Who's really hauling
New York's trash?
NYC just handed its commercial waste to a handful of carters under the new Commercial Waste Zone law, covering roughly 200,000 businesses. nyctrash.ai is the independent data platform tracking what that's actually doing to complaints, costs, and neighborhoods.
A–F scorecards, a complaint map, a bill checker, and a data explorer — all live. Questions, tips, or press? Contact us →
- 260+
- licensed carters graded
- 20
- commercial waste zones
- 579k
- 311 complaints analyzed
- 200k
- businesses affected
The problem
The data exists. Nobody's connecting it.
Complaints live with 311. Carter licenses and fines live with the Business Integrity Commission. Health grades, zone awards, contract values, and campaign donations all live in separate silos. The small business owners, tenants, and reporters most affected by it can't see the whole picture.
We pull these public datasets together, normalize them, and make them searchable, so a bodega owner in Corona and a reporter at a city desk can ask the same question and get a real answer.
What we're building
A tool, not just another report.
Interactive complaint map
NYC's 20 Commercial Waste Zones, shaded by carter-attributable 311 complaints per 1,000 licensed businesses. See which zones are actually being failed, and who hauls there.
Live nowCarter scorecards
An A–F grade for every licensed carter: BIC fines, the zones they serve, and the complaint rate where they operate. Live now.
Live nowBill checker
Small businesses paste in their hauling bill and find out whether they're being charged above the legal Commercial Waste Zone rate ceiling.
Live nowData explorer
Filter complaints by zone, neighborhood, or council district, time, and type — then share any view with a link or download the numbers. Built for journalists, council staff, and researchers.
On the roadmap
The investigations coming next.
Each new public dataset we integrate unlocks a question worth answering. With the core tools live, these are the cross-dataset investigations on deck next.
- →Campaign-finance ↔ carter zone awards
- →Carter truck safety records (FMCSA)
- →Worker safety & wage-theft records
- →311 reporting gaps in immigrant neighborhoods
- →Pre-CWZ vs post-CWZ outcomes by zone
Follow the data.
Business owners, reporters, researchers, and reformers. Get an email when we add a new dataset or ship a new tool — no spam, just the data drops.
Or reach us directly: asp9085@nyu.edu