For decades, urban rat control has mainly been associated with inspections, traps, rodenticides and burrow treatments. New York City is now trying to intervene one step earlier: reducing one of the resources that enables large rodent populations to thrive in urban environments — constant access to food waste.
The city is progressively expanding its waste containerisation programme, replacing rubbish bags left directly on the street with closed, rodent-resistant containers. Throughout 2026, the system has continued to expand to residential buildings, while City Hall maintains a plan to roll out containerisation citywide over the coming years.
The strategy is particularly interesting for the environmental health and pest management industry because it partly changes the question. Rather than focusing exclusively on how to eliminate existing rats, it also asks which urban conditions are allowing these populations to find a continuous food supply.
Rubbish bags: an easily accessible food source for rats
The logic behind New York’s programme is relatively straightforward.
A plastic bag left on the pavement for hours presents very little barrier to a rat. It can be torn open, releasing food waste and creating recurring feeding points on streets where rodents already know when and where food can be found.
The New York City Department of Health itself identifies accessible rubbish as one of the factors that encourages rat activity and recommends storing waste in rodent-resistant containers with tightly sealed lids.
This principle is consistent with the Integrated Pest Management (IPM) approach described by the CDC. An IPM programme is not based exclusively on eliminating pests: it also aims to modify the environment to reduce access to the three essential resources that allow a population to thrive: food, water and shelter.
This is particularly important in cities.
Rodenticide treatments may temporarily reduce a population, but if large quantities of food and suitable shelter remain available, the conditions that caused the problem are still there.
What is New York doing?
The transformation began gradually, with changes to waste set-out times, new requirements for businesses and pilot residential containerisation programmes.
The next step has been to replace traditional black rubbish bags with different types of containers.
Smaller residential buildings are already subject to specific requirements to place rubbish in official containers. In higher-density buildings, the city is introducing Empire Bins, large stationary containers located on public streets and designed to be collected by trucks equipped with automated systems.
The Department of Sanitation’s stated objective is to progressively remove rubbish bags from the streets and make it more difficult for rodents to access waste.
Furthermore, the strategy goes beyond simply changing the type of container. New York is combining this transformation with specific monitoring programmes, inspections, priority control areas and targeted measures coordinated across different city agencies.
This is probably the most interesting aspect of the model for other cities.
Is it working?
The first municipal data are encouraging, although they should be interpreted with caution.
The Department of Sanitation has reported continued declines in rat-related complaints during the implementation of the new measures, with particularly significant reductions reported in some areas where containerisation pilot projects were introduced.
However, a reduction in calls or complaints from residents does not automatically mean that the entire change can be attributed to the new containers.
During the same period, other measures have also been implemented, including changes to collection schedules, inspections, specific rodent-control programmes, street cleaning and targeted interventions in certain neighbourhoods.
Even academic studies analysing changes in rat populations across different cities identify New York’s containerisation programme as a promising development, while considering the available evidence still too early to draw definitive conclusions about its long-term impact.
The lesson, therefore, is not simply:
“Containers eliminate rats.”
It is something more interesting:
Systematically reducing food availability can alter one of the environmental factors that sustain infestations.
Waste management is also pest management
This idea is not new.
A programme previously developed by the New York City Department of Health in several Bronx neighbourhoods had already demonstrated the importance of addressing environmental conditions at neighbourhood level.
The strategy combined regular inspections, active monitoring, education, actions by property owners and the correction of factors that encouraged infestations. One of those factors was precisely rubbish accessible to rodents. The programme significantly reduced the number of properties where signs of active rat infestations were found.
Another study based on tens of thousands of inspections carried out in New York also found an association between certain characteristics related to large volumes of rubbish and increased rat presence. Improvements in waste management and street cleaning were associated with a lower likelihood of detecting rodents.
All of this reinforces an important idea for urban pest management:
Rubbish is not simply an urban cleanliness issue. It can also be a variable within the ecology of rodent populations.
Could the model be applied to other cities?
There is no single model that can automatically be applied to every city.
New York has specific characteristics: high population density, large residential buildings, enormous volumes of waste and a long-standing practice of placing rubbish bags directly on pavements.
A European city where communal waste containers are already widely established, for example, starts from a completely different position.
What can be transferred is the preventive principle behind the policy.
A city could jointly analyse:
- where rodent infestations are concentrated
- where waste is regularly found outside containers
- which businesses generate the largest amounts of food waste
- where containers are insufficient or frequently overflowing
- which collection schedules leave rubbish exposed for longer periods
- where burrows and potential harbourage are concentrated
- and which areas generate the highest number of reports from residents
Overlaying these layers of information could reveal patterns that make it possible to address environmental causes before increasing corrective control measures.
Containers alone will not solve the problem
There is also a risk of oversimplification.
A city can replace rubbish bags with containers and still experience significant rodent problems.
A poorly closed, overflowing or undersized container can once again provide a food source for the local rodent population. Food can also accumulate around restaurants, litter bins, markets, sewer systems, or loading and unloading areas.
The CDC’s own rodent surveillance guidelines identify both directly exposed waste and containers that are improperly sealed, overflowing or insufficient as problematic conditions.
In addition, rat populations also need shelter and opportunities to move through the environment.
Urban rodent management therefore needs to combine waste management with:
monitoring + maintenance + exclusion + harbourage removal + professional pest control + evaluation of results.
Containers can close off one source of food, but they do not replace the rest of the programme.
An opportunity for pest management companies
This approach also broadens the role of environmental health and pest management companies.
Professionals no longer need to limit their diagnosis to locating burrows or selecting the appropriate treatment. They can also analyse the conditions that are sustaining the infestation.
During an inspection, for example, they may identify:
- containers that are permanently left open
- waste around loading areas
- insufficient collection frequencies
- businesses where food waste remains accessible
- accumulations of materials that provide harbourage
- recurring pest activity around specific waste areas
Recording these factors makes it possible to move from a report based solely on “whether rodent activity was detected” to one that explains why the area continues to provide favourable conditions for rodents.
Furthermore, if this information is geolocated and analysed over several months, heat maps can be generated based on pest activity, recurring problems can be identified, and teams can assess whether the changes introduced are producing results and how they are affecting rodent behaviour.
This fits particularly well with a preventive, data-driven pest management model.
From treating rats to managing the urban ecosystem
The New York case reflects a broader evolution within pest management.
For many years, a large proportion of municipal strategies focused on acting directly against the target pest. However, the Integrated Pest Management approach also seeks to address the conditions that allow that pest to thrive.
In the case of urban rodents, this means considering several factors together:
food, water, shelter, human behaviour and population activity.
Waste management therefore shifts from being an area separate from pest management to becoming part of the overall strategy.
For specialist companies, this transformation also creates opportunities to work with more information from inspections, reports, monitoring points and pest-activity heat maps.
Specialist tools such as iGEO make it possible to record geolocated incidents and monitoring points, work with heat maps, maintain service histories and connect the information collected by technicians with planning and subsequent analysis.
The ultimate objective is not to carry out more treatments, but to understand which conditions are causing the problem to keep returning.
Conclusion: less available food as another part of rodent control
New York’s experience raises an important question for any city facing persistent rodent problems: perhaps part of the solution does not lie solely in increasing the number or frequency of pest control methods, such as traps or treatments.
It may also lie in making the urban environment less favourable to rats.
Waste containerisation is specifically designed to address one of the fundamental elements required for their survival: food availability.
The initial signals reported by New York are positive, but the programme will need to be monitored as it expands, while distinguishing the effect of containerisation from the other measures being implemented simultaneously.
What is supported by the principles of Integrated Pest Management is the underlying logic: rodent control is more sustainable when action is also taken to address the environmental conditions that encourage or sustain infestations.
For other cities, therefore, the lesson from New York is not necessarily to copy the same type of container.
It is to ask a much more useful question:
What are we doing to stop our streets from constantly providing rats with food, shelter and opportunities to thrive?
