‘Don’t Do New York Dirty’ Means ‘Don’t Litter’

Good morning. It’s Friday. Today we’ll look at a new campaign aimed at one of those seemingly intractable New York problems: littering. We’ll also get details on why more than 100 NASA scientists are moving out of a building that television viewers know from the sitcom “Seinfeld.”

Credit…John Taggart for The New York Times

Can New York change its habits about littering?

That’s the question behind a new advertising campaign that comes at the end of a week when there has been reason to think that habits in New York can change.

New York Today on Tuesday looked at congestion pricing. By most measurements, after four months with a toll on traffic heading into the busiest part of Manhattan, drivers’ habits have changed. Equally important, for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, is the revenue that congestion pricing is bringing in.

The new anti-littering campaign isn’t charging litterers, and it isn’t paying people not to litter. The creators of the campaign acknowledge that it may not bring about change as quickly as congestion pricing has. The slogan, repeated in commercials that will be broadcast on television and shown in movie theaters and on sanitation truck posters, is: “Don’t do New York City dirty — trash your trash.” One of the people who came up with it is Pam Harris, the president of the Sanitation Foundation, a nonprofit that works closely with the city’s Department of Sanitation.

Harris, who helped think up the Knicks’ “Go, New York, Go” motto in the 1990s, talks about “creating a culture of cleanliness.”