On October 6, New York City’s Curbside Composting program expanded its weekly residential pickups in Brooklyn and Queens to all boroughs. This initiative, part of the City’s 2023 Zero Waste Act, helps to fight rats, avoid food waste rotting in smelly landfills, mitigate greenhouse gas and other pollution, combat scorching heat, recycle nutrients, revitalize soil, improve communities, and make a better future for our kids.
Whether enough New Yorkers are on board, however, is a big question. Reactions to the composting program have ranged from celebration to unfamiliarity, confusion, and even opposition, and compliance with the mandatory program is a concern.
While many New Yorkers are enthusiastic, others may not know what composting is, why it is important, and whether it is doable. It is indeed easier and better for the world to waste less in the first place by lowering consumption. A staggering one-third of residential waste here is food, creating a slew of problems and disposal hassles while straining budgets unnecessarily. Instead, consumers could start with buying only what is needed. Waste can also be reduced through apps like “Too Good To Go”, which offers discounted delicious food that would otherwise be thrown away.
But composting helps make waste more usable than if it is just tossed in the trash.
Composting means separating food scraps, as well as leaves, yard waste, and paper soiled by food, and disposing of these items apart from recyclables and garbage. While many composting facilities accept fruit, vegetable, grains, coffee, and eggshell remains, NYC Sanitation will also collect “meat, bones, dairy, prepared foods, and greasy uncoated paper plates and pizza boxes.”
To secure its many benefits, the City is making composting easy by providing hundreds of accessible orange bins in public spaces, giving out free brown containers for residential use, instituting weekly pickups in all boroughs, providing food-scrap drop-off sites, and postponing the fines for mandatory composting to Spring 2025. The 400-plus orange “Smart Bins”, which can be unlocked with a cell phone and are available anytime in all boroughs, are simple to find and use through the no-cost app. Residents can order stickers as well as free brown bins for individual residences, which will be picked up weekly by the Sanitation Department on recycling days.
While food scraps can get smelly and gross, one workaround is to freeze the organic leftovers or use a compost bin, and dispose of them later along with any leaves or yard waste, whenever convenient.
Still, it can be hard to prioritize composting or to shoulder more burdens when struggling to make ends meet, balancing work, school, family, and friends, opposing government impositions, or laboring to clean up the kitchen after a busy day, for instance. And it might seem like an unnecessary hassle that doesn’t have clear and immediate benefits to New Yorkers’ daily lives.
But, think about food and rats. There are so many rats in New York because there is abundant food, water, and shelter. Keeping leftovers sealed up in latched rat proof compost bins, and indeed generally in secure garbage containers, means there is less for rats to eat, lowering their survival and reproduction. This is one reason why New York is rolling out new garbage bin requirements in November. Other ways of fighting rats, such as with poison or traps, often do not work with huge populations like the City’s, as the animals reproduce so quickly. These methods cause tortuous and unnecessary suffering and overlook the consumer’s role in wasting so much food. Further, these dangerous chemicals can spread through the food web to rat predators like the majestic red-tailed hawks that grace our city. Pets are vulnerable to rat poison too!
New Yorkers produce roughly eight million pounds of compostable waste per day. Rather than rotting in a landfill, composting breaks the organic material down and recycles nutrients, such as into fertilizer that can be used by community gardens to revitalize soil, improving health through food and time outdoors. Since smelly landfills or polluting garbage incinerators are too often sited near low-income, underserved, or minoritized communities, keeping food out of the garbage is a win-win. Further, food decomposing in landfills gives off methane, a greenhouse gas 25 times as powerful as carbon dioxide, leading to climate change that already affects New Yorkers with record-breaking heat, flooding, and increasingly severe and costly storms.
To be sure, the program would work best by engaging New Yorkers fully, following the science, and addressing concerns including biogas and byproducts, infrastructure and facilities, community compost budget cuts, and general greenwashing. Officials should restore popular community composting programs, avoid greenhouse gas emissions, equitably site effective facilities, and spread the word to more New Yorkers.
In the spirit of the 3Rs, Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle, minimizing collective waste generation by consuming less in the first place is key. Composting, or correctly recycling food scraps and other organic waste, is easy but can only work with New Yorkers on board. So compost today!