I am done with this.
The overflowing bins, the stench of rot on summer evenings, the soft crunch of refuse underfoot before you even see it. The darting shadows along the canal edges — not cats, not birds, but rats. Not a few, not a scattering, but dozens, sometimes hundreds, moving with the confidence of a city that has stopped caring whether they are seen. This isn’t the Amsterdam of picture postcards and curated Instagram feeds. This is the Amsterdam of austerity, of broken public systems, of neglect so complete it now scurries on four legs.
Over the last decade, national governments have perfected the art of dumping their problems onto municipalities and then starving them of the means to deal with those problems. Amsterdam, with its leftist politics and high-profile defiance of the country’s increasingly rightward drift, has been punished for it. Budget cuts are dressed up as “efficiency” and “local empowerment,” but in practice they mean fewer sanitation crews, slower maintenance, less enforcement, and entire districts left to manage civic collapse with duct tape and good intentions. The bins — those underground hydraulic marvels that were meant to make waste management tidy and modern — now jam or fill faster than they can be emptied. Residents, boxed in by design, have nowhere to put large items except on the street. Homeless scavengers rip open bags in search of bottles and cans, scattering the contents, and the city’s understaffed crews arrive too late to do more than triage.
It’s a feedback loop of decay: mess begets more mess, vermin thrive, and the public’s sense of responsibility evaporates. COVID lockdowns broke whatever fragile waste etiquette still existed, as people turned their apartments into workshops and clear-out zones. In denser neighborhoods, the result was mountains of refuse and rats bold enough to sun themselves in daylight. That behavior hasn’t reversed. It has calcified. The Hague, with its enclosed neighborhood waste houses, remains comparatively clean; Amsterdam’s street bins are part of the public theatre, and now they tell a different story.
Public health officials know that leptospirosis — Weil’s disease — is here. It’s carried in rat urine, and it can kill through renal failure in a matter of days. But the official posture is silence. No panic. No acknowledgement. No headlines that could dent tourism revenue or spark political blame. If there’s an outbreak, you’ll hear about it from rumor before you hear it from city hall. Meanwhile, every broken bin and every spilled bag is a breeding ground.
This isn’t inevitable. It’s engineered — not by a conspiracy of rats, but by the conscious choice to strip public services to the bone, to turn the commons into a dumping ground while wealth retreats behind private walls. We talk about the “cost” of clean streets, but never the cost of letting them rot. The rats aren’t the problem. They’re just the most honest signal of what we’ve allowed to fester.
Problem One – COVID, Small Apartments, and the Collapse of Public Trust
When COVID hit, Amsterdam’s waste system was already operating on the edge. Then the lockdowns came — and with them, the perfect storm for a breakdown in public order around the commons.
People were trapped in apartments that, for many, were barely larger than a single tram car. There was no garden to stash a broken chair, no shed for old electronics, no attic to store bulky waste until pickup day. Every scrap of unused space was already claimed for survival. So when residents renovated, decluttered, or finally got around to that DIY project they’d been putting off for years, the debris had nowhere to go except the street.
Drop-off centers were closed or restricted. Waste crews were short-staffed. The underground hydraulic bins filled faster than they could be emptied. And as piles formed, public discipline dissolved. People began leaving waste beside the bins — “just for now” — assuming it would be collected within a day or two. But a system in slow-motion collapse doesn’t work on the timescales of individual convenience. By the time collection crews arrived, bags had been ripped open by scavengers, wind, or animals.
This wasn’t a moral failure. It wasn’t laziness, or selfishness, or some sudden citywide collapse in manners. It was a structural crisis, born of conditions beyond anyone’s control. People in 35 m² flats didn’t suddenly forget how to use a bin; they simply couldn’t make the system work for them under pandemic constraints.
But the pandemic did more than create logistical bottlenecks. It broke public trust in the city’s capacity to maintain the commons. When you see the same pile of trash every day for a week, when your bulky waste sits uncollected for ten days, when rats are visibly feeding in daylight and nothing happens — you stop believing the system works. And when that belief is gone, so is the willingness to play by the rules.
This is why you can’t “fix” the problem with fines, inspectors, or lectures about civic pride. You can’t out-penalize a failure of infrastructure. When the system is visibly broken, enforcement just looks like punishment for having the wrong kind of home, the wrong kind of life, or the wrong kind of street. The COVID years hardwired this into daily life in many neighborhoods, and austerity has left no slack to undo it.
If Amsterdam wants clean streets again, it has to start by accepting that the garbage crisis isn’t about bad citizens — it’s about the collapse of the commons under sustained pressure, and the refusal to resource the recovery.
Problem Two – The Scavengers Nobody Sees
Every city has its shadows, but in Amsterdam’s waste crisis, the shadows have names and histories — and they are not just “the homeless.” They are men and women who fled Eastern Europe, Ukraine, and the crumbling edges of post-Soviet space, chasing the promise of a better life in the EU. What they found here was not safety, but survival on the margins.
Many are casualties of wars that barely make the news anymore. They’ve seen homes burned, family scattered, friends killed. Some carry the invisible wounds of post-traumatic stress; others never had the chance to process what happened to them. They work the streets in quiet desperation, pushing rusted shopping carts or dragging heavy sacks through the rain. Their eyes are often glassy — from fatigue, from alcohol, from a need to dull memories that refuse to fade.
For them, statiegeld is not an environmental policy. It’s a lifeline. Bottles and cans are currency, one of the few things that can be collected without paperwork, without a fixed address, without the risk of being fined for working illegally. The city’s bins are their gold mines, and every night they dive headfirst into black plastic bags, searching for a few cents at a time.
But in the act of searching, the bags split. The contents spill onto wet cobblestones. Some scavengers try to re-pack them neatly; many don’t bother. And why should they? Nobody cares about them. They are invisible to the tourists, a nuisance to the residents, and a problem the municipality would rather frame as littering than as poverty.
The bottle deposit system, as it stands, wasn’t built for desperation. The amounts are small, the returns scattered. To make enough for a night in a hostel or a few cans of beer, scavengers have to work for hours, covering kilometers, digging through dozens of bags. Alcoholism is common — a poison and a crutch. In the cold, it’s one of the few ways to feel warmth. In the summer, it’s a way to forget the smell of the bins they live off.
And as with the trash crisis itself, austerity has stripped away what little support existed. Shelters are over capacity. Social workers are underfunded. Mental health services for migrants are a joke — a waiting list of months, sometimes years, for an intake appointment. In the meantime, people die quietly in the doorways, under bridges, or in abandoned sheds.
The scavengers are blamed for the mess, but they are not its cause. They are its most visible symptom. The city piles up its refuse and then punishes those who try to extract value from it. The scavenger’s sack of bottles is worth a handful of euros; the mess it leaves behind is worth a thousand photographs for right-wing pundits railing about “urban decay.”
Amsterdam’s streets aren’t just dirty because of garbage. They’re dirty because the city has decided that the people picking through that garbage aren’t worth saving.
The bins are broken, the streets are cluttered, and the rats have moved in. They don’t just feed at night anymore — in places like Sephardi Park, they run openly along curbs, vanish into bin chutes, and dart between trash bags in broad daylight. For anyone who’s lived in Amsterdam a while, it’s not just unsightly. It’s dangerous.
Rats are not just an abstract urban nuisance. They are mobile disease factories. Their urine can carry leptospirosis, which can shut down your kidneys in days. Their fleas — small, almost invisible — carry bacteria that most people assume went extinct with medieval plagues. But these aren’t history lessons; they’re on the street, right now, waiting to jump to the next host.
I know, because I’ve had them, from my dog. A flea infection from rats isn’t like a mosquito bite or an ordinary rash. You wake up one morning with small, red, ulcerating rings, three millimeters across, that look like burns. The skin lifts away. They don’t heal on their own. Within a day, they’re angry, oozing, and hot to the touch. It’s not just an itch — it’s a spreading wound. In my case, it required prescription antibiotic cream to stop the infection. Without it, those wounds could have spiraled into cellulitis, or worse.
This is what happens when garbage is left to fester: rats breed, fleas spread, and the line between “public sanitation” and “public health” collapses. And the danger isn’t evenly distributed. Children, pets, the elderly — they’re the first to be bitten. Dogs like mine can pick up fleas just by sniffing near a pile of garbage, then bring them into your home. Or visit a park – it is actually dangerous these days. Those fleas don’t care whether you live in a squat or a renovated canal house. They will bite anyone.
The city’s official line is usually that outbreaks are “isolated,” that any spike in cases is “under investigation.” But in practice, infestations spread invisibly until someone connects the dots — often too late. And because acknowledging a vector-borne disease problem in a tourist capital is politically radioactive, the incentive is always to downplay it. That’s how you end up with false reassurance: either there’s no problem, or it’s not the city’s problem.
Meanwhile, every week the same hotspots pile up trash faster than the crews can clear it. Every day those bags sit in the open is another day for a flea to feed, breed, and wait for a human host. And once the infestation starts, you can’t fumigate a street like you can an apartment. The rats scatter, the fleas scatter, and the cycle begins again. Plus having an apartment cleaned of fleas costs a lot of money.
Garbage is the symptom. Rats are the vector. Fleas are the delivery system. And the infection — that’s what we carry home.
Scenario – When the Rats Bite Back
It starts quietly. A warm, wet summer, more rain than usual, more garbage piles left open between collections. Rats flourish — not just in the back alleys and industrial yards, but in the postcard-perfect city center. They find the overflowing bins near Dam Square, Rembrandtplein, and the Jordaan. They leave urine trails on cobblestones, on canal stairs, on the metal rims of bin chutes. You can’t see it. You can’t smell it. But it’s there.
Leptospirosis — Weil’s disease — rides in that urine. It seeps into puddles, clings to damp fabric, survives on wet stone for days. You don’t have to touch a rat to catch it. Step in the wrong puddle with a blister on your heel, handle a railing where contaminated water has dried and cracked the skin on your hand — the bacteria are inside you before you know it.
The first hospital admissions don’t make headlines. A few cases scattered across neighborhoods: fever, muscle aches, nausea. But within days, the symptoms escalate in some patients. Skin turns yellow. Eyes redden with hemorrhage. Urine output crashes as the kidneys fail. ICU beds start filling with tourists — German cyclists, American backpackers, British stag-party survivors — all of whom thought they just had the flu when they got on the plane.
By the third week, it’s clear this isn’t an isolated cluster. Contact tracing points to public spaces: Leidseplein, Vondelpark, tram stops along the 2 and 12 lines. Municipal cleanup crews start wearing gloves and masks. Disinfection teams hit the bins with high-pressure steam, but there are too many sites, and the rain keeps washing new contamination into the streets.
The infection earns a nickname in the tabloids: “Canal Fever.” It’s catchy, ominous, and impossible to trademark away. Videos go viral — a tourist on a canal boat with a high fever being loaded into an ambulance; a close-up of a rat leaping from one floating garbage bag to another; a puddle in front of a Heineken Experience entrance swirling with oily runoff.
Tourism tanks. Hotels post occupancy rates down 40% in a month. Cruise companies quietly reroute away from Amsterdam, citing “operational adjustments.” Stag parties head to Prague instead. The national tourist board issues cautious language about “low health risks” that convinces no one. International media frame it as the perfect metaphor for a city collapsing under its own romantic myth — the beautiful canals hiding the rot beneath.
In the end, it’s not the number of infections that does the most damage. It’s the uncertainty. No one can tell visitors how to stay safe without admitting the full scale of the outbreak. Every puddle looks suspicious. Every rat sighting is another piece of anecdotal proof. And the longer the city hesitates, the more the narrative sticks: Amsterdam, the city where the streets bite back.
Solutions — If We Wanted to Solve It
There’s no shortage of ideas. What there’s a shortage of is political will — and in Amsterdam’s case, outright political sabotage from above.
Yes, we could add separate collection baskets for bottles next to the underground bins. It’s a proven, low-tech fix: scavengers get what they want without tearing bags apart, residents get cleaner streets. But here’s the catch — raising the statiegeld might make the bottle problem worse, not better. When the incentive to collect jumps sharply, the competition for those bottles intensifies. More people will scavenge, more bags will be ripped open. It’s a pressure valve, but it can also be a spark.
We could also employ homeless people directly — pay them to collect garbage under supervision, give them a safe place to sleep and food in exchange for work that keeps the city clean. It would cost less than emergency cleanup crews and reduce scavenging chaos. But every time this idea surfaces, the answer is the same: “no budget.” Austerity has turned “we can’t afford it” into a reflex, even when the costs of inaction — health care bills, lost tourism revenue, property value erosion — are much higher.
And here’s the part no one likes to say out loud: when problems are ignored long enough, people will force salience. That’s the term — making a crisis impossible to ignore, often by triggering events that demand an immediate response. If the city won’t address garbage piles, some people will eventually light them on fire. Not as protest signs, but as street-level blackmail: fix this, or watch the costs explode. It’s reckless, illegal, and dangerous — but it’s also predictable in a system where the official answer to every civic problem is “we’ll look into it.”
The real danger isn’t just the trash or the rats. It’s the pile-up of secondary crises:
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Lost tourism revenue as the city’s image decays.
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Increased public health costs from diseases and infestations.
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Housing value drops in visibly neglected neighborhoods.
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More vandalism and street crime in spaces where civic order has already collapsed.
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Daily stress and resentment from residents who feel abandoned.
And this isn’t some unfortunate bureaucratic oversight. It’s deliberate. Parties like the PVV have been on a rampage against left-wing cities like Amsterdam for years, using budget cuts as a form of political punishment. This is hate-driven governance — treating whole cities as enemies to be starved and humiliated. They’re not acting as problem-solvers. They’re acting as political arsonists, often backed by far-right billionaires and foreign actors who have every interest in weakening progressive urban strongholds.
Austerity here isn’t about “efficiency” or “fiscal discipline.” It’s a weapon — wielded by career sociopaths in the PVV, BBB, JA21, and to a lesser degree, the VVD. And it works, because their voters don’t want solutions. They want to hurt the system, punish its institutions, and watch it fail. The garbage in the street isn’t a side effect. It’s the point.
Conclusions – Takeaways for Amsterdam
This is not a slow-moving problem anymore. It’s accelerating. The bins are failing, the garbage piles are growing, the rats are thriving, and the city’s capacity to respond is shrinking under deliberate political sabotage and budget starvation. COVID broke the public’s waste discipline, austerity froze the recovery, and now we are living in the aftershock — an environment where neglect is normalized and every week without action deepens the damage.
Unless Amsterdam moves now, this will escalate. Public health incidents will multiply. Flea infestations and rat-borne diseases will become seasonal realities. Tourists will start noticing — not as a quirky “authentic” mess, but as a reason to stay away. Once the narrative shifts to “Amsterdam is dirty and dangerous,” it will be years before the city’s brand recovers, no matter how quickly the streets are cleaned.
This morning, I took a long walk with my dog. Not a single street I passed was free of trash. Bags split open on sidewalks. Cans rolling in the gutter. Rat runs along the canal walls. This isn’t an isolated blip — it’s the baseline. And the longer we pretend this is tolerable, the more expensive and politically impossible the eventual clean-up will be.
The takeaway is brutal in its simplicity: fix it now, or lose control entirely. That means:
- Sue the national government in court for more money. FORCE them to increae budgets because of health concerns, lost real estate value, threat of violence, spiraling health care costs.
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Rapid-response cleaning of hotspots before they snowball.
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Separate bottle collection to reduce scavenger-driven mess.
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Employing homeless people in supervised cleanup roles.
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Coordinated reporting and service across all waste contractors.
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Public acknowledgment that this is a crisis — not a “maintenance issue.”
Because if Amsterdam doesn’t reclaim its streets now, the streets will define Amsterdam. And not in the way anyone wants. If the city can’t clean itself, it will be cleaned out — of visitors, of trust, and of the Amsterdam people thought they knew.