Trash Bag Mountain Ban Starts 2024 For All NYC Businesses

NEW YORK CITY — Trash bag mountains soon will shrink from New York City's streetscape.

All commercial businesses in the city will have to put their trash in secure, lidded containers starting March 1, 2024, said Mayor Eric Adams.

Adams said his announcement Tuesday actually targets "Public Enemy Number 1": rats.

The city's mountains of black trash bags no more will be a "rat buffet," said the rodent-hating mayor. The upcoming container rule will take 20 million pounds of trash, or half the city's waste, off the rats' plate, he said.

"Starting in March, all of those black bags will be off our streets," he said. "Our streets will look cleaner, they will smell cleaner, and across not just the borough of Manhattan but across the entire five boroughs."

The business garbage change builds off several recent rules that transform how the city deals with trash.

First, the city changed garbage set-out times to later in the day.

Then, this summer the city's restaurants, bodegas, delis and chain businesses had to start putting trash in containers.

The changes came with a soft touch crackdown by sanitation workers, who issued more than 22,000 trash warnings to businesses during a one-month grace period, officials said.

Jessica Tisch, the city's sanitation commissioner, said rat sightings have decreased 20 percent citywide since the trash changes began a year ago.

"It is getting results," she said.