San Francisco is considering buying trash cans that would cost up to $20,000 apiece in order to fix the city’s growing trash problem.
A committee on the board of supervisors said Wednesday that the new, custom-made trashcans they want to place throughout the city could cost between $12,000 to $20,000 per trashcan.
The council members said they hope mass-producing the trashcans would drop the price per can down to $2,000 to $3,000.
For right now, the committee members voted to build 15 trashcan prototypes that will include three different designs as part of a pilot program. These prototypes are supposed to prevent the cans from overflowing with trash and prevent people from rummaging through them.
Supervisor Matt Haney acknowledged the trash, made worse by the city’s increasing homelessness rates, is a problem, but said the price tag is “ridiculous.”
“Our streets and our sidewalks are a mess, and the cans we have out there now are actually part of the problem,” saidHaney, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
“At this point, they’ve already come up with designs, we won’t save time now to go backwards,” he added, “but it’s really frustrating that they chose this route. $20,000 a can is ridiculous.”
City taxpayers also slammed the proposal.
“It’s insane. Insane,” one San Francisco resident said, according to CBS News.
Others argued the prototypes won’t solve the cause of the city’s trash problem.
“They go looking for drugs. They go looking for things to recycle. In the neighborhood I live in, they bust them open, pull things out. Sometimes they get too full,” said another city resident, Isaac Stevens.
Even the city’s Department of Public Works admitted the $20,000 price tag is too much, but claimed the new trash cans could help serve as an example for other cities.
“I want us to be, frankly, the model for other cities. Portland, New York, Sydney, wherever it is across the world, to take our cans or to try to model their cans after ours,” said Alaric Degrafinried, acting director of the Department of Public Works.
