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Ladies and gentlemen, meet NYC's latest garbage truck: an Italian-born, automated, side-loading machine that Mayor Eric Adams and his team truly hope will revolutionize the city's much-talked-about refuse business.
Here’s a demo of New York City’s new automatic side loading garbage truck lifting large on street containers. A pilot program is expanding to all of Community Board District 9 in West Harlem. pic.twitter.com/d9NmXaupOC
— Emma G. Fitzsimmons (@emmagf) February 1, 2024
Officials unveiled the new prototype yesterday, which is intended to basically replace the sanitation trucks that have been roaming around town for years now. Workers will no longer have to throw in heaps of trash bags in the back of truck. Instead, this "superwagon" will, according to an official press release, "service the stationary on-street containers that high-density buildings will use to containerize their trash."
Developed in Torino, Italy before production phases in Hicksville and Brooklyn, New York, the truck of the future is a common staple across other American cities.
However, according to the New York Times, the machine could not be rolled out locally because "the city is so dense and its trash so voluminous" as to require larger trash containers than the ones seen in the U.S., more reminiscent of the vessels used in Europe. This new specialized truck accommodates those larger sized containers.
At the moment, the superwagon is the only one of its kind belonging to the city's fleet and it will be used as part of a pilot program in uptown Manhattan, where residents are currently being asked to throw their trash in large shared containers that are placed on the streets.
Speaking of those shared bins, which are a major part of Adams' push to solve the city's garbage problem: the pilot program currently in place requires requires resides of large residential buildings across ten blocks of West Harlem to use the large shared containers for their trash. As of yesterday, though, the guidelines expanded to include all of Community Board 9 in West Harlem.
"Under the new, expanded pilot, buildings with 31+ units will be required use one or more stationary on-street containers (these will be assigned to the building rather than shared)," explains an official spokesperson for the NYC Department of Sanitation.
Buildings with between one and nine units, on the other hand, will make use of individual "wheelie bins" instead.
Despite the fact that the efforts will decrease the number of parking spots around Manhattan, we are partial to any project that seeks to clean up New York. The effort has been a long time coming.