W.A.S.T.E. Not

On a chilly day in Brooklyn, I paused to admire two trashmen at the intersection of Wyckoff and Suydam as they worked during rush hour. In the space of a red light, the man on the southwest corner launched the full city street bin skittering like a hockey puck diagonally across the street, where the second man grabbed it, dumped it into the truck, and slid it back to its latticed cylindrical holder cemented to the sidewalk. “That’s quite a system,” I said to the nearer man. “These are Eric Adams’s fancy new bins, right?” “Yeah. They’re all right,” he said. “But the old ones used to slide better.”