New York City has unveiled its latest tactic in a “trash revolution” to wrangle control of its city back from rats.
So innovative is this “beautiful rat-fighting piece of engineering”, discovered by a consultancy firm paid $1.6m for its efforts, that the city’s mayor, Eric Adams, demonstrated how to use it during the announcement.
You open the lid, you put the rubbish in it, and you wheel it out. It’s a wheelie bin.
Other parts of the US already have wheelie bins, and the fact New York City is finally rolling out the mobile receptacle has drawn hilarious reactions online. As Arwa Mahdawi wrote for the Guardian, Britons have found this most hilarious because “wheelie bins occupy a large amount of space in the national consciousness”.
In Australia, the wheelie bin was introduced in the early to mid-80s, and since then, Australians have learned that it’s more than just a bin.
Wheelie bins can spark ‘an interspecies innovation arms race’
Australia’s sulphur-crested cockatoo became so good at using their beaks to manoeuvre themselves to swing bin lids open in Greater Sydney that the human response to this phenomenon became the subject of a scientific study.
The research, published in the journal Current Biology, found Sydney residents were resorting to increasingly sophisticated measures to deter the birds from their bin-raiding antics, finding 52 combinations of techniques.
The researchers called the battle an “an interspecies innovation arms race”. The challenge for humans was to to secure the bins in a way that still allows them to be emptied by automated garbage trucks.
One nifty solution was to wedge a pair of running shoes near the hinge of the bin lid.
Hopefully the rats in New York don’t learn the same tricks, with New York City’s mayor noting during his unveiling of the wheelie bin that the “pesty New York City rats” have been getting “more and more bold”.
“They no longer run from you. They just hang out and just do what they want,” Adams said.
However, Australians have also found that wheelie bins aren’t the best tool for corralling a crocodile.
In 2017, a 3.5m crocodile wandered into a small north Queensland fishing town on New Year’s Eve. In an effort to corral the crocodile back towards the water, locals and police formed a barricade of hay bales and wheelie bins.
The plan worked for a moment, with the crocodile taking a few tentative steps in the direction of the shoreline, before it returned to its post at the front gate of a house. The animal was later raised into a boat using a forklift.
Wheelie bins can be a ‘wheelie’ good time
As Guardian Australia reporter Josh Butler noted, the bins can be put on their side and raced down hills.
wait til New Yorkers hear about putting these things on their side and racing em down hills https://t.co/nlwMgDb8vZ
— Josh Butler (@JoshButler) July 10, 2024
And one punter at the Melbourne Cup – “the race that stops the nation” – found in 2016 that wheelie bins can also be ridden like a horse.
However, be warned that riding a wheelie bin can also reveal the nasty character of a nation. Photos of the racegoer – later labeled the “bin-rider” – who was photographed pretending to ride a wheelie bin like a horse went viral. She had to take down her social media accounts after receiving “nasty” comments from strangers after the pictures were published.
During Covid lockdowns wheelie bins also played a strong supporting role in one of the most popular activities Australians adopted to keep their spirits up – dressing up for bin night, including as a bride in their old wedding dress, as dinosaurs and in one case in an inflatable penis costume.
Don’t take the request to ‘take the bins out’ literally
In Australia, to “take the bins out” means to wheel the bins to the kerbside, an act that is usually done once a week the night before the rubbish is due to be collected.
But one Australian in 2021 decided to take this literally. It began when Carl Stanojevic received a late-night text message from his neighbour, Nick Doherty – who works remotely – asking if Stanojevic “would be able to take my bins out please”.
Stanojevic joked about taking the bin out to local restaurants and bars. The next morning, after it was emptied and cleaned, Stanojevic decided to follow through, taking the wheelie bin on a big day out to see the sights.
Wheelie bins make good ice baths, apparently
Responding to the cold plunge trend, a popular Australian hardware store provided a “simple” yet cheap way to build an ice bath. It involves drilling a drainage hole and tap into a (clean) wheelie bin and filling it up with ice and water.
This trend has also caught on in the UK, where writer Joel Snape reported last year that friends had been leaping into wheelie bins full of ice cubes as part of a January ice bath challenge.
Wheelie bins can sometimes multiply
Most households in Australia don’t have just one wheelie bin – there are sometimes three, and in the state of Victoria, households have four.
Each bin is for a different type of waste. One is for general rubbish, one is for garden and food waste, one is for mixed recycling, and in Victoria, the fourth is for glass.
