Following years of community pressure including concerted advocacy by New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, the New York City Department of Sanitation has released a detailed plan for reforming the commercial waste industry through the implementation of commercial waste zones. Right now, more than 90 different private carters crisscross the city each night to service the city’s 100,000 commercial businesses, driving long, overlapping routes. The industry has been involved in dozens of fatalities in recent years and yielded more than 500 moving violations in just one week of recent police enforcement action.

NYLPI, along with members of the Transform Don’t Trash (TDT) Coalition, has lobbied for years for reform and views the plan as a framework to protect workers and communities impacted by the commercial waste industry along with the general public and our shared environment. NYLPI Senior Staff Attorney Melissa Iachan was quoted in the Department of Sanitation’s Press Release announcing the move. She said: “DSNY’s Commercial Waste Zones plan sets NYC on the path to meaningful, comprehensive reform of a broken commercial waste system. We look forward to working with the administration and the City Council to ensure passage of a historic, robust reform that fully protects the workers on the trucks and the communities where the vast majority of the City’s garbage is trucked each night.”

Click here for the full post, and click here to read a statement on the reforms by the TDT coalition.