Look, No Hands: Meet New York City’s Garbage Truck of the Future

For roughly a century, garbage in New York City has been collected in much the same way: by throwing it into the back of a sanitation truck.

On Thursday, New Yorkers got their first glimpse of the future.

A prototype of the city’s new garbage truck made its debut in Manhattan, and there was a noticeable difference. Gone was the gaping opening where sanitation workers typically toss in bags of trash; in its place was a mechanized side loader, designed with Italian technology.

Automated side-loading garbage trucks are a common sight on streets across America, but New York’s version is different. Because the city is so dense and its trash so voluminous, New York will be introducing larger European-style trash containers (imagine the sleek offspring of a dumpster and a more traditionally sized 96-gallon trash container). As a result, the city needed a specialized truck that could handle the larger containers.

The truck is part of the city’s move toward trash containerization, an approach used in cities like Buenos Aires and Barcelona, Spain, and a departure from New York’s ubiquitous scenes of small mountains of garbage bags piled up on curbs.

The change will require overhauling the city’s massive trash collection operation, removing thousands of parking spots and securing potentially hundreds of millions of dollars over the next decade to pay for it during a period of fiscal austerity.

Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat who is entering his third year in office with a low approval rating, has made trash one of his top priorities. He hired a rat czar and has argued that removing trash bags — and the rats who feast on them — is a key part of his efforts to improve quality of life in the city.

Mr. Adams was at the truck’s debut on Thursday, riding inside the vehicle and watching a demonstration of a container being lifted into the air while “Empire State of Mind” — the Jay-Z and Alicia Keys track that the mayor has adopted as his theme song — played in the background.

As the bin hit its peak height, the song hit its chorus: “Concrete jungle where dreams are made of, there’s nothin’ you can’t do.”

“This is the most significant progress toward clean streets that New Yorkers have seen in generations,” the mayor said.

Sanitation officials have been meeting with experts from Turin, Italy, and rushing to create the prototype truck, which uses a joystick to control the side loader. Next, they will move to buy European-style containers.

The city’s sanitation commissioner, Jessica Tisch, called the truck a “super weapon in the fight against filth,” combining an American truck chassis with a European side-loading body, which she said was “no small feat.”

The city’s plan has changed some since officials announced it last May. For smaller residential buildings with nine units or less, New Yorkers will be required to put trash in smaller “wheelie bins” starting this fall. For apartment buildings with more than 30 units, the larger on-street containers will be required.

Properties with 10 to 30 units can choose between wheelie bins or containers, which will be assigned to a particular building and not shared among different properties.

City officials had initially estimated that as many as 150,000 parking spots might be lost to make way for trash containers. Their new estimate is roughly 30,000 parking spots.

Since last September, the city has been running a small pilot program using shared containers in a 10-block area in West Harlem, and officials said that feedback from the community was positive and rat complaints were down.

The pilot program will expand to all of Community Board District 9 in West Harlem by next spring. But notably missing from the mayor’s news conference was the local City Council member, Shaun Abreu, a key ally on trash issues who voted against Mr. Adams on two criminal justice bills this week, overriding his vetoes.

Clare Miflin, executive director of the Center for Zero Waste Design, said she was worried about the city’s decision to allow buildings to rely on dozens of wheelie bins when shared containers on the streets are a better option.

“We don’t want to make our sidewalks worse,” she said.

Earlier in the week, sanitation officials announced a long-delayed plan for an overhaul of the city’s commercial waste system. Commercial trash from office buildings and restaurants is handled separately from homes, and much of it is taken away by private hauling companies — a dangerous industry that has received major criticism.

The new system divides the city into 20 zones, with three carting companies chosen for each one. The first pilot district will be in central Queens starting this fall.