Trash and New York City have been synonymous with one another in the minds of many who’ve stepped foot in the Big Apple. We’ve all seen the unsightly stain left on the city streets by trash that could easily be tossed in the cans located on nearly every city block. Obviously if we grew out of the habit of littering, this wouldn’t be an issue. However, too many tourists and our own residents have no issue dropping their trash on the ground. Why is this? The bandwagon effect causes many to unconsciously give little thought into the action of tossing their beverage, snack, facemask, etc.., on the ground because so many others are doing it. This results in what we see daily when we leave our homes.

With the amount of us that are fortunate to call ourselves New Yorkers, the power to solve this comes in our numbers. In a city with more than eight million, if even a fraction of us took simple action, we could make a huge difference for the cleanliness of our city. Either not littering ourselves (the best solution), or by getting our hands dirty, we can be part of the solution. Many of us understandably don’t want to take our time cleaning up after anyone else, however we want you to consider if one piece is too much to ask. Just one piece of trash can help solve the issue of cleaning our streets.

Our vision of clean streets can come to reality with the contribution from New Yorkers that take pride in their city. While it may seem impossible to see the streets of New York resemble those of Tokyo or an upscale suburb, it truly can be done if the mindset of those who cause the problem changes. A combination of fewer individuals littering because everyone else does and those who voluntarily pick up just one piece a day will result in a city that we can all be more proud of.

The Problem

Litter is the easiest and most preventable issue to mitigate in NYC. And this problem also has one of the highest costs as well, with a sanitation budget of $1.9 billion in 2022 alone. A portion of these tax dollars could easily be spent elsewhere if this issue did not exist.

But money is not the only component of this problem. Public physical and mental health is also greatly affected. Studies have shown that clean surroundings help a person’s state of mind, which also makes the opposite true. A filthy city makes its inhabitants worse for wear. Not to mention, the garbage creating a readily available food source for our ever present vermin problem.

Another thing about this city that just makes this issue so much harder to tackle than it needs to be is this attitude that “Someone will get it”. Discarding trash next to a clearly already full public trash can, leaving bits of your lunch on a bench for nearby volunteers or employees to pick up, or “dropping” your gum wrapper on the floor of a subway car for MTA to take care of is the whole reason why we are in this mess. We have built up an over-reliance on others to fix our own messes for us, and this attitude has only created an extra problem for the city to throw unnecessary money at. Take responsibility for your own mess.

The Solution

We could collectively create a clean city if we utilized the strength of our large population. Being a city of more than eight million, just a fraction of New Yorkers can make great changes in our city’s cleanliness. The solution would be that citizens commit to pick up one piece of trash each day. This may seem like it wouldn’t make much of a difference, however given our numbers those pieces add up quickly.

Data from the MTA shows that in 2019, nearly 2 billion trips were taken on New York City transit. Ridership has picked up to pre-pandemic levels, meaning more of us are walking the streets with litter at our feet. Considering the amount of foot traffic there is on any city block daily, it’s not hard to see that pedestrians outnumber the trash on the street. We took the liberty of collecting some information on how much trash could be picked off the streets if we all just picked up a piece a day. We used standard 13 gallon kitchen bags to see just how much trash can be collected if we committed to just one piece.

Statistics

Averages:

-Total Pieces per Bag: 58.4

-Percentage of Recycle per Bag: 39.48%

-Percentage of Trash per Bag: 60.52%

Potential Trash Pickup:

If 1000 New Yorkers were to pick up 1 piece of trash per day, that would equal:

-Roughly 17 full trash bags in one day

If 100,000:

-Roughly 1,712 full trash bags in one day

If 1,000,000:

-Roughly 17,123 full trash bags in one day… 993,134 pieces!

It’s easy to see how much of a different environment we could have just by looking at these numbers. What’s needed is action. What we’re asking our fellow New Yorkers for is to simply pick up at least one piece of trash per day and dispose of it properly. This is a very simple solution to a problem we could all live without.  

Goal

Our goal is simple: to change the mindset that people have around litter. And there are 2 parts of people’s mindset that we feel need to be present in order to see real change in the city:

• You can not be part of the problem. Littering is a non-negotiable. Residents, tourists, commuters, and even people who are homeless should not be immune to this. No one should have an excuse.
• You need to be part of the solution, and do your part to actually get rid of the litter. Not just for your sake, but for the benefit of everyone. It’s time for action to be taken.

Getting people to individually stay out of the way of change is much easier to do because it requires no action on their part. But we as a city are well past this point. We need more people to do something about this, and not rely so heavily on the city sanitation, or volunteers, or the MTA. It is unfair for them to constantly keep cleaning up our messes, for us to not even be able to maintain a reasonable level of cleanliness on public property.