Restaurants stuck with empty tables as diners cancel.
Money on prototypes isn’t wasted — but time has been
A man dressed in head-to-toe black except for the white thunderbolt on his baseball cap hunched over a work table, tools spread around him. He refused to divulge what he was working on.
“You're not allowed to see this,” he told me with a smirk. “Or I'll have to kill you.”
Undeterred, I asked again what production manager Tony Rojas was making. He smirked again and answered, “You'll never know.” This is the back room of APROE, a design and engineering firm in San Francisco's Design District. It helps companies turn ideas for a new product into reality, often
keeping them hush-hush to avoid the prying eyes of competitors. But one of its next products is already famous, even though it exists only on paper.
Rojas and his colleagues will make the prototype for San Francisco's long-discussed new city
trash can. The can scored headlines recently when Public Works officials told incredulous members of the Board of Supervisors the prototypes might cost $20,000. Each.
After realizing that wasn't going to fly, officials agreed to bring the
price down to just $12,000 a can — still a shocking sum even in exorbitant San Francisco where everything costs too much and our annual city budget of more than $13 billion doesn’t stretch nearly as far as it should.
When the cans are eventually manufactured in large quantities, they’ll cost between $2,000 and $3,000, still pricey but less expensive than competitors like Big Belly.
The more distressing figure is the length of time it will have taken notoriously slow City Hall to replace the 3,000 trash cans already way past their shelf life. Ironically, the current dark green Renaissance cans contribute to San Francisco’s rampant sidewalk filth because they’re bad at their only job: holding trash.
Public Works is already three years into the process of replacing the cans, and it only recently settled on three possible designs. It’s nearing a deal with APROE, still unsigned, to create 15 cans — five of each prototype — to place around the city in November for testing.
Sometime next spring, it’ll issue a request for proposals for another company to manufacture 3,000 or more of the winning can. But it has no timeline beyond that — never mind a date when they’ll actually dot our sidewalks.
Asked whether all the cans will be replaced in 2023, Beth Rubenstein, spokesperson for Public Works, said, “I couldn’t say.”
Supervisor Matt Haney, who’s been calling for better trash cans since taking office, said Public Works’ long deliberation over something so basic is frustrating.
“They’ve slow-rolled this as slow as anyone could possibly roll anything. Where is the urgency?” Haney asked. “This is part corruption, part incompetence, and part a department that is deeply and structurally broken.”
Haney led a successful effort to break the department into two, one focused on sanitation and one on infrastructure. The split should happen next year, and the city must find two new leaders after Public Works chief Alaric Degrafinried recently left for BART.
Of course, it’s hard to separate Public Works’ long quest to better contain filth with Degrafinried’s allegedly dirty predecessor, Mohammed Nuru, who faces federal corruption charges.
Nuru told me three years ago that the city needed new cans, but that he’d held an inhouse design competition that didn’t elicit good enough responses. That same year, his department entered into a twoyear agreement with Alternate Choice LLC to provide the Renaissance cans that are easily broken and spill trash.
Alternate Choice LLC is run by the son of Walter Wong, a permit expediter at the center of the city’s corruption scandal who agreed to plead guilty to fraud and money laundering charges. City Attorney Dennis Herrera in March suspended Walter Wong and Alternate Choice LLC from doing business with the city.
Asked whether that mess had contributed to the slowness in picking a can, Rubenstein said, “Not at all.”
She explained that having a transparent process takes time and that no off-the-shelf can met the city’s needs for a receptacle that’s beautiful, long-lasting and tamper-proof, and has a separate recycling component, a rolling mechanism to get them more easily to garbage trucks and a sensor to tell workers when they’re getting full.
This is San Francisco, after all. Even our trash cans must be bespoke.
But what sort of place makes such a one-of-akind trash can? Mose O’Griffin, president and founder of APROE, graciously offered to show me around.
Inside the intriguing shop, part of SF Made’s facility on Hooper Street, 16 employees build prototypes for companies or create research and development facilities for them. They work to ensure that 90% of their materials are sourced locally. Clients include Peloton, Facebook and Blue Bottle Coffee.
The facility resembles Willie Wonka’s Chocolate Factory but with less candy and more tools. Next to the front door sits the “wall of toys.” There’s a mold of the bottom half of O’Griffin’s face to create masks that fit him perfectly. There’s a 3-D printout of his ear. The room also sports a huge traffic light, a handcrafted shed for private meetings and a poster featuring break-dance moves from New York City. (O’Griffin is a breakdancer, too, and showed off some tricks.)
The back room is more serious — and more private. It’s filled with tools, sheets of heavy steel, a yellow crane to lift them and a water jet cutting machine. O’Griffin wouldn’t say what his team was making, and some areas were covered with blankets for extra secrecy. I highly doubt I’d be able to figure out their prototypes and relay them to competitors even without the blankets, but I suppose you can never be too careful.
“We would let in trouble — our client would be unhappy,” O’Griffin explained of keeping the project literally and figuratively under wraps.
O’Griffin said he was surprised that the city trash can had garnered so many headlines. For him, it’s just a no-brainer that creating a prototype of a new product costs a lot more than when they’ll be manufactured at scale.
Andrew Damele, APROE’s head of design and engineering, explained the cost isn’t really for one trash can.
“The real product is the process and the learning,” he said. “The more money and time you spend up front, the better end result you’re going to get. It’s just the nature of manufacturing.”
The visit convinced me $12,000 for a trash can protoype isn’t as nutty as it sounds. Taking several years to get new bins installed on our filthy sidewalks? Now that’s plain crazy.