San Francisco’s first eight custom-designed “Slim Silhouette” trash cans hit the streets this week, eight years after the city started the process of replacing its aging sidewalk bins.
The cans have appeared at corners in the Castro, the Mission, the Sunset, the Richmond, Potrero Hill, Forest Hill, and North Beach. The one confirmed location is outside the former Hibernia Bank building at McAllister and Jones streets, near mid-Market. Public Works spokesperson Rachel Gordon told SFist that one can near that location had already picked up graffiti and she dispatched someone to clean it almost immediately.
Eight cans. That’s it for now.
Public Works is treating this as a soft launch, watching how the bins perform before any wider rollout. And the city still hasn’t confirmed whether it has ordered or manufactured the roughly 3,000 cans that would be needed to replace every existing street trash receptacle in San Francisco.
The backstory on these bins is, depending on your tolerance for municipal process, either a fascinating case study in how public infrastructure gets made or a nearly decade-long monument to bureaucratic delay. The Department of Public Works launched its search for a new trash can design back in 2018, during the Ed Lee and Mohammad Nuru era. The city wanted something that could handle recycling, use removable bins that Recology workers could swap out quickly, and actually survive on San Francisco streets without falling apart or getting jammed.
The project drew national attention in mid-2021 when the Board of Supervisors had to approve a contract for 15 prototype cans in three different models, and the headline figure was $20,000 per can. That number was misleading. It reflected the design and fabrication cost for a tiny run of custom prototypes, not what the cans would cost if manufactured at scale. The city was also testing off-the-shelf models alongside the custom ones, specifically to get a read on whether the cheaper option could do the job. Still, $20,000 per trash can became the story, and San Francisco absorbed another round of national jokes about its relationship with public spending.
A public vote in mid-2022 chose the Slim Silhouette model. Then three more years passed. Fabrication was finally confirmed underway, with the city saying the cans would appear on streets sometime in 2026. Public Works estimated last year that the per-can manufacturing cost would land at or under $3,000, roughly in line with what comparable off-the-shelf bins run. That’s a very different number than $20,000, but the final cost hasn’t been officially confirmed.
The San Francisco Department of Public Works oversees roughly 25,000 street-facing trash receptacles across the city, according to department figures, which gives some sense of the scale involved if the Slim Silhouette ever reaches full deployment. Recology, the city’s sole refuse hauler under a long-standing exclusive contract, would handle the actual emptying.
What’s genuinely interesting about the Slim Silhouette, if you set aside the timeline, is what it was designed to do. The bins incorporate a recycling section directly into the unit, which sounds obvious but wasn’t standard on San Francisco’s existing cans. The removable inner bins are meant to cut down on the time Recology workers spend on each stop, which matters when you’re servicing a dense city.
Whether the design holds up under real conditions is exactly what this soft launch is supposed to find out.
For now, if you spot a sleek new trash can that doesn’t look like the dented green cylinder you’re used to, take a photo. After eight years, the city’s new trash cans deserve a little documentation.
“If you see one being used or abused in the wild,” Public Works said, “do update us.”