In 2022, when New York City began exploring ways to gather mountains of garbage bags off the curb and contain them in attractive, rat-proof bins, Brooklynite Liz Picarazzi was ready.
She had seen the writing on the wall and primed her company, CitiBin, to manufacture a mix of modular trash enclosures for residential and municipal use. Their selling point is that they feature a clean, modern design made of tough materials to make garbage and recyclables less accessible to vermin and less of an eyesore to pedestrians.
“It’s a pretty obvious thing: Trash bags on the curb are not a good look and are not good for tourism,” said Picarazzi. “Public beautification is driving this.”
The startup’s offerings enabled the firm in 2022 to partner with the Time Square Alliance, one of the city’s largest and most influential business improvement districts, to try out its enclosures. The bins turned out to be “a gamechanger” for the alliance, which gathers 600 bags of garbage per day from the Time Square area, in minimizing the presence of stinky trash on the curb, said the BID’s president, Tom Harris.
So when the city made moves in 2023 and 2024 to require businesses and residential buildings to containerize their trash, CitiBin was ready to capitalize on the new rules. The mandates have ushered in a period of rapid growth for the Sunset Park-based startup.
To date, the company’s staff of eight has installed 5,000 trash enclosures across the five boroughs, with a growth rate of 116% in the past three years, Picarazzi told Crain’s. CitiBin works with or in 28 of the city’s 75 BIDs and also has its enclosures in 10 city parks. The boom in business has led the company to expand its offerings to several other cities, including Baltimore, Boston and Chicago. Last year CitiBin’s revenue hit the low seven figures, said Picarazzi.
All this growth landed the firm on the Inc. 5,000 list in 2024 as one of the fastest-growing private companies in the U.S. “The publicity that we got, primarily from the big launch in Times Square, really gave us the credibility to be able to go into other markets,” said Picarazzi.
CitiBin got its start in 2012, when Picarazzi was the CEO of Brooklyn Navy Yard-based handyman company Checklist Home Service. Clients began asking her to help them tidy up their trash, and so Checklist began experimenting with materials and building out enclosures for residential customers.
It wasn’t until 2015 that Picarazzi leaned fully into CitiBin. She sold Checklist Home Service for an amount she declined to share, and said she invested some of those funds in CitiBin to get the startup going. She put roughly $8,000 into the firm the day she formally founded it.
Early prototypes were built in Picarazzi’s Park Slope backyard. As a test, the company worked with an exterminator to bait the bins with pizza at an Upper West Side building that had a particularly nasty rat problem.
“There were like 30 rats that immediately came out,” said Picarazzi. “They tried every which way to get in, and they couldn’t.”
