This is a story examining San Francisco’s bizarre pursuit of the perfect trash can: the time it has taken, the stunning amount of money being spent, and the baffling lack of curiosity on the part of many of San Francisco’s elected representatives and media observers in questioning the proposal by San Francisco Public Works to spend $427,500 to produce 15 prototype cans. We’re moving forward in the next stage: prototype manufacturing and testing of the cans we opted to redesign from scratch. Still, Haney, like all his colleagues on the Board of Supervisors, approved the plan to spend $427,500. “But why did we choose this path to begin with? And why are we still doing this rather than putting out a bunch of different types of cans that already are produced, that are much cheaper, that are already performing well … in some other place … and then making a decision based on this? This is a very expensive, much longer, uncertain process that we’ve chosen.”

“I realize we’re pretty far down the path here already,” he said at a Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee meeting July 21.

The price tag for each prototype was estimated at between $12,000 to $20,000 apiece. In July, the Board of Supervisors would vote on spending $427,500, much of it to manufacture and test five prototypes of each model. By the summer of 2021, two-and-a-half years later, an industrial design firm had completed the conceptual drawings for three models. Here was the plan being described to him, as far as Supervisor Matt Haney could parse it: In late 2018, San Francisco had embarked on a quest to design its own garbage can - from scratch.

Garbage cans