Trash reforms are coming to Manhattan’s Chinatown, and New York City's sanitation department is racing to bring locals up to speed.
The dense neighborhood is within the first “commercial waste zone” to be established in the borough. By the end of May, thousands of Lower Manhattan businesses will be required to arrange for their trash to be collected by one of three garbage companies authorized to serve the area.
It’s a change required by city legislation passed in 2019 that aims to rein in the city’s notorious private trash industry by establishing 20 different commercial waste zones. While residences have their trash picked up by the city sanitation department, businesses are required to hire private companies to do the job. And for years, many of those companies deployed trucks on long routes across several boroughs, which city officials said prompted reckless driving and caused a string of fatal crashes.
Nearly seven years after the law passed, the sanitation department is finally implementing those reforms in Manhattan. The department activated the first of the zones in Queens last year and plans to complete the citywide rollout by early 2028.
Newly appointed Sanitation Commissioner Gregory Anderson headed to Chinatown on Wednesday with a team of multilingual staffers to help spread the word to business owners. He visited several stores on Lafayette Street, telling owners they’d soon need to register with one of the preapproved companies.
Still, even as the city has implemented the reforms, deadly crashes involving private garbage trucks have continued — including by those awarded rights to operate under the new plan.
On Sunday, 19-year-old Nishath Jannath was crushed in Woodside, Queens, under the wheels of a garbage truck owned by Royal Waste.
Jannath was the 10th person to die in a crash involving a private waste truck since 2019, when the reforms were passed into law, and the sixth to die in a crash involving a company awarded rights to the new zone system, according to a Gothamist analysis.
Anderson said the crash was a terrible tragedy, but that he had no direct authority to investigate it because the commercial waste zone for the area where Jannath was killed is not yet activated.
“We expect that carters will not only meet the training and safety requirements that we have, but continue to improve so that we don't lose any more lives,” Anderson said.
Police have not made any arrests, but auditors from the comptroller's office determined last year that the Queens-based company was the most crash-prone of all the companies it examined.
Gothamist reported in 2024 that Royal Waste — which was later acquired by the national outfit Waste Connections — was awarded zones in the commercial waste plan after its employees gave more than $10,000 to former Mayor Eric Adams’s re-election campaign.
Advocates for the commercial waste zone reforms, like Justin Wood with New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, said drivers working in the new system are under a magnifying glass by city regulators.
“It's just night and day compared to the old system, which we sort of compared to the Wild West,” he said.
