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Issue #379

A digital collage showing two raccoons scavenging through litter on a sidewalk next to a wooden-slatted trash can in a park.

Sunday, February 1, 2025

Why American cities pay over $3,000 for one trash can

High-tech, designer trash bins are popular with local governments. But many people just want a regular can on the corner.

BY MARK DENT

High-tech, designer trash bins are popular with local governments. But many people just want a regular can on the corner.

When Danny Sauter campaigned door-to-door in northeastern San Francisco in 2024, he expected that residents would be united over concerns about homelessness and housing costs. But a surprising issue kept popping up: trash cans.

Though San Francisco has ~3k of them on its infamously grimy sidewalks, plenty of residents felt like there weren't enough.

"People would say, 'I can walk 10 blocks without seeing a trash can,' or 'there used to be a trash can on this corner for five years, and then it disappeared overnight,'" says Sauter, who won election as District 3 supervisor.

Early last year, he requested that the city put 1.5k more cans in his district. He knows it won't solve everything but believes a strategy of "more trash cans and more pickups" would create a cleaner environment.

Public trash cans are a messy problem for American cities. Some municipalities believe that having fewer trash cans reduces litter. And some spend upwards of $3k for a single trash can, believing premium designs and technology will solve their problems, only for residents to report similar cleanliness issues as before.

What would seem to be a simple concept — placing enough bins in walkable, trafficked areas and servicing them frequently — is a fraught endeavor, one that feeds into the growing belief that the government can't get things done.

Why are public trash cans so complicated and expensive?

Walt Disney, Tokyo, and Gavin Newsom

Start a conversation with somebody who is interested in trash, and they're likely to bring up one of two places where there practically isn't any: Disney World or Tokyo.

Legend has it that Walt Disney researched customer behavior at amusement parks and concluded that deploying trash cans every 30 feet discouraged littering, leading to an abundance of trash cans on Disney properties. The Magic Kingdom has an underground trash compacting system, and Travel + Leisure once reported that all employees, from custodians to Cinderella actresses, are required to pick up any piece of litter they come upon.

A crowded street leading to Cinderella Castle at Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom, featuring two brown trash cans placed close together.

Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom. Notice the two trash cans close to each other on the left. (Gary Hershorn/Getty Images)

Tokyo, relative to America's large cities, is spotless, too. But unlike Disney World it has very few public trash cans, a policy resulting, in part, from a doomsday cult using sarin in plastic bags during a 1995 attack.

"I have colleagues here at Public Works who go on vacation in Japan and, to the T, every one of them who's come back the first thing they say is not, 'I just saw beautiful mountains or went to a tea house,'" says Rachel Gordon, director of policy and communications for the San Francisco Public Works department. "It's like, 'Oh my God, there's no litter on the street, and there are no garbage cans.'"

Nineteen years ago in San Francisco, then-mayor Gavin Newsom took a page from the Tokyo playbook. As part of an anti-litter initiative, San Francisco started removing public trash cans, a few hundred at first but eventually more than 33% of the city's total, bringing its number from ~5k to ~3k.

Residents complained, but Newsom insisted that having a large quantity of trash cans at regular intervals led to illegal dumping by households and businesses. Fewer trash cans would discourage this practice, he believed, and allow more space for pedestrians with handheld trash.

Resident satisfaction with the city's cleanliness has stayed roughly the same in surveys since Newsom's trash can cull, although with grades in the C+ range, San Francisco isn't earning any comparisons to Tokyo.

Gavin Newsom speaking into a microphone while pointing off-camera during his time as mayor of San Francisco.

Gavin Newsom's mayoral administration led an initiative to reduce the number of San Francisco's trash cans. (Michael Macor/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)

Other cities have discovered that removing trash cans made things worse.

After the New York City Transit Authority removed bins at a few dozen stations from 2011 to 2014, an audit found that at stations where receptacles were removed the average amount of bags needed for collecting litter increased 3.2% and average track fires increased 33%.
Philadelphia tested out various numbers of trash receptacles at select parks and commercial corridors, measuring the amount of waste, litter, and staff hours needed for pickup. It found that more trash cans correlated with less litter and fewer trash cans correlated with more litter. (The Philadelphia Citizen opined on the discovery with the headline "Water is Wet.")

Syon Bhanot, a Swarthmore University behavioral and public economist who helped with the research in Philadelphia, says the city ran the experiment because, as in San Francisco, significant amounts of litter in Philly come from "short dumping," when people illegally unload garbage in public areas.

Bhanot says social norms can influence behavior around waste and litter. For instance, if people expect consistent curbside trash pickup, they might have less incentive to illegally dump a bag next to a public trash receptacle in the middle of the week, reducing the need for receptacles. (Since 2024, Philadelphia has employed twice-weekly trash pickups in several neighborhoods.)

The incentive to litter also comes down to a cultural expectation about what others condone, Bhanot says.

And Tokyo-like expectations don't exist in most American cities. "I'd like us to be a bit more of a tidy, polite culture, but we're not there yet," Sauter says. That's why he'd like San Francisco to add more trash cans.

While San Francisco has more bins per capita than New York City and less-dense California cities like San Jose, it lags behind Washington, DC, which has ~6.6k total trash cans and is often considered one of America's cleanest cities.

A bar chart titled "Which city has the most trash cans?" showing Washington, DC at 94 cans per 10k residents, followed by San Francisco (36), NYC (27), Portland (22), and San Jose (15) .

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Portland, Oregon, facing similar complaints as San Francisco, nearly doubled its trash can total from 2016 to 2025, from 750 to ~1.4k, focusing on neighborhoods outside the central city. It expects to have ~1.7k bins when the expansion is complete.

San Francisco, for now, is keeping its number of trash cans roughly the same while introducing a new model.

Paying a trash can premium

In December 2022, after years of expensive development, testing, public feedback, and the fraud conviction of a former Public Works director, San Francisco announced it had settled on a trash can of the future to replace its aging fleet: the Slim Silhouette.

A stainless steel container with circular openings on its front side for garbage and recycling, it beat out cutting-edge designs such as the Bear Saver and Salt & Pepper. The city paid ~$19k to build the prototype and reached a deal with a contractor to manufacture the trash cans for ~$1.4k each. That doesn't include installation costs or sensors that will provide an alert when the bins are full.

A digital rendering of the "Slim Silhouette" trash can, a sleek stainless steel bin with two circular openings, positioned in a public plaza.

A Slim Silhouette rendering. (San Francisco Public Works)

It's not an unusual price. Portland's new trash cans cost ~$2k each. Washington, DC's are ~1.5k. New York City has started replacing its longtime green mesh receptacles with $1.1k designer Better Bins that cost more than 2x as much.

New York City's Sanitation Department claims the Better Bins are leakproof and rat-resistant. A department spokesperson says they'll last on the streets longer than the green mesh cans.

San Francisco tested out a generic $630 wire mesh trash can but chose the Slim Silhouette because it found the Silhouette's opening, with a snorkel design, was better at preventing rummaging and its stainless steel body was easier to maintain. (It also costs less than the current models in use by the Public Works Department.)

The eye-popping price of these modern trash cans has little to do with permitting and red tape, like stories of $1.7m public toilets. Thoughtful designs are more expensive, and many cities believe it's necessary to pay the premium.

"If we could use the $600 baskets, if they did what we needed them to do… and didn't become more of a nuisance, we would have bought those," Gordon says. "That's what we were hoping would work."

She adds, "There's never going to be a perfect garbage can."

A flowchart comparing trash can costs, ranging from a $125 Chicago wire basket to a $4,800 Bigbelly Smart Max .

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Yet premium models don't always accomplish the goals sought by the cities that buy them.

Several years ago, Tacoma, Washington, tested out smart trash cans made by Bigbelly, a popular brand that offers solar energy-powered bins with a compacting feature, software connection, and a sensor that goes off when bins are full. Besides the high upfront cost, the city dealt with software fees and solar panel theft and found the compaction didn't reduce service costs.

Tacoma has replaced the smart trash cans with non-compacting models by Bigbelly and Storr that cost less than half as much.

"Ultimately, we moved away from solar compaction because the math simply didn't add up for our specific needs," says city spokesperson Maria Lee, over email. "We found that a simple, fully enclosed can prevents litter just as effectively."

Since Philadelphia went premium in the late 2000s and early 2010s, its trash cans have been a point of contention among residents and politicians.

As part of an effort to reduce trash service expenses, the city's Sanitation Department installed ~1.1k compacting BigBelly trash cans. They cost ~$3.7k each and replaced standard $100 wire baskets, according to the Philadelphia City Controller. Because of anticipated lower service costs, the city expected savings of $13m over 10 years compared to the wire baskets.

An infographic showing that one $3,700 BigBelly solar trash compactor is equivalent in cost to 37 standard $100 wire baskets.

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The Controller's Office found that the city never conducted a cost-benefit analysis to verify any savings. A former director of Philadelphia's Zero Litter and Waste Cabinet later wrote that the Sanitation Department didn't integrate the Bigbelly's sensor system, so the alerts for full bins just went "into the ether."

A Philadelphia Sanitation Department spokesperson declined an interview but said in an emailed statement that Bigbelly trash cans in the city's core were emptied once or twice per week, compared to five times per week for prior trash can models, allowing them to coordinate pickups with regular trash services.

Terrill Haigler, a former sanitation worker in Philadelphia, often comes across Bigbellies that are overflowing or damaged. And he says that there aren't nearly enough, especially in neighborhoods outside the heart of the city.

"I believe that Philly is in a trash can desert," he says.

So he bought his own inexpensive trash cans.

Wandering the trash can desert

While working for the city, Haigler began posting on social media as Ya Fav Trashman, sharing details about life as a sanitation worker and advocating for cleaner streets. He started his own private waste collection business in 2021.

And last year Haigler decided to do something about Philadelphia's lack of trash cans.

Using grant money, Haigler started a pilot program to put five public trash cans in a North Philadelphia neighborhood. By January, four months into the program, his crew had collected ~4.5 tons of trash. He says neighbors and business owners call if they're overflowing before pickup days and sometimes store the garbage until the crew can get it.

"You start to activate the community," he says. "They're taking pride."

Terrill Haigler, known as "Ya Fav Trashman," standing in a yellow beanie and Adidas hoodie in front of a pile of trash bags.

Terrill Haigler has tested out inexpensive trash cans in areas of North Philadelphia. (Courtesy of Haigler/Ya Fav Trashman Instagram)

Most of the trash has been coffee cups, soda bottles, and plastic bags filled with dog poop — not the materials that you'd expect from illegal short dumping.

The experiment has also been affordable. The cans, 55-gallon metal drums, cost ~$150 each, he says. Haigler pays two workers $100 a week to empty the cans on Tuesdays and Fridays.

He hopes to receive more grant money to expand the program, so that Philadelphia can "do it like Disney" and have affordable trash cans everywhere.

"It doesn't have to be," he says, "a $3,000 trash can."

Little victories

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, the $1.4k Slim Silhouettes are expected to finally hit sidewalks this summer. If the new models prove as rummage-resistant and easy to maintain as intended, Rachel Gordon says San Francisco's Public Works Department may expand the number of trash cans in the city.

District 3 Supervisor Danny Sauter speaking outdoors into a microphone with his hand gesturing.

Supervisor Danny Sauter still wants more trash cans in his district. (Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images)

And Danny Sauter, the city's District 3 supervisor, has notched at least one win in his quest toward adding 1.5k new trash cans in his district.

In the Italian-American North Beach neighborhood, with a bevy of pizza restaurants, residents and businesses complained that a single pizza box could back up a trash can because of its awkward shape and lead people to throw litter on the sidewalk.

So Sauter found a bespoke solution: two bins specially designed for collecting pizza boxes.

Only 1,498 more trash cans to go.