San Francisco wants high-tech trash cans to deter human scavengers

The city of San Francisco is looking for new public garbage cans to fend off garbage collectors – and local officials are considering spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on high-tech prototypes, each of which will cost up to $ 20,000, a report said.

There are currently around 3,000 trash cans in public places in the city, but the existing ones are often hunted down by human scavengers who leave a mess, the acting director of the public works department said, KTVU reported.

“They pick the lock, dump the whole can on the street and then sort the things they want while the rubbish is either on the sidewalk or on the street,” said Deputy Director Alaric Degrafinried.

Instead of choosing from already-made containers, the report said the city could launch a $ 537,000 pilot program for a contractor to manufacture 15 containers.

Under the program, the contractor will create three prototypes and the city will order five of each at a cost of $ 20,000 each, the report said.

The city hopes to develop and launch a high-tech, vandal-resistant model by the end of this year.

While the prototype is expensive, city officials said the actual replacement cost would be around $ 3,000 to $ 4,000 per can, according to the report.

City overseer Matt Haney told the news channel he was concerned about the high cost of the program.

“I saw in the line item that 15 of them were for $ 300,000? That’s an extraordinary cost per can, ”said Haney.