Dear Mayor Mamdani,

Allow me to congratulate you on a very productive start to your term. Your recent call for cost-saving measures caught my attention because it is imperative that NYC end its costly trash subsidy. Reversing this harmful policy will save the city money and help clean up its streets. Perhaps you’re wondering what trash subsidy I’m referring to.

Like almost all cities, New York indirectly subsidizes trash and supports rampant littering. It does this by neglecting to charge companies the true cost of the trash they produce. This cost is instead borne by the city, and passed on to all New Yorkers. With universal childcare, you showed the city will happily spend money on subsidies that align with its core values and goals. Likewise, the city must assert its values by removing subsidies with overwhelmingly negative externalities.

The ubiquitous single-use coffee cup is the poster child of this trash subsidy. Large chain coffee shops figured out long ago that if they send customers away with their drinks, the cost of disposing of all that single-use trash gets transferred to the city. Customers walk a few blocks before discarding their cups in street trash cans where the trash becomes the city’s problem. This is why food and drink containers are the clearest case of the city taking on these waste disposal costs.

Worse still, many of these single-use containers become litter which is even more costly to clean up. These are often half-full, making them much heavier and more cumbersome to deal with. I recommend learning about the problem the way I did, by joining one of the many NYC neighborhood cleanup initiatives; groups like the Clean Bushwick Initiative¹, and the Malcolm X Blvd Beautification Group². Collectively they spend countless hours bagging litter to put a momentary dent in the constant stream of trash hitting the streets. I also tried to solve this problem by creating a sustainability-based ratings platform for cafes³, but the true solution must come from the city.

With a bit of political will, this is a very tractable problem; the solution saves the city money and beautifies its streets and parks from day one. As a former member of the Manhattan Solid Waste Advisory Board, I know firsthand that you have highly dedicated teams that would love to help you iron out the implementation details, as would I. The main points are simple:

• Require the use of reusables for dine-in orders
• Charge venues the fully considered cost of the single-use to-go waste they produce
• Higher fees for chains according to their number of venues in the city
• Make the fees simple and predictable for businesses
• Enforce the rules

Consider the problem in mattress-fine equivalents. New Yorkers that improperly dispose of a mattress can face a fine of up to $300 (and the wrath of their super). Given that a large portion of food containers are disposed of partially full, a cautious estimate for a coffee cup + lid + 2 oz. of water is ~70g. If a Starbucks sells ~600 drinks a day and half of those are disposed of outside the venue, that’s about 46 pounds (21 kg) per day! Or about one twin mattress per day, per venue. So a mattress-fine equivalent is ~$0.50 per single-use cup since Starbucks uses single-use cups almost exclusively. All of those estimates err on the low side, so consider that $0.50 number a floor.

This clear misalignment of incentives must end, but it won’t be easy. Every large coffee chain and fast-food lobby will fight you over it. People will call you the “C” word. You can tell them that, in this case, Capitalism offers a natural solution to the problem: charge companies what it costs the city to deal with the trash they produce.

You would also generate a lot of goodwill by making it legal to sell coffee directly in markets like the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket. Provided it’s done with reusables, everybody wins and droves of drowsy market-goers will love you for it. Just like with congestion pricing, skip-the-stuff, universal childcare, and so many other recent good decisions, NYC can stay true to its values by eliminating the indirect subsidy on trash, starting with coffee shops.

With gratitude,
Alexander Morgan

P.S.: Every single cafe directly controlled by the city is exclusively single-use. It is unacceptable to have the flagship library in Manhattan lined in marble but still house a single-use only cafe. The same goes for every borough’s botanical gardens. The city must lead by example.

(This letter was originally shared on LinkedIn here.)