That moment when New York City realized that it doesn't have to resort to clogging its curbs and sidewalks with loose bags of trash and can instead rely on sophisticated technology: Trash cans
Car brain in the comment thread...
Trash bags take up exactly as much space as a trash bag for exactly as long as it is on the sidewalk. Trash cans take up more than their maximum capacity regardless of how full they are, 24 hours a day.
And the tweeter's reply...
Despite having the best public transit system in America, New York City has 3 million on-street parking spaces, more than 95% of which are free, and your concern is… trash cans taking up too much space? Sorry, but if you love the rats so much, why don't you marry one?
The word 'bodega' makes me so irrationally angry.
You are not so special you need your own word for convenience store. Fuck you, you stupid city.
We need to have special subtypes of convenience store. E.g. I stand by the need to distinguish Spätkaufen from lesser convenience stores. :GDR-emblem:
Circlejerking about convenience storesNew Yorkers :solidarity: Foreigners in Japan
bodega
I lived in NYC for a while. A bodega is not a convenience store. Convenience stores by definition are chain stores. Bodegas tend to be family run and tend to be funky because of that.
A bodega is a small owner-operated convenience store serving hot and prepared food, often open late hours and typically with ethnic market influences. Most famously located on New York's street corners as an introduction by Puerto Ricans in New York City, they are renowned for their convivial culture and colorful character. There are an estimated 13,000 bodegas across the city.
'A bodega is a small owner-operated convenience store '
:guts-rage: :guts-rage: :guts-rage:
nothing will calm my fury. nothing
Commoditized 7-11-like shit is not a bodega. But - yes - some people still call bodegas convenience stores because bodegas are basically non-existent in most of the US.
this isn't a gotcha the word bodega just makes me angry
there is no debate here, only rage
All the convenience stores around me are owned by mom and pop tyrants, the only difference is that they let Shell sell gas in the parking lot.
Convenience stores by definition are chain stores.
Where did you get that definition from?
Convenience stores by definition are chain stores.
How? All the convenience stores around me are small businesses.
in new york, things are special because new yorkers believe they are. i mean, it's not like anywhere else in north america has a completely unique, owner-operated store selling a weird variety of convenience items and egg sandwiches. such a thing can only have ever happened in new york, where the magic of civilization happens. once you leave the boroughs, it's all just chains.
They look like the kind of stores that operate all over my town, all family run and filled with everything. Looks like it started from Puerto Rican immigrants and that checks out.
Where I was we called it a corner store and it was the only place white people were treated like potential shoplifters. So it had that going for it at least.
Begging NYC to just put elevators and platform screen doors in their subway stations, remove on-street parking, build one of those cool Danish incinerators, and install those nifty underground Dutch trash bins.
those nifty underground Dutch trash bins.
What wizardry is this? Underground!
Yeah but that would require us to spend money improving the subway and that shit ain't happening unless we get a maoist mayor who accepts belt and road money from China
those nifty underground Dutch trash bins
Isn't that just the subway?
Trash bags take up exactly as much space as a trash bag for exactly as long as it is on the sidewalk. Trash cans take up more than their maximum capacity regardless of how full they are, 24 hours a day.
That's why you have people take them inside when not in use. Why is this such a novel concept to americans? Other countries have had this solved for literally decades now.
It's only novel to New Yorkers, I'm pretty sure everybody else uses trash cans.
hey the rest of us have trash cans too, New Yorkers just fucking love garbage
To bring my bin in and out I would have to put down my burger and tear my eyes away from the latest slop I’m watching on Netflix for 45 seconds, this is America pal I’m exercising my constitutional right to just throw a fucking trash bag out the window into the gutter.
Do any of you recycle? We don't just take our bins out we split the contents into 4 different bins that are collected on different days and at different intervals.
A ton of places in the US have this as well, curbside recycling pick up. But for the last several years most of it doesn't really end up actually recycled anymore because it's unprofitable to do so. Only aluminum and steel cans usually, most plastic just ends up in a landfill
Paper? Cardboard?
We split into:
Glass, plastics, metals, food waste, paper/cardboard, general-other-waste, garden waste.
where i live, it's blue bin for glass, paper, cardboard, metals and plastics
green bin for garden waste
and black bin for everything elseInteresting, I'd ask which council but probably best not to say.
We get a separate bag for paper/card, separate bag box for glass/plastic, small box for the food waste, and then blue bin/red bin.
I assumed this was the case everywhere as it has been the same experience I've had at 3 different councils at opposite ends of the country for me.
huh, weird
not going to specify the council, but it's in east angliaIn Seattle, it's the three bins. I assume that's how it is in most places in the US that bother with recycling and compost.
Garden waste is usually separate here, not at all considered recycling and handled differently (and compared to everything else well and effectively) for the most part. Paper and cardboard get recycled pretty effectively on larger scales by commercial outfits that produce a lot of them to make it cost effective. Separate food waste is rarer for curbside pickup but some larger cities do it, or there are smaller nonprofit like volunteer programs to keep it out of landfills.
For everything else, most places here that do curbside pickup have commingled recycling, everything "recyclable" gets put together in one bin and then sorted at a facility. And since only the metals are profitable to recycle mostly every thing else ends up in a landfill either directly or eventually. A lot of rural areas have recycling centers that you have to take your stuff to and sort there and more of that ends up actually being recycled because it's not all jumbled up together.
A few years ago when China stopped taking the world's plastic recycling and the cost of oil dipped to a more economic level almost none of the plastic "recycled" in the developed world stays out of a landfill. Unless you know exactly where it goes or what happens to it, plastic usually doesn't get recycled often.
I feel like I did a really bad and haphazard job of drunkenly trying to explain this but hopefully you get the jist. Also why did I write an effort post on recycling, why do I know this useless information?
Interesting.
The separation of food waste reduces regular waste pickup by 30%, which is how they make it more affordable by reducing regular pickups to bi-weekly.
Food waste and garden waste both get composted and the offshooting methane gets used for electricity generation. This keeps it out of landfill where it would otherwise cause greenhouse gases.
Yeah I'm aware not much of the plastic is actually recycled. I think we need to ditch plastic for glass. Glass is nicer anyway. We have at least made some pretty significant improvements to the quantity of single-use plastics being used, and there is a complete ban on most of the worst ones coming into force in October.
I hate how much simpler and more effective it could be here with a modicum of effort and thought, ugh. And of course not having to rely on a profit motive would basically solve most of it, but even that notwithstanding there are so many less dumb ways to make it more feasible to actually recycle stuff here.
On the smallest of silver linings it's usually a really good example to show libs how personal responsibility doesn't effect positive change if large systems they operate in run counter to their efforts.
Oh, my god - that's definitely going to happen. Some awful tech bro with connections to Eric Adams is going to make some useless app with a name like NYCanIt. The app will "disrupt" the system because Adams made buidlings, stores, restaurants, etc buy the fucking thing "to bring New York City's garbage collect system into the 21st century". Some idiot libs will also buy the app to "support the mayor". The app will be a rat that eats money.
Sometime later news will break that Adams has a super-sketchy connection to the tech bro and highly likely some percentage of NYCanIt revenue goes right into the mayor's pocket. Adams will respond by saying "I am a Christian and a man of God. Ungodly people do not understand what a man like myself is trying to do to make the city better." Notably he'll entirely ignore the media's mewing requests he explain what his exact connection is to the tech bro and to NYCanIt.
We have a new rentable trashcan and we think you're going to love it
Through the use of advanced AI, we have devised a trash pick-up service with optimal routes which exclude the trashiest parts of the city, meaning you get faster* service!
* Subject to eligibility. Living in a trashier area may lead to ineligibility.
Commonwealth countries using cutesy terminology like 'wheelie bins' and 'the loo' to disguise how monstrous their societies actually are.
As opposed to the non-commonwealth USA with its hyper-masculine "dumpsters" and "restrooms" that makes the monstrosity plain for all to see.
They have those in the exurbs, and also at least some cities here in America.
Change the language and it is...
New York City continues its fight against pestilence. We must reduce the proliferation of trash and of rats. Henceforth restaurants and stores shall set out trash in metal cans instead of jury-rigged containers such as shipping crates.
I wonder if people were this resistant to the concept of indoor plumbing. "How dare you! I will piss and shit in a bowl and then throw it out onto the sidewalk every day!"
Somebody in this thread mentioned the underground trash cans that they have in the Netherlands. So much in the US comes down to a simple concept yet so much of the media continues writing 1,000,000s of more words to pretend that isn't true.
Companies and governments don't want to spend money for the public good. If there's a cheaper, - cough - shittier solution - they'll do that instead.
