Brian Lair on WNYC.

So let's talk trash for a few minutes, shall we?

I don't mean gossip or insults.

Don't call in with stories about the fight you heard your neighbors having through the walls last night.

I mean trash. Literally. Composting. Trash bins, rats, dog poop. Because the New York City

Sanitation Commissioner is here. Gregory Anderson took over the Department of Sanitation back in

March, returning to the agency where he spent close to a decade before going to Albany

for a while to work for Governor Hokel,

the Mamdani administration has called him a key architect of the city's trash revolution.

They used that term, and they brought him back to hopefully finish the job.

Commissioner Anderson, congratulations on your appointment.

Welcome to WNYC.

Thank you, Brian. It's great to be here.

So what does the term trash revolution refer to? Where did that come from? So the trash

revolution refers to the long time practice of taking our trash bags, setting them on the curb,

leaving them there for hours and hours to attract rats, to create a mess, and expecting them to be picked up, you know,

sometime the next day. So what we are doing as part of the trash revolution is really getting

trash bags off the curb into containers, cleaning up our city, making it a better place to live.

You want to reflect on the starting point of this plan, which was put forth by the Adams administration back in 2022, I think it was.

Yeah, and this really came from my predecessor and good friend Jessica Tisch, who is now the police commissioner,

and, you know, she came into sanitation without having a lot of experience in the department,

and I think looked at the practice of trash bags being stored on the curb and said,

...