Trash Bins and the Hidden Tax of Institutional Retreat

Recently, I found myself doing something that should have been unnecessary: walking along Paseo de la Reforma with an influencer and placing temporary trash bins on one of Mexico City’s most important avenues. It was not a conventional cleanup campaign, nor was it an attempt to replace the public sanitation system through charity; it was an act of social and urban activism intended to make an institutional absence impossible to ignore. By introducing a few ordinary bins into a corridor where they had gradually disappeared, we wanted to expose the absurdity of a city that attracts millions of visitors, hosts mass celebrations, and presents Reforma as its international showcase, yet increasingly asks pedestrians to carry their waste indefinitely because the most elementary public infrastructure is no longer available. People immediately used the bins, which confirmed something that should be obvious but is repeatedly absent from the political discussion: civic responsibility depends, at least in part, on whether the city provides the physical conditions that make responsible behavior possible.

The intervention followed research by The Place Institute showing that more than 80% of the trash bins that once existed along Paseo de la Reforma, from El Caballito to the Puerta de los Leones, had disappeared over the previous three years because they were removed, stolen, damaged or simply never replaced. Between the Diana Cazadora and the entrance to Chapultepec, journalists were able to locate only three bins, while wealthier commercial areas such as Polanco continued to offer containers on many corners, often maintained by private businesses rather than public authorities. During the 39 days of the 2026 World Cup, sanitation services collected 298 tons of waste from Mexico City’s celebration areas, with between 40 and 50 tons removed after each of the largest national-team gatherings on Reforma; after one victory, more than 700,000 people occupied the central city, making the absence of permanent waste infrastructure not merely visible but impossible to defend as a marginal issue.

The most common response to these scenes was that people should be cleaner, behave better and take their waste home, and certainly no serious argument about public space should absolve individuals who deliberately throw bottles, food containers or plastic bags onto the street. Personal responsibility matters, but when government removes infrastructure and then attributes the resulting disorder exclusively to individual morality, it converts a policy failure into a cultural accusation. Citizens are described as dirty, undisciplined or lacking civic values, while the institutional decisions that made appropriate disposal increasingly difficult disappear from the conversation. The underlying message is that every person should become individually responsible not only for producing less waste, which is reasonable, but also for compensating for the absence of a functioning public collection system, which is something entirely different. Co-responsibility should mean that institutions provide an effective system and citizens use it properly; it should not mean that government withdraws from the system and congratulates itself for teaching society a lesson in personal discipline.

This distinction matters because the disappearance of trash bins is part of a wider retreat of public institutions from everyday life in Mexico. Families increasingly purchase private security, install cameras, employ guards and surround their homes with gates because public safety cannot be assumed; those who can afford it purchase private medical insurance because access to reliable healthcare is uncertain; workers rely on private vehicles or app-based transportation when public mobility does not connect them safely or efficiently; companies maintain sidewalks, lighting, landscaping, drainage and waste collection around their properties because the quality of the surrounding public environment has become unpredictable. Even cleanliness is becoming territorially unequal, with functioning infrastructure concentrated around private developments, hotels, corporate offices and high-income commercial districts, while other parts of the same city are expected to manage through improvisation. What is presented politically as individual empowerment is therefore often something much less progressive: the gradual privatization of ordinary life, in which access to safety, health, mobility, cleanliness and dignified public space depends less on citizenship than on purchasing power.

For business, this institutional retreat operates as a hidden tax. Companies contribute through formal taxation and then pay again to reproduce the public conditions required for them to operate, hiring security guards because the street is unsafe, arranging transportation because employees cannot travel predictably, cleaning sidewalks because public maintenance is insufficient, purchasing water or backup electricity when basic networks fail, and creating privately managed environments around offices, stores, hotels and restaurants because customers and workers cannot otherwise be guaranteed an acceptable experience. Large corporations may be able to absorb these expenses and build small islands of functionality, but smaller businesses cannot, which means that public decline does not simply inconvenience everyone equally; it rewards scale, increases barriers to entry and makes economic opportunity more unequal. A restaurant depends on the cleanliness of the sidewalk outside its entrance, a hotel depends on visitors feeling safe beyond its lobby, a retailer depends on pedestrian confidence and an employer depends on workers reaching the workplace without sacrificing unreasonable amounts of time or money. Public space is therefore not separate from business infrastructure. It is business infrastructure, and a government that allows it to deteriorate is quietly increasing the cost of investment while publicly claiming to improve competitiveness.

The comparison with New York is revealing because Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration has chosen to frame waste not as evidence of defective citizens but as a problem requiring public investment, operational capacity and a different physical system. Mamdani did not invent New York’s containerization program; previous administrations introduced requirements for businesses and low-density properties and launched an initial Empire Bin pilot in West Harlem. What his administration changed was the level of political commitment: instead of leaving the initiative as a limited experiment without a citywide deadline or adequate funding, it established a plan to remove trash bags from sidewalks throughout the city by the end of 2031, beginning with six additional community districts that will be fully containerized by the end of 2027. The first expansion is expected to provide more than 6,500 large containers to over 3,500 medium- and high-density residential buildings, supported by automated side-loading trucks, building assignments and a budget that begins with US$14.8 million in fiscal year 2027 and is projected to grow to US$162.2 million by fiscal year 2030.

That approach offers a more convincing definition of progressive government than the language of personal responsibility currently used in Mexico. It does not deny that residents, landlords and businesses have obligations, but it recognizes that government must design, finance and operate the system within which those obligations can realistically be fulfilled. It also connects street cleanliness with labor dignity, because leaving thousands of loose bags on sidewalks does not only create odors, obstruct pedestrian movement and attract rats; it forces sanitation workers to lift, drag and handle torn or leaking bags manually, transferring the physical cost of an inadequate system onto the workers responsible for keeping the city functioning. Mamdani’s position is progressive not because containers are inherently ideological, but because it treats cleanliness, public health, decent working conditions and the quality of the sidewalk as collective responsibilities worthy of sustained public investment. It accepts that a city must do more than lecture its residents: it must organize resources, set deadlines, purchase equipment, make difficult spatial decisions and create an institution capable of delivering the policy after the announcement has disappeared from the news cycle.

Mexico City, by contrast, has become highly effective at managing extraordinary events while continuing to neglect ordinary systems. It can deploy thousands of workers, police officers and temporary sanitation teams for a World Cup celebration, remove dozens of tons of waste overnight and announce that recovered plastic will eventually become benches, planters or lighting elements, yet still leave long sections of its principal avenue without a permanent place to discard a bottle. Following the World Cup and the attention generated by journalistic investigations and public interventions, authorities said they would evaluate returning bins to Reforma, which is a positive response and demonstrates that social activism can influence public decisions. Nevertheless, the deeper objective cannot be merely to reinstall a handful of containers until the controversy passes. A serious policy would map pedestrian flows, transportation nodes, informal commerce, food consumption and event density; establish clear responsibilities between agencies and borough governments; create predictable collection schedules; provide separation and recycling options; protect sanitation workers; and maintain the infrastructure over time rather than waiting for another crisis to reveal that it has disappeared.

This is why placing bins on Reforma was not simply a symbolic gesture about litter. Social activism is sometimes misunderstood as an effort by citizens to perform the work that government has failed to do, but its more important function is to reveal failure, create public pressure and demand that institutions resume their responsibilities. Community participation should improve public systems, influence their design and hold them accountable; it should not become an unpaid substitute for government. When residents repair parks, fill potholes, install lighting, provide surveillance, organize water deliveries or purchase street furniture, their commitment may be admirable, but a society should be cautious about celebrating its capacity to survive institutional neglect as though that neglect were evidence of resilience. Asking citizens to participate in a functioning system is democracy; asking them to replace that system is abandonment.

Investors, entrepreneurs and business leaders should care about this distinction because markets depend on institutions that can execute ordinary responsibilities consistently. Government is not experienced primarily through political speeches, investment announcements or international rankings, but through the daily reliability of permits, transportation, security, drainage, waste collection, healthcare, sidewalks and maintenance. Mexico does not suffer from a shortage of plans or public commitments; it suffers from a growing distance between what institutions say they provide and what people encounter when they leave their homes. A trash bin may appear insignificant beside airports, industrial corridors, nearshoring strategies and major infrastructure projects, yet its presence communicates something fundamental about state capacity: that government is willing to organize and maintain the ordinary conditions of collective life. When it renounces even those responsibilities, citizens and companies are forced to finance its absence, inequality grows, public trust erodes and the promise of competitiveness becomes increasingly difficult to sustain.

The problem is not simply trash. The problem is whether government still intends to govern.