Delaney Hall

Today, our service request comes from my boss, Roman Mars, and it gets into seemingly small stuff like the mechanics of trash can design and placement and big stuff like city procurement processes and the politics of trash.

We're looking at how the trash cans in San Francisco actually work.

Today our guide is Rachel Gordon, the Director of Policy and Communications at San Francisco Public Works.

Public Works is one of the city's largest departments.

It's responsible for designing and building streets, planting trees, cleaning up graffiti, and keeping the city's buildings running.

They also install and maintain the city's public trash cans.

In addition to focusing on the busiest areas of the city and the neighborhoods with lots of dogs, the department also fields requests from 311 and from the District Board of Supervisors, which is San Francisco's version of a city council.

This was my first hint that the way trash cans work in San Francisco is not always straightforward.

Sometimes trash cans get placed and then pulled and then placed again.

Rachel says this can go back and forth a few times, and it's clear there are fights happening about trash cans.

It turns out that one way the Department of Public Works deals with that is to run pilot programs, trying to gather actual data about what happens when trash cans go in somewhere new.

That's what happened back in 2017, when the city ran a pilot that spiraled into a nearly 10-year odyssey to try and tackle the issue of litter in San Francisco.

In the process, it revealed all kinds of weird and counterintuitive stuff about how garbage works in the city.

The pilot started in one neighborhood, running about 30 blocks through the Mission District.

There were some pretty good reasons to think that more trash cans might mean less trash.

For one thing, it just seems kind of intuitive.

But also, there's this often-repeated story in the world of trash management about Walt Disney.

He supposedly spent time watching visitors at Disneyland, and he observed that people would carry trash for about 30 steps before dropping it.

And so he placed trash cans every 30 steps.

Now, it is not really clear if this story is true, but the basic principle has been backed up by research.