Service Request #3: Why Is There So Much Litter in San Francisco?

ROMAN MARS: This is Roman Mars. I’m in beautiful San Francisco, California. 

DELANEY HALL: Recently, Roman headed across the bay from Oakland to San Francisco. He is not in the city very much, only a couple times a month. 

ROMAN MARS: But if I’m here during the daytime, and I have a little bit of time, I very often go to Tony’s Slice House in North Beach and get a slice of pizza and a soda in a paper cup. 

DELANEY HALL: Roman took his pizza, and he started walking. And when he was done eating, he looked around for a trash can. 

ROMAN MARS: There’s no trash can where I’m standing right now. I don’t know if there’s one in the next block, but I kind of expect a trash can at every major intersection. 

DELANEY HALL: Because that’s where people end up standing while they wait to cross the street and they might have something to throw away. It makes sense. But like he said, no trash cans in sight. 

ROMAN MARS: And it got me thinking, who determines how frequent there should be a trash can? Who determines the placement? Are they placed, like, strategically? Is there an algorithm or a formula for these things? Because when I see the sort of dearth of trash cans in the city and I’m walking around with my food waste, I think, “Well, this is why the city is so dirty.” Like, it has a lot of litter.

DELANEY HALL: I don’t mean to sound like Tucker Carlson. 

TUCKER CARLSON: Civilization itself is coming apart in San Francisco, right there in broad daylight, on the city’s sidewalks, which are littered with junkies and feces and dirty needles… 

DELANEY HALL: But some parts of San Francisco can sometimes be a little bit dirty. 

ROMAN MARS: San Francisco is fantastic, and anyone who fearmongers about it doesn’t know it and they should just [BLEEP] off. But it does have litter. And I think, well, maybe it has so much litter because it has so few trash cans. And so I really want to figure this out. Who determines the trash cans–even how they get picked up, how they’re maintained, how they’re designed… I just really want to figure this out. Or I want this to be figured out for me. 

DELANEY HALL: I’m Delaney Hall, and this is Service Request from 99% Invisible and Campside Media. Each week we take your burning questions about infrastructure and we investigate. Today, our service request comes from my boss, Roman Mars, and it gets into seemingly small stuff, like the mechanics of trash can design and placement, and big stuff, like city procurement processes and the politics of trash. We’re looking at how the trash cans in San Francisco actually work. 

RACHEL GORDON: We have about 3,000 locations in San Francisco with garbage cans. It’s actually one of the most garbage cans for a city our size. 

DELANEY HALL: Today our guide is Rachel Gordon, the Director of Policy and Communications at San Francisco Public Works. Public Works is one of the city’s largest departments. It’s responsible for designing and building streets, planting trees, cleaning up graffiti, and keeping the city’s buildings running. They also install and maintain the city’s public trash cans. 

RACHEL GORDON: And we focus where the garbage cans are going to be. So we put them near transit stops, commercial corridors, near schools, hospitals, health centers, places where there are gonna be a lot of people– You’ll see fewer garbage cans in purely residential areas, although we do get requests if it’s on kind of a common dog walking route. We will try to get garbage cans there so people can dispose of their dog waste. 

DELANEY HALL: In addition to focusing on the busiest areas of the city and the neighborhoods with lots of dogs, the department also fields requests from 311 and from the District Board of Supervisors, which is San Francisco’s version of a city council. 

RACHEL GORDON: If they hear from constituents that they want garbage cans in certain areas, we will go and we do a couple of things. We look to see, has there been a garbage can there before? Has it been removed for some reason? So we track what kind of complaints there have been. If they’ve been taken out before, or sometimes they go back and forth multiple times, then we will not put a garbage can back in that location. 

DELANEY HALL: This was my first hint that the way trash cans work in San Francisco is not always straightforward. Sometimes trash cans get placed and then pulled and then placed again. Rachel says this can go back and forth a few times, and it’s clear there are fights happening about trash cans. It turns out that one way the Department of Public Works deals with that is to run pilot programs, trying to gather actual data about what happens when trash cans go in somewhere new. That’s what happened back in 2017, when the city ran a pilot that spiraled into a nearly ten-year odyssey to try and tackle the issue of litter in San Francisco. In the process, it revealed all kinds of weird and counterintuitive stuff about how garbage works in the city. The pilot started in one neighborhood, running about 30 blocks through the Mission District. 

RACHEL GORDON: It’s a very high-trafficked, dense commercial corridor with businesses ground floor and apartments up top. We put a garbage can on every corner, so four garbage cans at each intersection. And then on most of the blocks, we put other garbage cans mid-block. We wanted to see if we have all these garbage cans, will there be less litter on the street? There was a lot of litter on that block–a lot of bus stops and transit stops there. 

DELANEY HALL: There were some pretty good reasons to think that more trash cans might mean less trash. For one thing, it just seems kind of intuitive. But also, there’s this often repeated story in the world of trash management about Walt Disney. He supposedly spent time watching visitors at Disneyland, and he observed that people would carry trash for about 30 steps before dropping it. And so, he placed trash cans every 30 steps. Now it is not really clear if this story is true, but the basic principle has been backed up by research. Studies show that when trash cans are visible, closely spaced, and well maintained, people typically throw less litter on the ground. But that is not really what Public Works found with their pilot in the Mission District. 

RACHEL GORDON: We noticed that it really did not make that much of a difference at the end of the day. In some spots there was less litter. In some spots the litter was just the same–some spots it was more. Several times I’d be out on the block watching or out on street watching and I’d literally see people standing at a bus. Their bus comes. There’d be a garbage can five to ten feet from them, and they dump their candy bar wrapper on the ground. 

DELANEY HALL: I’m picturing you sort of out there, standing subtly off to the side, watching people at a bus stop, seeing someone drop a candy wrapper on the ground. It’s reminding me of my children. I just watch them open a snack and then just leave the trash on our floor. What is the psychology behind that, where you know the bin is right there? You know, what do you think is going on? 

RACHEL GORDON: That’s a good question. I mean, one of the things we’ve discussed a lot at Public Works is what would happen if we did not pick up the garbage? We don’t want our city to look dirty and messy. So we will have street cleaners. We will go and pick up trash. So in a way it’s like a maid service at a hotel, right? You don’t make your bed, someone else comes in and makes it. You throw down your candy wrapper on the street of San Francisco, somebody’s gonna come by and eventually pick it up. So, not everyone is a slob and a litterbug in San Francisco at all. But I have seen people pull into a parking space with very nice cars and they dump out their ashtray and the coffee cup and they put it on the curb and take it out of their car. They don’t want their car messy. They’ll put it out on the sidewalk. And then someone from Public Works or another nonprofit will come by and clean it up. 

DELANEY HALL: Right. It strikes me that there’s something almost a little paradoxical about what you learned from that pilot, which is that more trash cans does not necessarily mean cleaner streets. Why do you think that is? 

RACHEL GORDON: Because, again, it’s about behavior. So, trash cans really are a convenience for people. I think it’s great if someone has that, that they’ve finished something, eating something, reading something in the newspaper, or whatever– They don’t want to carry it back home with them. They want the convenience of dumping it into a public trash can. 

DELANEY HALL: Something I learned in this conversation with Rachel is that there is not one universal way that trash and trash cans work. It’s more like there are different cultures of trash. One place that Rachel mentioned is Japan. And even in very big and busy cities like Tokyo, there are very few public trash cans on the street. This actually goes back to 1995, when cult members released sarin gas in the Tokyo subway, killing more than a dozen people. The attack led the country to remove trash cans from public places as a precautionary measure so that no one could hide anything in the bins. The trash cans never really came back, but somehow Japan remains spotlessly clean. There’s now a cultural understanding that you keep your trash and then throw it away when you get home. And even within the U.S., there seem to be different trash cultures here, too. Unlike San Francisco, there are places where the more trash cans equals less litter equation seems to be true. 

RACHEL GORDON: I’ve gone to, you know, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, Seattle, Portland… We have people going all over, and they go, “Well, how come you can have a trash can in these cities, but you can’t have one in San Francisco?” We don’t have that magic answer of why it’s happening, but we do know it’s happening. 

DELANEY HALL: Rachel may not have a definitive answer about what’s going on in San Francisco, but she does have some theories. For one, the city has a higher than average unhoused population. And sometimes people sort through public trash cans for valuable recyclables and then leave trash scattered on the ground. 

ARCHIVAL NEWS REPORT: They were looking for things to recycle and they bust them open and they’ll pull things out and… 

DELANEY HALL: Then there’s illegal dumping, which is a huge part of the equation. About 18,000 tons of trash get dumped on San Francisco’s streets every year. This is stuff like mattresses, furniture, construction debris, and bags of garbage. 

DUMPING IN BAYVIEW REPORT: Here’s another kind of dump site that we see a lot here in Bayview. It looks like someone kind of put it near a garbage can and then left it on the sidewalk on the street… 

DELANEY HALL: Public Works actually has a team of investigators who go out and rip open trash bags, looking for addresses and shipping labels to figure out who’s responsible. 

DUMPING CLEAN UP REPORT: So that will take a DPW crew a while to pick that up. And the question is, what’s in there? That building material, is it toxic? 

DELANEY HALL: On top of that, there have been complaints about a scandal-plagued company called Recology, which the city has hired to empty the trash cans on a daily basis. Some people complain that Recology does not empty them enough. 

OVERFLOWING TRASH CANS REPORT: When we walk around the trash cans, we see, like… Overflowing with pizza boxes, large and small– And they’re everywhere…

DELANEY HALL: Anyway, for whatever reason, there’s litter. And when it comes to littering, studies show that people take their cues from their environment. When a space looks clean, they tend to keep it clean. But when it’s already dirty, they feel more comfortable adding to the mess. And so, in a place like San Francisco, it can become a self-reinforcing cycle of trash leading to more trash. 

Which brings us back to the trash can pilot in the Mission District. Adding cans didn’t really seem to help with the litter, and so Public Works decided to run a different experiment. They wondered, what if instead of putting out more trash cans, they redesigned them? Their old models, known as the “renaissance cans,” had been on the streets since 1993, and they were reaching the end of their natural lifespan. So it was time for new cans. And maybe the city could find a new design that worked better, was less vulnerable to trash picking, and maybe most importantly, was sturdier because here’s another thing that happens in San Francisco: people attack the trash cans. 

RACHEL GORDON: If there’s any way a trash can can be vandalized, people will find a way to do it. It’s everything from breaking the doors of the trash cans, graffiti vandalism… People will break things to try to get into the trash cans. So that’s a big issue. When we put a trash can out–people say, “We want a trash can on the corner”–it’s not long before someone says, “Take this trash can off the corner, it’s causing more of a nuisance.” We have some trash cans in the city that are 600 pounds or cement trash cans. And people will tip them over. It’ll take a bunch of people to do that. But to pull them back up, we need to bring a crane out to do that. So it really has been a fascinating, let’s just say, “policy adventure” in San Francisco. 

DELANEY HALL: The policy adventure continues when we come back. 

[AD BREAK] 

DELANEY HALL: So after this experiment in the mission district, you pivoted from adding cans to actually redesigning them. What led to that decision?

RACHEL GORDON: We didn’t see what the existing cans could do in terms of reducing litter on the streets. We wanted to see if we could find a can or come up with a can design to make it more difficult, again, for people to rummage through them. If they’re going to get graffiti tagged, is it easier to clean? Do they have good locking mechanisms? So we went out for a contest. We looked at three designs that we prototyped. We also took existing garbage cans that we could buy from off-the-shelf models. We put them out to the test with the public. 

DELANEY HALL: The three custom trash can designs included the Salt and Pepper, which had a distinctive two-tiered shape with one section for bottles and cans and another for trash. Then there was the Slim Silhouette, a narrow can with stainless steel bars on the outside to discourage graffiti. And finally there was the Soft Square, which featured curved panels and a foot pedal to open it. The city also picked three off-the-shelf garbage can models to include in the testing. And then they ran a two and a half month pilot where they put out the six total models in 52 different locations across a broad range of neighborhoods. Then they invited the public to test them out and rate them. 

NEWS ANCHOR #1: In San Francisco, when it comes to trash cans, it’s out with the old and in with the new… 

NEWS ANCHOR #2: There is a QR code as mentioned that you can see on the side of these trash cans. If you have an opinion about it, go ahead and scan that QR code and give your feedback… 

RACHEL GORDON: And we saw what ones worked, what ones didn’t, which ones could be broken into, if they got tagged, which ones were easy to clean, which ones were easy to service, how were they for maintenance, and what did people feel about them. So we tested them with the garbage service folks who have to empty the cans. We tested them with our own folks who have to maintain and clean them. We tested them with businesses and members of the public who have to use them to see what they liked. And then we wanted to go even a step further just to see which ones could actually be manufactured en masse. 

DELANEY HALL: Eventually, thousands of people weighed in on the designs. And Rachel says they were mostly very thoughtful about it. 

RACHEL GORDON: I think that’s one thing that makes our city endearing is that the public will weigh in on just about anything. Again, there are going to be 3,000 of these out on the street and they’re going to be in every neighborhood so people want to know, like, what’s going to be in front of their home or their business or when they’re walking their dog or taking their kids to school. They want to have a say in it. 

DELANEY HALL: But there was criticism, too. Some people were like, “What are you doing, San Francisco Public Works? Why does the public have to weigh in on garbage cans?” And then there was the cost of the prototypes. 

NEWS ANCHOR #1: The prototype cost $20,000 per can. As one supervisor puts it, “It’s a Fox News headline waiting to happen.” 

FOX NEWS: Look, you may think this is trivial–not worthy of editorial time. Well, I disagree… 

DELANEY HALL: And sure enough, it did end up on Fox News. 

FOX NEWS: It’s not just about trash cans, it’s about a city, like many others in America, that’s really gone off the rails… 

DELANEY HALL: I’m curious, because there was a lot of media focus on the cost rather than the design, how did you and your colleagues actually explain to the public why those prototypes were so expensive? 

RACHEL GORDON: Yeah, so we were paying for design and development. I guess we could, these days, just put in AI. Design me a garbage can. But we had to get industrial designers to come up with it. They had to really look at what could withstand the rigors of a public garbage can in San Francisco. And then they actually had to be manufactured, right? We didn’t put them on a 3D printer. We had to go and have them manufactured. So $20,000 or so a can for the prototype–that’s not a crazy amount of money when you’re talking about these 3,000 garbage cans that are gonna last hopefully a generation. What is really interesting though, is when we went out to bid for who can manufacture these garbage cans en masse, the price was very reasonable. It actually came a little lower than what we initially expected. So each garbage can is going to be about just under $1,400: $1,375. And if you look at off-the-shop models, it’s about the same or a little bit less actually. 

DELANEY HALL: But the public didn’t just complain about the cost of the trash cans. They also eventually complained about the amount of time the whole process was taking. This whole undertaking–the designing, prototyping, testing, and deciding which cans to go with–it all started back in 2017. And the garbage cans are still not out on the streets of San Francisco. Rachel says they should roll out this summer. 

RACHEL GORDON: Which is nine years from the start. It will probably be about that long since we started talking about new garbage cans going through. So it’s been a really long process. And I think people should hit us on that a little bit. But we do have–I’m not going to make excuses–explanations. Contracting processes, competitive bidding, and COVID was a huge one. Everything was put on hold. People had to rethink the money we had. How was it going to be spent? Should we spend it on new garbage cans? Or should we go and just try to jerry-rig the old ones we have and try to keep them going as long as we can? 

DELANEY HALL: Everything Rachel’s saying is true. COVID created a real two to three year time warp when everything fell apart. But take that away and you’re still looking at six years to get a new trash can on the street. It just seems like it should not take longer to pick a trash can than it takes to build a skyscraper. 

DELANEY HALL: What model did the city ultimately choose? And how much did the public input affect that decision? 

RACHEL GORDON: Yeah, so a lot. So we chose the Slim Silhouette model. 

DELANEY HALL: That was the narrow can with stainless steel bars on the outside. 

RACHEL GORDON: The Slim Silhouette was favored by the maintenance folks, by the people who service the can, and then definitely by the public. It was the number one choice of the public. We had to make tweaks though. We wanted to change the size of the opening so people could use it for their cardboard lunchboxes. We wanted to change the ribs on it on the outside exterior kind of design element so they’re easier to clean. And then we also fiddled a little bit with the lock to make it a more hardened lock and also easy for the garbage men and women to service it. So we’re gonna manufacture about a half a dozen. They’re just in the process. And then the manufacturer is doing a very rigorous in-house test, so really, like, bang it with everything they can. 

DELANEY HALL: I love that. A trash can tester. So many jobs you never really think about. 

RACHEL GORDON: You won’t think about that. 

DELANEY HALL: I’m curious. Why do you think trash and cleanliness has become a charged issue in San Francisco? 

RACHEL GORDON: I think part of it might be political. San Francisco is a very blue city–democratic–liberal. We’ve had Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, Dianne Feinstein– We’ve had a lot of big name Democrats come out of the city. It’s nice to take a hit at it. I’ll venture to say it’s the most beautiful city in the country. It is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. It is not trashed everywhere. The trash in San Francisco–it’s on par with a lot of other cities. The trash cans though–there’s a constituency for every trash can in San Francisco. There are people who are for the trash can and people who are against the trash can. And then it’s one of our jobs at Public Works to try to find the right balance with that. 

DELANEY HALL: It strikes me that trash collection is this fundamental service that cities provide. And I think sometimes, if people see piles of trash in certain parts of the city, they make a certain logical leap, which is that if the city can’t get this right, it must not be working well in all these other ways. Is that your sense of the way that garbage works politically? 

RACHEL GORDON: That’s certainly an interesting way to look at it. I think you have a similar thing probably in the Midwest and the East Coast where it’s snow removal. Can you get the streets plowed when there’s a snowstorm if you’re a mayor? People look at those things. There’s something called “pothole politics,” right? The basic things–the basic services… We are out there cleaning the streets of San Francisco literally 24 hours a day with specialized cleaning operations, everything from manual sweepers to flusher trucks and sweeper trucks, to people driving around in pickup trucks, picking up litter they see. And then we have about 120 now folks who are called “block sweepers,” who are in commercial corridors, who literally are with a broom and dustpan sweeping up the corridor. So, we are going to schools, talking to kids as young as second graders. It’s when you said, “How did this end up in my living room?” Think about if you have something you want to get rid of, what’s the proper way to get rid of it? 

DELANEY HALL: It’s like ultimately you can bring people to trash cans, but you cannot make them throw away their trash. So really there’s an underlying behavioral issue that you’ve been talking about throughout this interview. 

RACHEL GORDON: There is. It really is if people did the right thing, right? You have garbage. Where are you going to put it that it’s not going to affect the common areas and really the public good. People don’t wanna see trash on their streets. People don’t feel good about that. There are a lot of reasons why you don’t want trash on the street. But a big one is how do you feel about your city and about your neighborhood if you see litter around? 

DELANEY HALL: The new cans are finally rolling out this summer. And honestly, they look great. They’re so sleek. But as Rachel has made clear, you can design the perfect trash can and still have dirty streets. Litter in San Francisco isn’t just a design problem, it’s a complex behavioral problem caused by people dumping household garbage to dodge collection fees and rummaging through bins because they have nowhere else to go and illegally dumping–I’m going to say this number again–18,000 tons of garbage on the streets a year. A better trash can is definitely a tool, and I’m sure it will help. But it’s not going to fix it all. 

We started this episode with a question…

ROMAN MARS: Who determines the trash cans, even how they get picked up, how they’re maintained, how are they designed? 

DELANEY HALL: And we have a pretty good answer, at least for the nearly 3,000 trash cans on the city’s sidewalks. They are overseen by San Francisco Public Works. The department installs, maintains, and repairs the trash cans. They prioritize placing cans in the busiest places, like in commercial areas and plazas and near bus stops and other areas with a lot of foot traffic. When it comes to putting out new trash cans, they take feedback from the public, via 311, and requests from the board of supervisors. Sometimes they’ll run pilot programs to see how more or differently designed trash cans might affect litter in a given area. So, if you’re ever wondering why it takes San Francisco a decade and half a million dollars to choose a trash can, now you know. 

Consider this service request resolved. 

Today on the show, you heard Roman Mars, no further introduction needed. And you also heard Rachel Gordon, the Director of Policy and Communications at San Francisco Public Works. 

Do you have a question about infrastructure that’s been bugging you? Maybe it’s something you walk past without really thinking about it, like a fire hydrant or a parking meter or a manhole cover. If there’s a piece of infrastructure you’ve always wondered about, we want to hear from you. Send us your service requests by recording a voice memo with your question and emailing it to servicerequestat99pi.org. 

And remember, if you litter, a city worker like Rachel might be secretly watching and judging you. I’m Delaney Hall. Infrastructure is everywhere. And we’re here to help you decode it. 

Service Request is a production of 99% Invisible and Campside Media. The show is produced and fact-checked by Julia Case-Levine and edited by Shoshi Shmuluvitz. Mix by Yi-Wen Lai-Tremewan. Theme song and music by Swan Real. Additional editing by Emmett FitzGerald and Vivian Le. Show art by Aaron Nestor. 

Special thanks this week to Roman Mars who is our boss at 99pi. Kathy Tu is our Executive Producer. Matt Shaer is the EP at Campside. We are a part of the SiriusXM Podcast Family. You can find us on all the usual social media sites, as well as our Discord server. There’s a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI, at 99pi.org.