RATS: THE DIRTY TAIL OF NYC’S WASTE

Templeton, the rat from Charlotte’s Web, always made me smile with his sly quips. Until he and his extended relations moved into my backyard this summer.

Then his comment: “I am on my way to your trough to eat your breakfast, since you haven’t got sense enough to eat it yourself.” literally hit home. It’s a perfect metaphor for NYC’s current sanitation crisis. In the 80s NYC was overrun with rats. Parks, trashcans, and subways seethed with them.

Elizabeth Acevedo writes in A Rat Ode how rats are amongst the most admirable survivors because they scare us into realizing how much we waste.

But this year it’s different. Despite endless exterminator visits, they just kept coming. WHY??!! I have nothing to eat, I’m a compulsive neat-freak recycler and composter. I even fought the city for 3 months to get my building’s rat-proof brown bins. So, here’s what I learned. Americans waste 87 million pounds of food a year. NYC alone produces more than 24,000 tons of waste a day. DSNY is only responsible for collecting 11,500 tons of that — less than half. So, no matter how much I do, there’s always waste around to make my backyard the perfect rat-staurant! NYC exterminator, Phillip Mann, of C4 Pest Control says the rat issue is the worst he’s ever seen. “[Too many] people don’t know or care where their trash goes,” he says. So, what can we do? Unfortunately, solving NYC’s sanitation problem isn’t as simple as recycling more and wasting less. It needs a holistic solution.

Education is the 1st step: Like more obvious recycling and composting instructions. Sean Khorsandi, Executive Director of Landmark West!, points out that while local businesses and residences offer separate receptacles for compost, recycling, and trash, people still throw waste in the wrong place. We need to clarify how recycling works and why it’s so important — for kids AND their adults. Incentives are an option too. Like taxes. Mr. Mann’s long experience has taught him, though, that prevention of waste buildup is the best medicine. He insists that, despite popular belief, sanitation is not expensive or difficult. “It becomes expensive “when you wait to address it.”

Anyone who’s ever had rats or roaches knows that. The onus is partially upon building managers to place trash on the curb much closer to pick up time. Bags sitting out overnight invite sleepovers. But we can pitch in, too, by ordering fewer food and Amazon deliveries and fighting the increasing number of supertalls that vomit their foundations on top of existing trash. Finally, we need to invest in better receptacles.

Rats are more talented than we think; they can traverse any medium and eat through any material, be it wood, sheetrock, or even cement. So, wire trashcans become their corner food-trucks. Mann and Khorsandi agree that we need more Big Bellies, and a lot of them. It’s a rat’s paradise that is about to come crashing down…on us, not the rats.

Holly Lynch is a 2nd generation NYC native. She is a Cancer survivor and a Universal healthcare & climate change advocate. Holly is running for Congress in New York’s 10th district.