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NYC is the only American city I know where garbage is just left on the sidewalk for hours every day. I imagine simply requiring bins/dumpsters would absolutely
by scoofy 4y ago
NYC is the only American city I know where garbage is just left on the sidewalk for hours every day.
I imagine simply requiring bins/dumpsters would absolutely devastate the rat populations.
- Scoundreller 4y agoImport raccoons. Works for Toronto. What’s NYC’s problem? Not enough detached housing in downtown maybe.
- woodruffw 4y agoDon't worry, we've got raccoons too[1]! [1]: https://nypost.com/2021/08/21/raccoons-terrorize-bronx-nypd-tow-pound/ https://nypost.com/2021/08/21/raccoons-terrorize-bronx-nypd-...
- 22289d 4y agoI live in an area where raccoons are common and I'd rather have the rats. Those things live off of trash too and they're scary, aggressive and dangerous. And they're rabid. Rats run from humans. Raccoons attack them. Try to get between a raccoon and it's trash and good chance you come away with rabies.
- ilyt 4y ago"See that one weird trick on how NYC solved homeless problem" video of some people running away from racoons
- Scoundreller 4y ago> good chance you come away with rabies. Naw, they've tested them in Toronto: none had rabbies since 1997. A sick raccoon usually has distemper, which you have nothing to worry about as a human. It's the 2-3% of bats with rabies you have to worry about. https://www.toronto.ca/community-people/health-wellness-care/health-programs-advice/rabies-prevention-and-control/rabies-in-animals/ https://www.toronto.ca/community-people/health-wellness-care... > Try to get between a raccoon and it's trash Why would I do that?
- steve_adams_86 4y agoI’m so torn on the bats thing. Many people have spent countless hours exposed to them and never gotten sick, and very few people get rabies from bats at all, so the risk appears very low. I suppose the people around them the most follow certain safety precautions that regular people don’t. Although cases are exceedingly rare (1-3 per year in the USA I think?), evidently that shoots up occasionally: https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2022/p0106-human-rabies.html https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2022/p0106-human-rabies.h... That link does make 5 cases up from 0 seem like a big deal, but… A chunk of that time was during quarantine time, and dropping from 1-3 to 0 isn’t so profound (though it’s far preferable, of course). M In any case, I wouldn’t wish rabies on anyone. I suppose I just wish we were less afraid of bats and able to help them flourish. Apart from rabies, they are incredible animals that do a lot of good for their ecosystems.
- ak217 4y agoBats are uniquely dangerous to all other mammals because of how their immune system is different (due to the unique metabolic requirements of flight, they have evolved a system which allows viruses to remain active in the body instead of fully suppressing them). We knew this before COVID-19, COVID-19 is not the last bat-borne viral disease that will be a problem, and it is no coincidence that it came from bats. Bats are amazing but the way to let them flourish is to leave them alone and maximize conservation. Humans should not be commingling with bats (or even researching them as nonchalantly as we have been) until we get MUCH better at biomedical engineering and immunotherapy.
- steve_adams_86 4y agoThat’s fascinating. I’m surprised I’d never heard that little detail about bats before. Or maybe I did, but didn’t realize the significance of it and it didn’t fully register. I agree about staying away from bats. I mean, if there’s a risk of rabies at all, I don’t want to go near a single one of them. But like you say, letting them be and conserving (or even restoring) their habitats would go a long way in supporting them. Ideally there would be no human interaction element. I suppose people worry that if bats flourish, we will encounter them more often. I’m not sure how likely that is at various scales. Say their populations double, would we see twice as many bats and see a doubling of rabies cases? I’m not sure.
- jelliclesfarm 4y agoRaccoons are actually friendly and can be had as pets in many states.
- steve_adams_86 4y agoThe raccoons that visit my yard are pretty cool with me being around and I can watch them from fairly close. I don’t think they’d be anything like pets but I like seeing them around. They’re curious about me, and as long as I don’t stare or move too quickly, they just dig in my garden (they mostly seem to eat these large beetle grubs) and wrestle each other. I wouldn’t interact with them, but I’m glad they aren’t afraid of me anymore. Years ago I accidentally cornered one in my shop and it let out the most terrifying guttural noise I’ve ever heard from such a small body. These days I have a feeling they would be uncomfortable but not in attack mode. I was about 5 feet from one while putting trash in my bin a few weeks back and it just watched me from around the corner of my shed. When I moved here, I either wouldn’t have been given the chance to see it there or it would have scrambled up a tree. Overall I think they’re pretty laid back animals, but we tend to scare the hell out of them. Watching the babies wrestle in the grass is a real joy. It’s also incredible fascinating to watch they way their hands work. They aren’t as dexterous as us, or perhaps I should say not as generally so, but they have a kind of dexterity that is almost entrancing at times. There is a lot of spatial awareness and capability in their movements. As long as they aren’t in my house, shed, or shop, then whatever. I’m happy to share some space. But yeah, definitely not pet material for me.
- NoRagrets 4y agoIndeed. I hear you. They are still wild animals. I have seen a couple of people have them as pets..fixed them and vaccinated etc. it seems a tad cruel to want to domesticate a wild animal.
- steve_adams_86 4y agoI think so. I wonder if they essentially go crazy being cooped up. Dogs and cats are generally accustomed to it, but even they can become extremely depressed. Come to think of it, I get depressed from being indoors too much.
- joecool1029 4y agoFuck that, NYC already has raccoons and those little trash pandas can't get where the rats can and they are too busy eating pizza and other junk. Poison is also bad as its an indiscriminate killer that wipes out the pests predators. What NYC needs is to overturn Ghouliani's ban on ferrets and release a ton into the subways. I'll also take reintroduction of least weasels or stoats. Unlike the omnivore raccoon, ferrets are an obligate carnivore. There's something like a 2500 year history of using ferrets to hunt for rats. One of a ton of old sources on it: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/42305/42305-h/42305-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/42305/42305-h/42305-h.htm EDIT: More on NYC's history with ferrets and the ban, https://observer.com/2015/01/new-yorks-most-misunderstood-mammal/ https://observer.com/2015/01/new-yorks-most-misunderstood-ma...
- JoyfulTurkey 4y agoRaccoons poop can be particularly nasty. Raccoon roundworm eggs are incredibly hardy. Thankfully human cases are incredibly rare, but I wouldn’t want to increase the population I am around.
- puchatek 4y agoAh yes, the Australian solution to every pest problem. Worked out great! /s
- Scoundreller 4y agoproblem with Australia is that they don't have a harsh winter to freeze all introduced gorillas.
- vrc 4y agoNo space for dumpsters especially in Manhattan. No alleys. Same for bins. They’d either be too big or too small. That’s the rub.
- bobbylarrybobby 4y agoThere's plenty of space, it's just all occupied by cars.
- mjhay 4y agoWhoa buddy, we gotta keep our priorities here. Cars are more important than pedestrians, cyclists, and human lives. What makes garbage so special?
- TeMPOraL 4y ago> What makes garbage so special? It accumulates fast.
- birdyrooster 4y agoSo, biofuel?
- TeMPOraL 4y agoSure. Which brings us back to the problem: NYC lacks the infrastructure to efficiently collect the trash and turn it into biofuel, because all the space is taken by cars. It's a bad balance of priorities between fuel production and fuel consumption.
- mjhay 4y agoFor the same amount of surface space, dumpsters would take up less space than loose bags of garbage. Other cities with comparable population densities have no problem doing this.
- iancmceachern 4y ago
- heather45879 4y agoComposting could help too if there was a way to separate food waste from other garbage. If there’s less food there’s less rats. But it’s probably too crowded I dunno. Maybe people should start eating the rats… lol
- cameldrv 4y agoI was just in NY and I saw a fair number of trash bins on the curb for the first time. Maybe things are starting to change.
- teawrecks 4y agoMeanwhile, Tokyo is spotless and has no trashcans anywhere.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tomphoolery 4y agoIn Manhattan at least, trash is picked up every single day. And yet there's still tons of garbage on the street. It's a problem of scale. Honestly, I got no problems with the rats. They're kinda cute actually.
- bamboozled 4y agoIt’s not a problem of scale because it doesn’t happen in Tokyo which is a more populace city and I’ve never seen a rat there.
- tkgally 4y agoI’ve been living in Tokyo and Yokohama since 1983, and I have seen rats a handful of times in Tokyo: once in a subway station, walking along the tracks; a couple of times in Shibuya in the early morning, picking through garbage; once or twice in residential neighborhoods. One sighting every five years is not a lot, I admit. Twenty years ago, I knew someone who worked for one of the large, upscale department stores, and she said they spent a lot of money and effort to try to control the rats in their elegant but old and porous building—which, like most department stores here, had many food shops in the basement.
- bamboozled 4y agoYeah, I mean they do exist, and maybe you’re right , more effort goes into it. But the black trash bags smashed open lying around New York is not cool
- bobthepanda 4y agoThe issue is that it even lays on the street. In some European cities an area the size of a parking space is a few chutes into an underground dumpster. It moves the trash (and the rats looking for it) out of sight.
- saghm 4y ago> Honestly, I got no problems with the rats. They're kinda cute actually Yeah, I know it can be an unpopular opinion, but I've always found them adorable, and after having gerbils in high school it's hard for me not to just think of bigger versions of them (obviously they do have other appearance differences, like the tail having less hair and the snout being more pronounced, but the way they move and act is surprisingly reminiscent of my past pets). Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to try to pet them like I would a domesticated pet rat, but they mostly just hang out in the background and don't seem to have any more desire to approach people than people have to approach them. I suspect that there are public health reasons for wanting to curtail the population, but people seem so disproportionately disgusted by them compared to other public health hazards that it's hard for me not to wonder if the political desire to get rid of them is influenced by that.
- IgorPartola 4y agoOh let me tell you the story of Worcester, MA. Now Worcester (pronounced woostah) is much smaller than NYC but still nothing tiny. It has city trash pickup but instead of taxing its citizens for this service it came up with the ingenious plan to charge people for usage. If you want to throw out some trash what you do is you go to a nearby convenience or liquor store and buy these tiny flimsy yellow bags for a fairly steep price (when I lived there it was nearly $2/bag), and then you just put your garbage in the bags and put it on the curb and it’ll get picked up. This way those who generate more garbage pay more and people would be encouraged to generate less garbage. Genius, right? No, wrong. So wrong. As I’m sure you can already see, it’s far easier to just leave your trash on the street than to take a trip to the city-ordained liquor stores to buy the approved bags. And with the bags being tiny and flimsy you don’t have much of an option for anything larger to get tossed. Got a big pillow? A dirty paint bucket? A 2x4? Just leave that anywhere. It was honestly one of the dirtiest places I’ve ever lived.
- chrisandchris 4y agoInteresting. That's basically how Switzerland works. And we are working quite fine.
- rablackburn 4y agoInteresting, that’s basically the model a lot of Japanese towns use. The difference is, if you leave garbage without the right bag/on the street your neighbours are going to dump it back on your front door. Larger item dumping is still a problem though. Some places issues coupons for a certain number of trips to the dump/year for local residents that can help.
- whalesalad 4y agoNYC is so gross. I can’t comprehend the appeal.
- lordnacho 4y agoDrone trash bins that drive around the city and go to some central depot to be emptied.
- sschueller 4y agoThey need this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhbhvdvTWUg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhbhvdvTWUg if there is no space for dumpsters.
- whazor 4y agoSame in Amsterdam, they have sensors and get emptied when full. Though Amsterdam still has rats, people still throw too much food on the streets.
- Taiyou 4y agoIn NYC there are certain days at certain hours when garbage in black trash bags can be left at specific spots on the sidewalk/streets by the residential building supers. There are rules to this, if garbage was left on the sidewalk everyday at all hours of the day then every block would have would lined up with garbage on the street.
- rajman187 4y agothere are some boroughs in London which don't have bins and residents just leave piles of trash out on collection day. No rats but rather foxes https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/15/urban-foxes-are-they-fantastic-or-a-growing-menace https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/15/urban-fo...
- Aromasin 4y agoNo rats? I must have lived in a very different London.
- nibbleshifter 4y agoYou get rats and foxes.
- alex_duf 4y agoIn fairness bags don't stop foxes
- KoftaBob 4y agoThey are doing just that, with NYC's new "Clean Curbs" program: https://www.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/227-22/mayor-adams-clean-curbs-waste-containerization-pilot-expansion-all-five-boroughs#/0 https://www.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/227-22/mayor-ad... This is what the new trash receptacles look like that businesses will be required to use: https://citibin.com/ https://citibin.com/
- grumple 4y agoPhilly does the same thing. You put your trash out on the sidewalk the night before pickup (or morning). You can put out a bin, but since there's no room to lift them by machine, bags get pulled out of the bin and often get ripped open. The building next door has dumpsters... I see rats running back and forth to them.