The player is a solitary, futuristic bin called "Big Belly", which uses solar power to crush rubbish and then presents sanitation workers with handy 35lb cubes to put in their dump trucks. Offered for to the city for a trial by its inventors, a small Massachusetts engineering firm called the Seahorse Power Company, Big Belly was put on a busy corner in Chinatown on Valentine's Day.

Since then - after going unnoticed for a couple of weeks - Big Belly has been moved to the corner of Church and Chambers streets in TriBeca, also in downtown Manhattan, and made it into the newspapers. And the first article about Big Belly, in The New York Sun last Wednesday, showed a glimpse of the tough world it is trying to break into.

Harry Nespoli, for instance, president of the Uniformed Sanitationmen's Association, the union whose members might lose out if Big Belly was to cut down on the complexity of rubbish collection, was quick to raise some doubts. Even though his office told me that no one had emptied Big Belly yet, Mr Nespoli still managed to offer the Sun a general dampener: "There are a lot of great ideas all over the country," he said, "But when it comes into New York, there's a tendency for it not to work."

It is hard to exaggerate the politicking and intensity of New York's struggle with its waste. For 150 years, concerns about public health have alternated with outlandish plans to make money. According to Benjamin Miller's Fat Of The Land, a history of the city's rubbish, one of New York's first health inspectors, a fake doctor called Alfred White, confronted the task of clearing the city of manure with the words: "There is the greatest chance for a fortune I ever saw."

Ever since then, New York has been through waste solution after waste solution, trying to deal with its daily load of 25,000 tons of rubbish. There have been policies of bone-boiling, ocean-dumping, incineration (and then not incineration) and recycling (and then not recycling). And most famously, there has been Fresh Kills, the landfill that was sneaked upon the residents of Staten Island in 1946.

Despite promises that it was a temporary dump, Fresh Kills lasted for 55 years, covers 2,200 acres and is one of the largest man-made structures on the planet. By the time it closed in 2001, it had given rise to the dubious term "landscape-sculpture".

Not that things are much better these days. Since Fresh Kills closed, New York has been largely without a rubbish plan, paying private contractors $300 million a year to haul its garbage in trucks and trains to landfills as far away as Virginia and Ohio. And although recycling is back on, Mayor Bloomberg's plan to use barges instead of trucks to carry most of the city's waste is still waiting for approval from the city council.

This is the world that Big Belly has entered.

I went to see the bin on Thursday, at around lunchtime. I had spoken to James Poss, Big Belly's inventor, a few hours earlier, and he said that the bin could exert up 1,800 pounds per square inch of pressure with the same amount of power as a hairdryer. "And it runs under very little sunlight," said Mr Poss, before adding that Big Belly could even work in London.

In the lunchtime crowds, Big Belly, which is smart and green and the size of a stove, was attracting some attention. I put my ear to it and thought I heard the faintest rumble of crushing sounds. A radio reporter was standing by, asking people what they thought it was. "A mailbox?" someone said, before a man approached the bin, thought about putting a can in it, and changed his mind.

I had arranged to meet Timothy Logan, the leader of New York's Zero Waste Campaign, by the bin. He drew up in a green Volvo and I got in. "Uh huh," said Mr Logan, whose hair is arranged in two plaits, as we drove past Big Belly, "I get it."

Mr Logan, a supporter of Bloomberg's barge plan, was polite but dismissive. Drawing attention to Big Belly's cost ($4,500 per belly) and the fact that it does its compacting without separating recyclables from other waste, he said: "I don't think it's going anywhere, but I want to try to say a lot of positive things about what the designer was thinking. He just didn't find the correct problem to solve."

Benjamin Miller, the waste historian, who now works, among other things, as a research associate at Columbia University's Earth Engineering Center, was more positive.

"Calling it Big Belly makes it sound silly," said Mr Miller, who used to be head of policy at the Department of Sanitation, "but conceptually, it's absolutely correct." He made the point that the city's 2,000 dump trucks, not to mention the thousands of private waste vehicles, are the most environmentally damaging part of the city's current struggle with its consumption.

But Mr Miller was also cautious. Calling Big Belly, "a tiny drop in the bucket", he described the complexity of trying to break into the garbage world of a city that has had more than 300 designs of rubbish bins and will always have interested parties protecting their patch. "This is the Persian Gulf of garbage," said Mr Miller, "you put this amount of garbage together and it's worth something. In fact, it's worth a lot."

Slices of New York