New York's Strongest Delivered a Cleaner, More Sustainable City in 2025

December 16, 2025

The Trash Revolution continued to move forward in 2025, with New York City streets noticeably cleaner and rats fleeing the five boroughs, thanks to more and more New Yorkers putting their trash in sealed containers. This has been a year of tremendous progress in every aspect of the New York City Department of Sanitation's work, from containerization to composting and more, transforming the city's streetscape and boosting quality of life for all who live and work here.

"We took office with a simple promise: to 'Get Stuff Done,' and, four years later, our administration can say we delivered that every day for working-class New Yorkers," said Mayor Eric Adams. "We drove shootings to record lows and pushed jobs and small businesses to record highs. We rewrote the playbook on homelessness and mental health to finally get New Yorkers living on our streets the help they need, and, after decades of half-measures, passed historic housing legislation to turn New York into a 'City of Yes.' We overhauled the way our students learn to read and do math, cut the cost of child care, and forgave medical debt. We eliminated taxes for low-income families, launched free universal after-school programming, drove down rat sightings, containerized 70 percent of trash, and gave residents more than 8 million pounds of free compost for their gardens. We got scaffolding off our buildings, trash bags off our streets, and opened up new public spaces for New Yorkers to enjoy. The haters may have doubted us, but the results are clear. On issue after issue, we brought common-sense leadership to create a safer, more affordable city, and our work has changed our city for the better; it will stand the test of time because we made New York City the best place to live and raise a family."

"Our Trash Revolution continues to produce measurable quality-of-life improvements that New Yorkers can see every day," said Acting DSNY Commissioner Javier Lojan. "We are now servicing the nation's first stationary on-street trash containers, rat sightings are down 12 months in a row, and we have given residents more than 8 million pounds of free compost for their gardens. New York's Strongest look forward to continuing this transformative work in the new year."

Highlights from This Year of the Trash Revolution

Empire Bins Are In, Rats Are Out

After a half century of trash bags on sidewalks, New York City started the year with more than 70 percent of trash required to be in sealed containers. During 2025, the Department made unprecedented progress containerizing the remaining 30 percent: In May, DSNY installed 1,100 Empire Bins across Manhattan Community Board 9, making it the first neighborhood to have its trash fully containerized. North America's first automated side-loading trucks are now picking up trash from stationary on-street containers in front of schools and high-density residential buildings across West Harlem. Next stop for the Empire Bins is Brooklyn Community District 2, where roughly a dozen schools are currently using Empire Bins, and all trash in the entire district will be containerized next year.

Putting millions of pounds of trash in sealed containers has also sent rats fleeing. Rat sightings reported to 311 have declined for 12 straight months when compared to the same month one year earlier, representing an overall decline of more than 20 percent. From December 2023 to November 2024, New York City residents reported 25,230 rat sightings. For the same period one year later, that number plummeted to 20,025.

Curbside Composting Shatters Multiple Records

Week after week, New Yorkers diverted record amounts of compostable material from landfill, sending the material instead to be turned into finished compost to nourish parks and gardens, or renewable energy to heat homes in place of fracked gas. During the second week of April, the Department collected nearly 3.6 million pounds of compost, more than three times what was collected at the same time last year and, at the time, the highest level of separated compostable material collected curbside in the City's history. That record was subsequently broken six times during the course of the year, peaking in late November with the collection of more than 6 million pounds of compost in a single week. The success of the nation's largest and easiest curbside composting program shows that if you make it easy for New Yorkers to fight rats and help the environment, they will do it week after week.

Curbside service is only one part of the wraparound suite of composting services offered by DSNY. New York City is now home to approximately 400 Smart Composting Bins — 24-hour drop-off sites where New Yorkers can bring anything from their kitchen and anything from their garden to be put to beneficial reuse. Without these programs, this compostable material would go into a landfill, becoming nothing but harmful greenhouse gases.

Commercial Waste Reform Brings Safety and Efficiency, While Slashing Truck Traffic

The city's commercial waste industry, made up of dozens of private carters inefficiently crisscrossing the city, had been plagued by public safety hazards, harmful environmental impacts, and poor customer service. Previously, a single neighborhood might be serviced by dozens of carters, creating a tangle of routes that increase air and noise pollution and decrease public safety. This year, DSNY began implementing commercial waste reform – first in Central Queens and subsequently in the Bronx – creating a safer and more efficient collection system while providing higher quality service and reducing harmful environmental impacts. Standards like the kind achieved under this program help businesses, they help the environment, and they help workers. We are proud to be getting it done, and look forward to continuing the implementation process in 2026 and 2027.

Enforcement Has Boosted Safety and Quality of Life

New York City property owners are our partners in keeping the city clean, with responsibility to keep their sidewalks free of litter, as well as 18 inches into the roadway. To ensure that property owners meet that responsibility, the Department of Sanitation issued more than 1.1 million cleanliness summonses in 2025.

Those who treat our neighborhoods as their dumping grounds should know that we have significantly stepped up illegal dumping surveillance citywide. The department's successful camera enforcement against this scourge continues, with 337 cameras deployed across the city. Summonses and impounds are up this year, putting crooks on notice: If you dump on our neighborhoods, we will catch you, we will impound your vehicle, and you will pay.

DSNY enforces street vending laws with a focus on situations where vending has created dirty conditions, safety issues, items being left out overnight, and setups that block curbs, subway entrances, bus stops, sidewalks or store entrances. In our enforcement of street vending rules, we have performed more than 11,000 inspections and issued more than 6,200 summonses, helping to ensure clean, safe, passable sidewalks.

Derelict and abandoned vehicles are blights on local neighborhoods and, knowing how these vehicles affect quality of life, the Adams Administration has made the removal of derelict and abandoned vehicles a priority with the establishment of an interagency Abandoned Vehicle Task Force with DSNY and the NYPD. The data shows that we take these complaints seriously: In 2025, we removed more than 7,000 derelict vehicles and, working with NYPD, we removed more than 2,600 additional vehicles. Finally, the city's Ghost Car Task Force removed more than 22,000 vehicles.

Managing the city's graffiti removal program, the Department of Sanitation has closed roughly 18,000 graffiti service requests, removing this blight from buildings, fences and other elements of our streetscape.

Key Diversion Metrics Rising, Making for a More Sustainable City

DSNY continues to increase the percentage of material diverted from landfill. In 2025, New Yorkers recycled 15.2 million more pounds of paper than they did in 2024, 10.3 million more pounds of metal, glass and plastic, and 122 million additional pounds of compostable material.

We also expanded our special waste sites to give residents additional options for safe, legal disposal of harmful items, including batteries, electronics, vape pens, fluorescent light bulbs, motor oil and transmission fluid, motor oil filters, paint, car tires, mercury-containing products and skin-lightening products. Compared to 2024, DSNY has collected 18,740 more pieces of harmful waste this year, including 2,792 more e-waste pieces than 2024, 305 more tires and 5,207 more batteries.

Looking Ahead

The Department looks forward to 2026, when it plans to continue its roll out of Empire Bins, which will be installed across Brooklyn Community District 2. The department will also continue to implement the commercial waste reform, with full implementation of Brooklyn South and Queens Northeast zones in February, eliminating a massive amount of truck miles from our streets while prioritizing safety and incentivizing recycling and composting. And as always, the department remains ready for whatever winter weather comes our way in the first months of the new year.

About the New York City Department of Sanitation

The Department of Sanitation (DSNY) keeps New York City clean, safe, and healthy by collecting, recycling, and disposing of waste, cleaning streets, attacking the scourge of illegal dumping, and clearing snow and ice. The department operates 59 district garages and manages a fleet of more than 2,000 rear-loading collection trucks, 450 mechanical brooms, 705 salt spreaders, and several dozen bike lane operations machines. Under the Adams administration, the department is aggressively cleaning more parts of the city than ever before, including over 1,000 long-ignored areas spread across every neighborhood. With the highest wintertime uniformed headcount in 20 years, DSNY is more equipped than ever to remove snow and ice from the approximately 19,000 lane-miles of City streets.

Press Release #25-42