UPPER WEST SIDE — The city's public recycling bins are creating a "health hazard," with overflowing cans regularly spilling refuse onto the street and becoming buffets for rats, local leaders say.
The bins, which have a side door that anyone can open, are "frequently wide open, allowing rats and even domestic animals to go through the trash," Community Board 7 member Andrew Albert said at a meeting this week.
People open the cans' side doors to dig through them for bottles they can turn in for cash and then leave the doors hanging open, he explained.
Board member Linda Alexander said she's even seen city Sanitation workers leaving the doors of the bins open when they empty them.
"They don’t clean it up," she said. "They leave the little door open and it’s a mess."
There are 332 recycling bins for bottles, cans, newspapers and magazines between West 59th and 110th streets, from Central Park West to Riverside Drive, a Department of Sanitation spokeswoman said. Two hundred bins were first installed on street corners in the spring of 2013 and then another 132 were added in March 2014, she added.
"The Department has noticed that individuals looking through the receptacles for cans and bottles have not closed the receptacles properly," DSNY spokeswoman Kathy Dawkins said.
However, she noted that the department has only gotten three complaints in the area about the bins since the beginning of 2015.
The problem is exacerbated when the bins become full and then are opened, with the contents spilling out onto the street, explained board member Dan Zweig, who said he's seen it happen on Broadway at West 107th Street.
"I don’t think DSNY can keep up with it...We live in a disposable society," Alexander added.
Workers empty the bins twice a week, and if additional personnel are available, they do additional pickups, Dawkins said.
But the consensus among committee members is that the schedule and the bins themselves aren't working.
"They’re bad," Albert said "There’s got to be a better design here."
The committee plans to invite Sanitation Department officials to an upcoming meeting to discuss a plan to replace the bins with better designed ones, members said.