Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photos: Getty

Mike Plotkin, who’s been a New York City sanitation worker for 20 years, recently noticed something happening at his garage on Staten Island. In the last 14 months, there have been 15 incidents in which one of his colleagues has gotten stuck by a needle someone tossed in the trash alongside their used tissues and Oreo wrappers. That number felt unprecedented. “When I first started, working out of a Coney Island garage, the rate was about one stick every other year,” Plotkin, who runs a blog called Behind the Truck, wrote in early June. “Sometimes longer.” And he had a theory about the apparent increase in needle sticks: GLP-1’s. “Hundreds of thousands of Americans are doing this now. All of them new to needles, most of them with no medical training.”

It was a compelling enough theory that I reached out to the Sanitation Department to see if they’d noticed anything similar. It turns out that what Plotkin had noticed at his garage appears to be part of a citywide trend. Per DSNY, in 2019, there were just 25 cases of sanitation workers getting stuck by a needle while on the job. This could be an undercount, since not everyone who gets jabbed reports it, but it was a baseline. By 2024, there were 36 reported cases. And in 2025, there were 46. As of June 3 of this year, there have already been 35 needle injuries, which puts the city on track for about 83 by year’s end. A spokesman for the department, Vincent Gragnani, declined to speculate on what might be behind the rise in incidents, but he did offer a reminder that syringes, clean or used, should be thrown out in a sharps container — the red ones with biohazard signs. Failing that, any heavy-duty plastic, such as a detergent bottle, that you label “home sharps” should do. (People can also take their used needles to a hospital or a pharmacy that accepts sharps drop-offs.) “Disregarding these rules endangers the health and safety of our Sanitation Workers, which is our top priority,” says Gragnani.

But we are, increasingly, a city of injectors, right? Beyond the more familiar terrain of diabetics, IVF patients, people using hormone therapy, and intravenous users of illicit drugs, people have been turning themselves into lab rats for new wellness frontiers. Per a 2025 Gallup survey, 12.4 percent of people nationwide said they were using semaglutide drugs — and that’s to say nothing of the new crop of cosmetic treatments that people have been sourcing through luxe longevity clinics, telehealth portals, and, in some cases, from China via WhatsApp. Dr. Neil Paulvin tells me that his midtown office has seen a 50 percent increase in patient inquiries about peptides this year, and William Allen, a marketing manager at the West Village–based Extension Health, tells me peptide orders to his clinic have essentially doubled compared to what he was seeing in 2025. It seemed worth asking around, so I started reaching out to people in the city using peptides, semaglutides, semi-illicit hyaluronic acid infusions, and other at-home cosmetic injectables about how they discard their spent needles.

Grace, one of the people I talked to, had until recently been using a compounded semaglutide. After scheduling an appointment with an online telehealth provider based in Illinois, she was sent a vial of a GLP-1, a package of syringes, and a prerecorded video on how to take the weight-loss drug. In the nearly five-minute clip, a blonde woman with a heavy midwestern accent instructs viewers on how to draw the medication from the vial and where to inject it on the body. This woman did not, however, say anything about how to dispose of the needles. So Grace just tossed them in the trash uncapped. “I was more concerned with my roommates seeing there was a needle in the trash than I was about having a lid on it,” she says. Another person I spoke to who’s been dabbling in peptides since late last year says he also tosses his needles in the trash — but he caps them. Did the prescribing health-care provider talk to him about disposal? “It never came up,” he says. (This seems to be the case for a lot of users considering the volume of posts on semaglutide and peptide-related sub-Reddits about proper syringe disposal.) A third person I talked to says that while she ordered a sharps container off Amazon to dispose of her used semaglutide syringes, a friend who gave her a tutorial on self-injecting just tossed hers, loosely capped, into the trash. But why would someone do that? “I don’t think there was any thought process about it one way or another,” she says. (Perhaps it goes without saying, but Gragani says capping and tossing isn’t a secure way to discard old needles. Caps can come loose.)

This is, of course, anecdotal. There are likely many explanations for the rise in needle pricks, and for every injectables novice throwing uncapped needles in the trash, there are certainly many more who know how to dispose of their used needles properly (or at the very least bother to Google it). The providers I talked to were also insistent that needle-discard best practices are very much part of how they’re talking to their patients. “I strictly advise my patients never to toss used needles directly into the household trash or recycling bins,” Jennifer Levine, a plastic surgeon on the Upper East Side, says. And Mandeep Singh, a registered nurse at Atlas Men’s Health Clinic, which has an office in midtown, says he and his colleagues give clients being prescribed peptides or whatever else print-out instructions on how to dispose of their syringes. No patient left behind. “We give a pamphlet out to the testosterone guys; we have print-outs that have these instructions on them,” he says. He was just as surprised as I was to hear that some people actually need them. “You’d think it’s common sense.”

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