Last week’s announcement that the Department of Sanitation is expanding its Empire Bin collection program to Community District 2 in Brooklyn included the news that it will expand to six districts, including Queens District 2, which includes Sunnyside, Hunters Point and Woodside.
The bins will be required for trash collection at all residential buildings with 10 units or more.
“We have done this already in West Harlem, where the installation of Empire Bins for trash from high-density residential buildings has proven extremely popular, leading to cleaner streets and sidewalks, and fewer rat sightings,” the DSNY said in an email.
The bins will be curbside and emptied by sanitation trucks with arms that come over the side. They can’t be placed by fire hydrants or in bike lanes.
The subject at some point always comes back to parking spaces. The DSNY said it does not consider parking spaces lost so much as it is public curb space being “repurposed to ensure that our streets are cleaner.”
A DSNY report on the program, available at tinyurl.com/5xwbhunt, breaks down the projected number of parking spaces by each community district on pages 71-73.
Accommodating the bins in CD 2 in Queens will replace an estimated 512 parking spaces, or 1.3 percent of all in the district. Queens on the whole would lose 4,322 spaces or 0.58, second lowest only to Staten Island and far less than the projected citywide average of 1.52 percent.
“In a great number of districts, the repurposing of street space necessary to finally stop forcing us to live around piles of smelly, disgusting trash bags will be in the 4 to 5 percent range,” the DSNY said. “This is an extremely worthwhile trade-off.”
The agency also said the citywide projection of 29,842 spaces comes in far below the 2023 DSNY estimate of about 150,000.
“We have found a way to get all the trash off every street using only one fifth of the space,” the DSNY said.