A Fancy Trash Can Comes to Brownsville
What does the $7,225 waste bin say about New York City's investment in a neighborhood that experienced decades of neglect?
This past summer, the mayor's Office of Technology and Innovation installed a high-tech and pricey trash can in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brownsville.
At a cost of $7,225, the "smart waste bin" acts as a trash compactor that can hold up to five times the amount of trash as a regular waste bin. It also connects to the internet, using solar power, in order to communicate when it needs to be emptied. The smart bin came with Brownsville's designation as an "innovation lab," an effort by the city to test tech-driven approaches to quality of life issues.
It was not because the neighborhood had a decades-old problem with trash, or that many residents list it as a current top concern. Still, the high-tech trash can demonstrates increased investment by City Hall, something welcomed by Brownsville residents if also viewed with some suspicion.
"When the city or anyone invests in such a visible project in the neighborhood that has seen disinvestment for generations upon generations, there is sure to be some skepticism," said Erica Mateo, a Brownsville native and resident who leads neighborhood safety initiatives at the Center for Court Innovation. She also serves as one of several community advisers to the neighborhood innovation lab.
"Why now?" said Mateo. "What is this really about? And I think those are reasonable things to ask."
Mateo previously served as deputy director of the Brownsville Community Justice Center, part of the Center for Court Innovation, and in that role oversaw a project to revitalize a portion of Brownsville's Belmont Avenue, including creating a small pedestrian plaza that now hosts the smart waste bin. Despite some of her own suspicions, Mateo said she appreciated how recent city investments were made.
"I appreciate as a resident of Brownsville — but also as someone who does community work — a process that allows for that kind of small-scale intervention so that way people are able to digest it, give feedback," she said.
Belmont Avenue itself had a long-standing trash problem with city bins that once overflowed. At one point, the Department of Sanitation took away the bins entirely in an effort to supposedly help with waste management, Mateo said.
(A spokeswoman for the Sanitation Department, Belinda Mager, said that the city will indeed remove sidewalk waste bins if they are prone to misuse, such as being filled with business or household trash. She said there are now numerous waste baskets along that commercial strip of Belmont that are emptied daily.)
Mateo also grew up as part of an entire generation of Brownsville residents eyeing a heaping and ever-growing trash pile. It sat behind a private building, at the edge of a New York City Housing Authority parking lot, on part of a Department of Transportation sidewalk.
"I do remember that trash and almost feeling like — not even knowing that something could be done about it," she said, adding, "The city agencies, to be honest, weren’t talking about it. They weren’t trying to figure it out."
In 2014 the Brownsville Community Justice Center, at the request of the local Community Board, reached out to the different city agencies involved to try to resolve the problem, first by getting NYCHA to remove the fence so that the Department of Sanitation could pull the trash out from behind the building.
When all was said and done, the city removed more than six tons of trash that had accumulated over 30 years. The sheer size of the heap, and its decades-long life, had long ago left its imprint on the psyche of the neighborhood.
"We see the connection between when there are spaces that feel neglected, people feel neglected," Mateo said.
Enter the smart waste bin.
It sits in the pedestrian plaza recently transformed by young people from the Brownsville Community Justice Center, with help from another neighborhood organization, Made In Brownsville. The plaza houses tables and chairs and large planters. It is covered by a street mural of two clasped hands, with the words "Brownsville Stronger Together."
The city contributed the bin, along with benches that have solar-powered mobile charging stations, to the plaza. José Serrano-McClain, with the Mayor's Office of Innovation and Technology, said the goal was to bring new technology to neighborhoods often at the bottom of the list when it came to improvements.
"The idea that we could also begin to think about what technology equity means and how do we modernize infrastructure beginning in places like Brownsville, which typically tend to be overlooked as we think about modernizing services city services — we're trying to reverse that trend," said Serrano-McClain.
The city began investing more in Brownsville under Mayor Bill de Blasio. Part of that includes the "innovation lab" designation and a broader vision of work to do in the neighborhood under the city's Brownsville Plan, released in June.
Officials may want to take note: at public meetings for both the Brownsville Plan and the innovation lab, residents flagged trash and waste management as a priority for the neighborhood.