All of New York City’s businesses will have their trash picked up by city-assigned private haulers by the end of 2027, according to a Sanitation Department plan shared with Crain’s. The timeline means it will take the city a full eight years to implement long-awaited reforms to its chaotic, dangerous commercial waste industry.
For decades, dozens of companies have sped around the city each night as they compete to pick up trash from 100,000 businesses — a disorderly system that has led to unsafe driving, rampant crashes, and overlapping routes that worsen carbon emissions. After a campaign by environmental groups and unions, the city in 2019 approved a plan that divides the city into 20 commercial waste zones, with no more than three carting companies allowed to operate in each one.
The first of those zones finally went into effect in Central Queens at the start of this year, following delays caused by the pandemic and efforts by Mayor Eric Adams’ administration to ensure that businesses did not face severe price hikes when negotiating contracts with their newly assigned haulers. Until now, the Adams administration had not said when it expects to implement the remaining 19 zones, frustrating advocates who say the reforms are long overdue.
Now under a timeline shared with Crain’s, the city will implement its next two zones, covering all of the Bronx, between Oct. 1 and Nov. 30 this year. The remaining zones will take effect at not-yet-specified dates through 2027, with the final three zones — in Upper Manhattan, the Upper East Side and Southwest Brooklyn — set to be implemented at the end of 2027.
The Sanitation Department provided the timeline ahead of a Wednesday City Council hearing where lawmakers will demand updates on the rollout. A coalition of unions and environmental groups that support the waste zones have urged the department to move faster — pointing to an October report that found 17 of the city’s chosen carters were involved in a combined 61 serious crashes between 2022 and 2024, resulting in 103 injuries and three deaths.
“This is a massive change to an industry that has for too long been treated as a race to the bottom,” reads Wednesday’s planned testimony by Javier Lojan, the acting Sanitation Commissioner.
The city says it has seen encouraging results in its Queens pilot zone that includes Jackson Heights, Corona and Elmhurst: As of March, zero of the 11,000 businesses in that zone had submitted any complaints about service or billing with their new assigned carter.
The city has had to fine carters about 200 times during the pilot for safety problems such as street obstruction or spillage, and the implementation was labor intensive, requiring repeated visits, advertising by the carters and outreach in multiple languages.
Because of those challenges, the Sanitation Department will need a bigger budget to implement all 20 zones, officials told the council at a March hearing. (DSNY is slated to get $1.9 billion in the next fiscal year under Mayor Adams’ preliminary budget.)
New York’s private waste industry has already begun consolidating in anticipation of the zones taking effect. Although the Sanitation Department announced the 18 haulers that won the coveted waste-zone contracts in early 2024, that list is already out of date — one of the awardees, Waste Connections of New York, bought another of the firms, Royal Waste Services, in September. That will require the Sanitation Department to replace Waste Connections in two of its assigned areas, since the law bans any company from operating in more than 15 zones.
The rollout has had other hiccups: last year, Crain’s reported that one carter, Cogent Waste Solutions, had been chosen for a waste-zone contract despite facing millions of dollars in penalties after being accused of overcharging customers. A few months later, then-Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch announced that the city had appointed an independent monitor to oversee Cogent when it begins hauling trash in its assigned zones in Brooklyn and Staten Island.
For supporters, the reforms cannot come soon enough. Under existing rules, more than 50 different carters sometimes serve a single neighborhood, while dozens of noisy trash trucks may drive through a single block on a given night. The existing system also disfavors businesses, according to city studies, which found that small businesses are charged 38% more for waste collection than larger firms — due mostly to a lack of pricing transparency and little bargaining power.
Once they are finally in place, the waste zones are expected to greatly reduce the so-called vehicle miles traveled by private waste trucks — from a current high of 23 million miles per year citywide down to 5 million.
