$20,000 Trash Cans That Probably Won't Solve the Problem

"Salt and pepper"--one of 3 designs (SF Public Works)

San Francisco has become the poster child for urban dysfunction.

A city like Detroit, where the collapse of its major industry led to decades-long impoverishment, is explicable; but San Francisco with its tech wealth, highly educated population, and cultural riches seems helpless to fix its homelessness, crime, and drug problems.

San Francisco can't even keep its streats clean and is experimenting (again) with a solution to filth: the $20,000 trash can.

San Francisco will try out six new models after spending 3½ years working on designs and $550,000 on a pilot program that seeks to fix the problems with the city’s current bins, which critics say are one culprit behind the city’s notoriously dirty streets. The green Renaissance models often overflow and are easily broken into, sometimes causing a bigger mess...

As a possible replacement to the current bins, Public Works is sending three custom-designed prototypes made by local companies and three off-the shelf models to locations around San Francisco.

Each custom prototype costs more than $10,000 — with one $11,000, another $18,800 and the third topping out at $20,900 per can. Last year the city said they would try to only spend $12,000 per prototype after pushback. Once mass-produced, each can would cost between $2,000 and $3,000 each.

Your humble blogger can see why the cans are so expensive, given that they are one-off prototypes and have custom specifications. [bold added]

Public Works officials...needed a can small enough to fit on a narrow sidewalk, secure enough so that someone couldn’t break in and with an opening slim enough so that people couldn’t reach inside to scavenge. The can had to hold a 32-gallon container, an electronic sensor that sends alerts when the bin is full and a recycling compartment on top.

San Francisco incentivizes scavenging because of its bottles-and-cans payouts, which far exceed the economic value of recycled materials. This payout structure in turn causes the overturning of trash cans, a contributor to dirty sidewalks and the source of the requirement to secure the cans and prevent reaching inside.

IMHO, as the Progressives like to say, the entire system is broken, and this $20,000 band-aid won't fix it.