Three million lucky New York City residents currently enjoy an “all-you-can-eat, all-night buffet,” totally free of charge. But the city’s mayor has plans to mercilessly cut off the food supply…to the city’s millions of rats. And it starts with how human New Yorkers dispose of their garbage
Lesson summary
Hi there, it’s Jeff again for another Plain English lesson. This one is number 638, so you can find the transcript and full lesson resources at PlainEnglish.com/638. JR is the producer, he has made sure everything is up and ready for you right there—PlainEnglish.com/638.
I’ve got a great story for you today. New York City is trying to control its rat population, and its number-one effort focuses on trash collection. If you’ve been to New York, you know it’s a problem. Will America’s biggest city finally solve its generations-old trash problem? The new mayor is trying.
That’s today’s story. In the second half of today’s lesson, I’ll show you what it means to “get rid of” something—this is a very common expression. I can’t believe we haven’t done it in 637 previous episodes, but today is the day. Let’s get going.
New York fights rats with trash containerization
The Empire State Building. The Brooklyn Bridge. The lights of Times Square. Central Park. And a big, stinking, pile of trash on the street. These are all famous sights in New York City. If you’ve been there, you know.
New York is the country’s financial and media capital, the beating heart of American capitalism. But any visitor, any commuter, and any New Yorker who walks on the street has to walk by enormous piles of black garbage bags, left haphazardly on the sidewalk.
This is how New York gets rid of its trash—yes, in the year 2024. Building managers put their tenants’ trash in black bags. They tie the black bags up. And on trash day, they leave them in a pile right on the sidewalk, where everyone has to walk by them—waist-high, sometimes shoulder-high mounds of garbage. I don’t have to tell you what that smells like on a hot summer day.
The city’s commissioner of sanitation calls this an “all-you-can-eat, all-night buffet” for rats. And it is an embarrassment for a city that prides itself on being a leader.
But New York is finally getting serious about its trash problem. It’s all part of the mayor’s war on rats.
The city has mandated that, starting this year, small residential buildings and all businesses containerize their trash. That’s a fancy way of saying: they have to put their trash bags in a trash can, with a lid.
This might not sound revolutionary to you. But putting trash in a container is a big step for New York. The challenge is that New York City doesn’t have alleys, so trash has to go out the front of the building. The same door that residents use to walk into the building: that’s the door used to take the trash out.
And the buildings are very close to the street, so there’s no logical place to put a trash container. That’s why New Yorkers’ trash ends up sitting on the sidewalk, in black bags, waiting to be collected. The bags often rip. They ooze unidentified liquid. And they smell bad. Now, though, the city is ready to move to containerization.
To start, all commercial businesses will have to use hard-lidded trash containers. And residential buildings of nine or fewer units must do the same. The city estimates this will cover 70 percent of the city’s trash. On dense residential blocks, the city plans to install containers on the street; from initial drawings, they’ll look like giant laundry bins. In other places, building owners will have to purchase hard-lidded trash cans themselves.
If you think it’s unpleasant walking by a mound of leaky, smelly garbage bags, then spare a thought for the workers who have to collect all this trash. Now, they pick up all the bags with their hands and load them into garbage trucks.
There must be a better way—and there is. Starting in 2026, building owners will be required to use specific bins from the city. These will be compatible with side-loading trash collection trucks.
Here’s how a side-loading truck works. A mechanical arm reaches out the side of the truck, grabs a trash can, lifts it up over the top of the truck, dumps the contents into the back, and returns the bin to its original position—all without intervention from a sanitation worker. This is faster and more sanitary, not to mention more pleasant for the workers.
Household and business trash isn’t the only problem, though: the trash cans for pedestrians on the street also attract rats. The city has 22,000 green baskets with a mesh design—that means, the trash baskets are full of holes. That’s right: they’re perfect for rats to squeeze in and chow down . The city held a design competition for a new street-level trash bin. The winner is more resistant to rats and is easier for workers to empty. Eventually, the city will replace all the mesh litter baskets with the new version.
The new trash effort will take many years. There is still no great solution for the tall residential buildings. But if this works, then New York could move from trash collection laggard to leader. Complaints about rats are already falling.
I lived in New York City for three years, in Midtown, West 55th Street, not far from Columbus Circle. I lived on a side street, in a five-story building. I was on the top floor with no elevator—but that’s another story.
Anyway, we would take our trash bags from the kitchen or whatever—we’d put them in a building trash can. And an employee of the building would pack our trash into the standard, big black bags and just throw the bags out on the street the night before the trash collector would come by.
And when you picture a side, residential street in New York, I’m sorry to say, one of the images you think of is mounds and mounds of black trash bags. Future generations won’t believe this was true. Visitors, sometimes, were in awe. They couldn’t believe it. “This is normal?” They would ask. Yes, it’s normal. But maybe not for long.
Great stories make learning English fun
