Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Gregory Anderson, commissioner of the New York City Department of Sanitation, installed the first of more than 700 residential empire bins in Brooklyn’s Community District 2 on Oct. 29.
District 2 spans across Downtown Brooklyn, Boerum Hill, Brooklyn Heights, Fulton Ferry, DUMBO, Vinegar Hill, Fort Greene, Clinton Hill and Brooklyn Navy Yard.
The stationary bins will replace large piles of trash bags across the district. The Department of Sanitation will install the bins outside all buildings with more than 30 units, and certain 10-30 unit buildings that opted into the program.
“Every New Yorker deserves clean streets and sidewalks,” Mamdani said. “For too long, New Yorkers have had to walk past mountains of trash bags piled high on the curb that offer fears for rats and stink up our streets.”
The containerization rollout, Mamdani said, will also make the jobs of the Department of Sanitation workers easier and safer.
The announcement also marked the beginning of a much larger rollout. The Department of Sanitation is planning for six more community districts to receive bins in the next five years, including Brooklyn Community District 8 which covers Prospect Heights, Crown Heights and Weeksville.
“This is not another pilot,” Anderson said. “Putting screws in the ground here in Brooklyn marks the beginning of a dramatic transportation of New York City’s streetscape.”
Property managers will be able to access the bins with a key card or smartphone app, and sanitation workers will service the containers using automated side-loading trucks.
The plan is modeled after the 1,100-bin rollout in Upper Manhattan in 2025, which helped trash containerization throughout the winter.
Full containerization of Brooklyn Community District 2 is expected to be complete by the end of the fall.
The citywide project aims to be complete by the end of 2031 and is expected to bring more than 6,500 bins to more than 3,500 buildings.
