Social media is replete with pictures of overflowing wastebaskets and piles of trash bags. They were chronicled by my colleague Winnie Hu in an article appropriately called “Your Tales of Trash Hell.”

Is there more trash on streets than in years past?

The city’s Sanitation Department says New York is getting cleaner, but social media has made photos of dumping more ubiquitous.

A department chief, Edward Grayson, said that most messes come from “a small population of people creating a giant eyesore” and that the city is cleaner than it was decades ago.

“We’re a victim of our own success, in regard to cleanliness,” he said. “We have an informed population that has raised its own standards” of what a clean street is.

How do these messes happen?

New York produces a lot of trash, partly because the city’s population has grown in the past decade to 8.4 million people. They produce some 12,000 tons of trash and recyclables each day.