Jerusalem Installs New Dumpsters For Residents To Ignore, Pile Trash Next To

A new way not to dispose properly of garbage.

Jerusalem, October 17 – An ongoing municipal project to replace unattractive, above-ground, communal trash receptacles with sleeker, more aesthetic units with the contents kept mostly underground has afforded dwellers of Israel’s capital the opportunity to scatter their litter around the sleek receptacles instead of around the ugly old ones.

Underground dumpsters first appeared in Jerusalem several years ago; the more discreet design places the 2000-liter containers in subterranean vertical niches, not in unsightly wheeled contraptions that fail to hold in the stink of rotting garbage, or keep out scavengers such as rats and street cats. Jerusalemites have greeted the contraptions, which have seen gradual installation around town, with excitement at the chance to fail to put their rubbish in an entirely new kind of dumpster.

Some of the older-style dumpsters feature doors or covers that allow users to shut in odors and shut out vermin. However, overloaded bins and apathetic residents mean no difference between those containers and the open-top ones; throwing trash bags and other detritus in the general direction of the dumpsters, rather than making a genuine attempt to get the rubbish inside them, has rendered any such sanitary features moot. The same applies to the new underground dumpsters, whose slanted, ergonomic design, foot-operated opening mechanism, and low profile afford city denizens a new way not to dispose properly of trash.

On Nissim Bachar Street, in the gentrifying Nachlaot neighborhood of the city’s center, the new dumpsters entered operation over the last month, following months of messy, makeshift solutions insufficient to the task even of substituting for their ugly predecessors. Residents of Nissim Bachar and surrounding streets, like those in other neighborhoods graced with the new design, wasted no time in adapting their classic strew-near-the-dumpster approach to the freshly-installed units – just as they displayed unique skill in piling rubbish nowhere near the makeshift dumpsters in the interim.

“Sanitation infrastructure is as much an art as a science,” explained Ayam Mizbala, head of the municipality’s sanitation department. “There’s a sweet spot, more intuitive than quantifiable, where it looks like we’re making a valiant effort, but in fact falling far short of providing both adequate trash storage capacity and frequent enough collection. Jerusalem has an affordable housing crisis. One of the best ways to keep real estate prices down is to maintain the ugliness that only the constant lack of capacity to keep garbage out of sight can provide. Even the aesthetic plague of unfinished construction projects can’t compete with that on a citywide scale.”

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