Several months ago, before the budget crisis took over city politics for the summer, I had been emailing with my council member and their staff about trash collection. I had not gotten far in the past in asking for help, and my hope was that a new representative would be more responsive. They were, although things eventually hit a wall for a bit with the budget chaos. I’m hoping to pick up the discussion again soon. These are my observations as to what I think is driving the litter problem. Despite the recent budget cuts, I think a lot of the problems are caused by top-down policy decisions, and fixes are possible.

Removal of Public Cans

My street has lost multiple public trash cans over the past few years, despite a dramatic increase in population. It’s gotten to the point where locals are pinning plastic bags fences to try to cope with the litter problem. Why are the cans being removed? Last year, I was able to speak with a city sanitation worker during their shift nearby. They told me that it was city policy to remove cans that had excessive amounts of household trash.

This was confirmed earlier this year when I reported an overflowing trash can via SeeClickFix, and a sanitation employee responded by threatening to remove the can entirely. This kind of response is both a punishment for law-abiding residents, and frankly, a self-serving excuse to do less work and likely save money. I do not blame individual workers, who are swamped and underappreciated, but a change needs to come in policy from the top.

This policy alarmed me for a few reasons. It was collective punishment, with all local residents (and visitors, as I live on a major artery) being punished for the actions of a few. That meant in practice that any ones left were getting even more dramatically overstuffed with household garbage bags. There didn’t seem to be any mechanism in place to educate the offenders, and/or proactively address the root causes of their behavior.

The technique of punitively removing trash cans is not a new one, with one of the more prominent examples being then-mayor Gavin Newsom’s controversial 2007 plan in San Francisco to remove nearly half of their public trash cans, which was partially reversed within a decade [SFist]. In Jersey City, the results of removing cans are already clear to me, with a dramatic increase in ground litter on my street.

Household Trash A Big Source

There are multiple causes of litter in the city, but the household trash one is an easy one to diagnose. For large residential buildings, they usually have a central trash room, where maintenance workers can take everything out to the street on collection day. If you live in a duplex, this is a much bigger problem, especially if your landlord is maintaining it on a shoestring budget. There may not be anywhere to store bags of trash before collection day in smaller homes, and if you work odd hours, the path of least resistance very well might be illegal dumping in a public can. I personally have seen residents in some of these buildings putting personal trash bags in the public cans on a Sunday afternoon.

Containerization As A Solution

It would be wonderful if Jersey City would copy New York City’s lead on containerization, joining most of the rest of the civilized world. We could try to deploy containers in areas with high levels of violations; unfortunately, these are also likely to be areas where the possibility of losing any parking spaces to on-street trash containers would be very politically charged. We should make sure that every resident knows the law, and if any multi-family homes don’t have cans, we need to understand why, and fix it.

Another option would be increased penalties and enforcement on violators, but it seems difficult to catch them in the act or find evidence of a violation. Many elected officials may not even be keen on the idea of such enforcement. Lastly, we could switch from the current open designs, to something with a flap or cover that makes disposing of bulky household trash more burdensome, although one questions the ability and willingness of Regional Industries to do anything more than the absolute bare minimum with collection.

Household trash is a primary cause of losing cans, but there are other factors driving litter too. Industrial areas too are rife with illegal dumping, some clearly by businesses. Politicians may wince at punishing residents, but we as a city need to restore our capacity to enforce the law on this activity, if only because we might be leaving a lot of revenue on the table in exchange for worse quality of life. It’s true for our endemic speeding and traffic violations, and it’s true for rampant trash and litter on our streets.

Exploring Resident-Driven Solutions

Absent city action, is there anything that residents can do? Municipal services have degraded across the board in many ways during the past few years, and one notable example is that there used to be more official volunteer trash cleanups. You still see these more often in homeowner-heavy areas, especially if they have a registered neighborhood association, but they’re much rarer in renter-heavy ones.

I spoke with my council member’s staff, who explained how I could work with DPW to organize one of my own, and I did. It worked relatively well in the moment, with decent participation that allowed a group of us to clean up a fair bit around a local park. Maybe the city can do a better job of publicizing that this is an option, but scaling it could be difficult. The bigger problem was in the follow-up. Literally a few days after our cleanup left the park in good shape, it was covered in trash again.

The point here is not to be a scold about activities that create trash; in fact, more high-quality third spaces for the public would do wonders in many respects. We need to put the tools in place to make cleanliness the easier choice for all. If we had plentiful public trash cans, placed in strategic spots with high foot traffic, I believe that would go a long way to solving the issue. There are a lot of problems that are hard to solve, but can we at least change some of these policies, try to make it easier for people to throw out their trash, and make our neighborhoods look like we all take more pride in where we live?

Author’s note: After writing this piece (but before publication), Jersey City DPW started a pilot program to remove even more trash cans from the streets.