New York City has just discovered wheelie bins - in Australia, they're about more than just rubbish

[sl8]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/11/new-york-city-wheelie-bins-system-australia-rats-comment

New York City has just discovered wheelie bins – in Australia, they’re about more than just rubbish

Keeping cockatoos out of them, fending off crocodiles with them – four decades of using wheelie bins has taught Australians they’re not just a place to dispose of your waste

Jordyn Beazley
Thu 11 Jul 2024 02.31 EDT

New York City has unveiled its latest tactic in a “trash revolution” to wrangle control of its city back from rats.

So innovative is this “beautiful rat-fighting piece of engineering”, discovered by a consultancy firm paid $1.6m for its efforts, that the city’s mayor, Eric Adams, demonstrated how to use it during the announcement.

[...]

Other parts of the US already have wheelie bins, and the fact New York City is finally rolling out the mobile receptacle has drawn hilarious reactions online. As Arwa Mahdawi wrote for the Guardian, Britons have found this most hilarious because “wheelie bins occupy a large amount of space in the national consciousness”.

[...]

1. Wheelie bins can spark ‘an interspecies innovation arms race’
Australia’s sulphur-crested cockatoo became so good at using their beaks to manoeuvre themselves to swing bin lids open in Greater Sydney that the human response to this phenomenon became the subject of a scientific study.

[...]

[Igel]

1. Round here they're standard.

Dump trash in them as needed, roll them out trash day. Dogs can't get in. Hard to tip. Contents don't get soggy and heavier than needed.

North of Houston. Don't even make a mess in a Cat 1 hurricane.

[House of Roberts]

2. We have these, but I never knew they were called 'wheelie bins'.

I put out my household garbage in a green one every Monday, and I have two blue ones for recycling, but they only pick up once a month on the first Tuesday, hence the need for two.

It takes a different kind of truck to dump these. First they added a mechanical dumper to the back of the old garbage trucks, but this still required two guys to ride the back of the truck. Now, the truck has a mechanical arm that picks up the bin and turns it upside down into the top of the truck. The driver never has to get out of the seat and it makes the route run faster.