density residential and also for commercial, and stationary on-street containers for high density residential. 

To touch on the McKinsey & Company debacle, some people on the internet have been saying that DSNY paid McKinsey $4 million to, putting it simply, “do a study on if trash cans work.” Could you set the record straight on that?

I mentioned that we had a lot of data about the weight of the trash, but almost none on the volume. McKinsey had a specialized team doing volumetric analysis. Basically, they analyzed billions of different records of trash pickups and helped determine the appropriate volume breakdowns by block for the entire city. They were paid $1.6 million for this kind of research, which appears on pages 81-87 of the “Future of Trash” report. They did not make the policy recommendations, they did not come up with the idea for the official bin, and they did not recommend containerization—all of those determinations were made by the city’s policy leaders. 

Ok, so can you give me the SparkNotes on what the containerization plan is now?

We started with commercial containerization requirements. Businesses produce about half of the trash in New York City. There’s 24 million pounds of residential trash every day, and then another 20 million pounds of commercial trash out there. We started requiring containerization of all of that trash in phases. We did food-related businesses first, because they produce most of the trash that attracts rats. Then we did chain stores, because they produce a large volume of trash. Then in March of this year, that rule extended to all businesses. Now every business in the city is required to put their trash in a bin. 

Then, what we announced this week was the first residential containerization mandate for single family homes up through buildings with nine apartments in them. All of them will have to containerize effective November 12, 2024. 

What about high density residential?

The high density on-street containers have to be lifted with a special truck that did not exist in North America prior to us beginning this program. There are actually no North American cities with on-street containerized trash. When we put together the “Future of Trash” report, the trucking industry estimated it might take five years to design that new truck. We were actually able to do it in less than one year. We demoed that truck in February of this year—we had a press conference where the mayor jumped out of it and you saw it working on the street in Tribeca. We are now building enough of those trucks to do an entire district: Manhattan community board nine, which is West Harlem. We will have the trucks that we need in the spring of 2025. The containers will go on the street, and there will be a part of the city that looks like Barcelona for the first time.

NYC is a crowded place. Where are people going to put these bins?

The rule about where to store them when they’re not in use was written with a lot of flexibility, because we know every block and every street is different. If you can store it in a yard, great, if you have a front staircase, great, and you can also store it along the building. We saw from the business containerization phase that everyone can find a solution to this.

I think that an important point to make is no consideration was made about where the black bags go. Right now, the trash takes up our street space at all times, and so making a change, getting the trash away from the rats, containerizing those odors? Summer in New York is going to be very different.

Now for the age-old question: How will this help with the war on rats?

We know that human food is rat food. Historically, New York City has put 16 billion pounds of trash on the street every year. That’s what we call the all-night, all-you-can-eat buffet for the rats. Since work on containerization began, we have seen rat complaints to 311 decrease in 12 of the first 13 months. That’s incredible. Historically, in New York City, rat complaints only go in one direction. To see them go down is a huge accomplishment. 

Is there anything else you want our readers to know?

I actually think that the biggest change here is about expectations. For many decades, perhaps centuries, New York City has been full of people who accepted the black bags on the street as almost our birthright, something to be proud of, which is ludicrous! I mean, you see it even in response to this announcement, people going, “This will never work.” I believe that the biggest change to the design of our city is in believing it can be cleaned. I often say that one of our biggest enemies in the war on trash is cynicism.