The Big Belly is a minor municipal miracle – a solar-powered trash compactor that stores five times the waste of ordinary trash cans, goes longer between cleanings and is rat-resistant. The bins have foot pedals that open their mouths to accept garbage, and some have sensors that signal a Public Works department that they’re full and need to be emptied.
Though the devices are in 2,500 communities in 60 countries, the 23-year-old company that makes them, Bigbelly, is almost local: It’s based in Norwood and, as of 2024, makes its products in a facility in Methuen and Lawrence.
These fancy trash cans are not perfect, though, and all too often sit crammed, an unsightly and temporarily unusable blight to the streetscapes of Somerville and Cambridge.
It turns out that an overflow at the opening doesn’t mean the Big Belly is full. It might be just that: a clogged mouth.
“All it takes is one poorly folded pizza box, for instance, to make an otherwise empty can overflow,” said Eric Weisman, Somerville’s commissioner of Public Works.
Pizza boxes are the culprit named most commonly in Big Belly problems.
A Somerville spokesperson, Denise Taylor, said the bins overflow often due to clogs from bulky or household trash, which cause the hopper to malfunction and appear to be overfilled when it’s not, and it’s the same in Cambridge: “These jams happen when the internal hopper mechanism becomes blocked and cannot cycle properly. This prevents the compactor from pulling trash down into the main bin,” said Jeremy Warnick, a city spokesperson. “Pizza boxes are among the most common items that cause hopper jams.”
There are enough such pizza-box-style problems that Cambridge is “currently working with the manufacturer to address issues related to sensors and fullness monitoring,” said Kristen Kelleher, the city’s Department of Public Works community relations manager. The software helps prioritize collections based on fullness alerts; the false position of a hopper jam sabotages that by demanding an in-person inspection. “A new maintenance contract is forthcoming to help improve system reliability,” Kelleher said.
Spotting the problems
As of July, Somerville had 284 Big Belly trash receptacles as well as other decorative barrels and traditional trash cans over its 4.1 square miles. Cambridge has 531 Big Belly cans out of a total 943 trash and recycling units over 6.4 square miles, Warnick said. (Numbers fluctuate slightly as units are added, removed or repaired.) The number of Cambridge stations has increased 38 percent since 2025, with new bins including trash and recycling stations replaced nearly all of the open-top trash cans left in the city. Two hundred of the fully enclosed Big Belly units were added just since September with an eye toward litter and rat control, Warnick said.
On a random day in in mid-July, there were 22 active hopper jam alerts in the system, Kelleher said. That’s about 4 percent of the bins in Cambridge.
Somerville doesn’t have automated alerts but is “interested in exploring the utility of this feature,” Taylor said. In the meantime, city staff are finishing up the creation of a GPS map tracking and reporting system for the bins so staff can flag issues by location and create their own 311 tickets via an app.
Both cities take 311 calls or SeeClickFix alerts from residents who spot overfull, overflowing or jammed trash barrels or Big Belly bins; in Somerville, those calls peaked at 16 in 2024, which works out to around 5.6 percent of the Big Belly bins in town. There have been only five such calls for 2026 as of mid-July in Somerville, despite a weekslong issue that’s taken a trash and recycling truck out of rotation, causing Public Works to shuffle vehicles and slowing some pickups, Taylor said.
“Of course, not every overfull trash barrel or Big Belly is reported, but we do have very active use of 311, so this offers some insight,” Taylor said.
A few hours to 2.5 days
Somerville workers are out collecting trash from public bins every day, with cans getting pickup on a rotating basis. In general, the city collects from each Big Belly a minimum three times a week in the spring and summer; a Big Belly in a high-use locations should be emptied more frequently, Taylor said. Recycling is collected from a twinned Big Belly a minimum of twice a week, she said.
“If DPW gets requests or complaints about overflowing Big Bellys – or spots them when surveying public spaces – they dispatch staff to empty the cans as soon as possible,” Taylor said. “Sometimes, during busy weekends, there is an excessive amount of trash produced. In those cases, DPW will put out additional collection bins and schedule additional pickups, if staff and schedule can accommodate this.”
A overflow can draw a pickup in just a few hours, but won’t go longer than 2.5 days, since all bins are emptied a minimum of three times a week whether they are full or not, Taylor said. A broken bin gets emptied and wrapped in plastic until it can be fixed.
“We are continually monitoring and evaluating our services, including trash pickup from public trash cans, which can have greatly fluctuating demand,” Weisman said. “We take pride in our work and are always striving to improve, so we welcome feedback and 311 requests or reports of any issues.”
Overflowing trash or recycling bins can be reported here in Cambridge or here in Somerville.
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