Something stinks about the city’s new trash bins.
New Yorkers are scrambling to buy required but tough-to-find official trash cans or face a fine — but the only company allowed to make the bins has already left town.
A former worker at Otto Environmental Systems told The Post the company shut down its New York operation after City Hall axed its request to hike prices for the branded “NYC Bins.”
Meanwhile, thousands of residents have complained that they paid for the $50 bins but still haven’t received them.
“The volumes that were spoken about within the contract the city wrote did not come to fruition,” the ex-employee, who asked to remain anonymous, told The Post. “We were losing money every week.”
Owners of residential properties with between one and nine units homes are required to start using the bins by June 2026 or be slapped with penalties. The rollout of the bins are part of a sweeping containerization push that covers some 765,000 small residential buildings.
Otto didn’t get a direct payment as part of an exclusive deal, but the money it was getting direct from buyers was apparently not enough — as it asked the Department of Sanitation to hike prices of the bins by $25-$30.
The city said no, prompting the company to roll out of the Big Apple, the former employee said.
“I got a call the Thursday before Thanksgiving to close the building, lay off the drivers, lay off the warehouse guys, and have that building empty before Thanksgiving,” the ex-employee said.
Besides shutting local storage and deliveries, Otto shipped the remaining inventory back to a warehouse in Charlotte, North Carolina, according to the former worker.
An Otto spokesperson confirmed it closed warehouses and imposed layoffs after its request was denied.
Otto also suggested that the city bill residents for the cans through property taxes like other cities do in the US rather than asking residents to order the cans directly, the spokesperson said. That would have cut down on delivery costs because the company could have delivered more cans to the same area each trip, according to the spokesperson.
But the city took a stance there was no need for a late change.
“The structure of the program was not a surprise; it was structured this way, with New Yorkers purchasing the bins directly, from the very beginning, and Otto chose to bid on it,” a spokesperson at the sanitation department said.
The ex-employee estimated the company delivered almost 1 million bins to roughly 400,000 households, a number confirmed by DSNY — but the former employee believes around 20,000 New Yorkers who ordered and paid still have nothing to show for it.
The city is now warning households that have not purchased a bin would still be fined despite difficulties placing orders online as previously reported by The Post. That irked one City Council member.
“You can’t mandate compliance when people can’t access the required product and they can’t get answers,” Staten Island Council member Frank Morano told The Post Wednesday.
“I don’t know how this vendor was selected, but it’s clear there were a lot of problems with every aspect of this rollout, from the management to the way they disappeared in the middle of the night leaving everyone without garbage pails and money,” Morano said. He added that seniors and residents without cars can’t easily get to Home Depot, which also distributes the bins.
Otto plans to keep manufacturing the bins and distributing them through Home Depot, the spokesperson added. But Morano said residents have had difficulty tracking down the product because of limited stock at the city’s 22 Home Depots — while shipping online could increase costs.
“This is really problematic. The city is mandating compliance but residents can’t access the required product,” Morano said. “Every day we have more and more constituents calling the office saying they’re in this boat.”
