How much trash piled up in Philly during the DC 33 strike?

• To the relief of a trash-filled city, AFSCME District Council 33, Philadelphia’s largest municipal union, ended its eight-day strike Wednesday after reaching a contract agreement with the city. Trash collection will resume Monday, but we wanted to know: How much trash went uncollected by the city during that time?

• Let’s think about this in terms of the large dumpsters that were stationed at drop-off sites around the city. While trash inevitably piled up around the dumpster, each site did include at least one dumpster.

• According to City Councilmember Anthony Phillips, trash at the sites was due to be collected “multiple times a day.” So that would mean two dumpsters’ worth of trash picked up from each site per day. Phillips did admit that “from what I’ve seen, the multiple times a day is not happening at every dump site.”

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• However, let’s presume that pickup went to plan. Over the eight days, that would have resulted in 16 dumpsters of trash collected from a single site.

• Philadelphia had 66 drop-off sites across the city, including six permanent sanitation centers that also accepted trash and recycling. That means that during the strike roughly 1,056 dumpsters of trash were collected.

• If there had not been a strike over the past eight days, trash collectors would have picked up roughly 5,360 dumpsters – based on annual figures provided by the Department of Sanitation.

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• That means that, based on our back-of-the-envelope math, 80% of the trash is still on city streets or in people’s homes, or about 4,304 dumpsters’ worth.

• For scale, here is City Hall next to our giant wall of dumpsters.

Methodology

To estimate how much trash and recycling was uncollected in terms of container units, we took Philadelphia’s Department of Sanitation report that they collect 610,000 tons of trash and 80,000 tons of recycling annually and combined it to 690,000.

Assuming that the average 13 gallon trash bag (0.05 cubic meters) weighs about 10 pounds (0.005 tons), this would mean that the Department of Sanitation collects about 153 million trash bags annually, which is equivalent to about 7.5 million cubic meters of trash annually, or 21,000 cubic meters daily.

To calculate how many dumpsters were required to service the daily volume of trash, we divided the daily trash collection volume by the volume of a 40-yard dumpster since we found that the largest dumpsters at the temporary drop-off points were of that size — although some sites had smaller dumpsters. These dumpsters can hold about 30.6 cubic meters of trash. This means that during normal trash collection, 670 dumpsters’ worth of trash is collected daily.

However, there are some limitations with this. Estimating the volume of trash inside a dumpster neglects the space between trash bags. We also cannot account for the trash that is outside of these dumpsters, or additional trash and dumping materials that have been dumped inside of the dumpster.

During the strike, trash and recycling could be dropped off at any of the six permanent sanitation centers, while only trash could be dropped off at the 60 temporary drop-off sites. Our calculations do not factor in differences between these types of facilities.

Staff Contributors

• Design and Development: Sam Morris
• Data: Jasen Lo
• Reporting: Fallon Roth
• Editing: Sam Morris
• Copy Editing: Thomas Bassinger