Mayor Eric Adams will announce the plan during his State of the Union address as part of his efforts to improve garbage collection and address New York’s rodent problem.
Ten years after former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg quoted a line from Star Trek and declared that composting was “the last frontier of recycling,” New York City is finally preparing to unveil plans for what it calls the nation’s largest composting program.
On Thursday, Mayor Eric Adams will announce the city’s intention to implement composting in all five boroughs within 20 months.
The announcement will be part of the Mayor’s State of the Union address Thursday at the Queens Theater in Corona Park, Flushing Meadows.
The program to allow New Yorkers to compost their biodegradable waste in brown bins will be voluntary; there are currently no plans to make the composting program mandatory, which some experts see as a key step to its success. But in an interview, Department of Health Commissioner Jessica Tisch said the agency is discussing the possibility of mandatory composting of yard waste.
“This project will be the first exposure to roadside composting for many New Yorkers,” said Ms. Tisch. “Let them get used to it.”
A month earlier, the city suspended a popular neighborhood-wide composting program in Queens, raising alarm among the city’s eager food processors.
The city’s schedule calls for a program restart in Queens on March 27, expansion to Brooklyn on October 2, beginning in the Bronx and Staten Island on March 25, 2024, and finally reopening in October 2024. Launch in Manhattan on the 7th.
As Mr. Adams enters his second year in office, he continues to focus on crime, the budgetary issue of the arrival of migrants to the southern border, and cleaning up the streets with an unusual (and unusually personal) focus on rats.
“By launching the nation’s largest curbside composting program, we will fight rats in New York City, clean up our streets and rid our homes of millions of pounds of kitchen and garden waste,” Mayor Adams said in a statement. By the end of 2024, all 8.5 million New Yorkers will have the decision they’ve been waiting for 20 years, and I’m proud that my administration will make it happen.”
Municipal composting became popular in the US in the 1990s, after San Francisco became the first city to offer a massive food waste collection program. It’s now mandatory for residents in cities like San Francisco and Seattle, and Los Angeles just introduced a composting mandate with little fanfare.
Two city council members, Shahana Hanif and Sandy Nurse, said after a joint statement on Thursday that the plan “is not economically sustainable and unable to deliver the environmental impact needed in this time of crisis.” oblige to compost.
New York City sanitation collects about 3.4 million tons of household waste each year, about a third of which can be composted. Ms Tisch sees the announcement as part of a broader program to make New York’s waste stream more sustainable, a goal the city has continued to strive for for decades.
Two years after Mr. Bloomberg called for mandatory composting, his successor, Mayor Bill de Blasio, pledged in 2015 to remove all of New York’s household waste from landfills by 2030.
The city has made little progress towards meeting Mr. de Blasio’s goals. What he calls curbside recycling is now a measly 17%. By comparison, according to the Citizens Budget Committee, an impartial watchdog group, Seattle’s transfer rate in 2020 was almost 63%.
In an interview Wednesday, Ms Tisch acknowledged that the city hasn’t made enough progress since 2015 to “really believe we’ll be zero waste by 2030.”
But she also predicts that the new composting scheme will greatly increase the amount of waste removed from landfills, part of the city’s efforts to combat climate change. When added to landfills, yard waste and food waste create methane, a gas that traps heat in the atmosphere and warms the planet.
The NYC composting program has had its ups and downs over the years. Today, the city requires many businesses to separate organic waste, but it’s not clear how effectively the city enforces these rules. City officials said they would not collect data on how much waste the program removed from landfills.
Although Mr. Adams announced in August that the practice would be rolled out to every Queens home in October, the city has already offered voluntary municipal curbside composting in scattered neighborhoods of Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan.
As part of the Queens program, which is suspended for the winter in December, collection times coincide with recycling collection times. Residents do not have to individually agree to the new service. The ministry said the cost of the project is about $2 million.
Some composters who have successfully changed their habits to fit the new schedule say the December hiatus was frustrating and backfired by disrupting a newly established routine.
But city officials were quick to call it a win, saying it was superior to previous existing plans and cost less.
“Finally, we have a mass market sustainability plan that will fundamentally change the speed of transfer in New York,” Ms. Tisch said.
The program will cost $22.5 million in fiscal 2026, the first full fiscal year in which it will operate citywide, she said. This fiscal year, the city also had to spend $45 million on new compost trucks.
Once harvested, the department will ship the compost to anaerobic facilities in Brooklyn and Massachusetts, as well as the city’s composting facilities in places like Staten Island.
Citing a possible recession and pandemic-related cuts in federal aid, Mr. Adams is taking steps to cut costs, including downsizing public libraries, which executives say could force them to cut hours and programs. The sanitation sector was one of the areas where he expressed his willingness to fund new projects.
Sandra Goldmark, director of campus sustainability and climate action at Barnard College, said she is “thrilled” by the mayor’s commitment and hopes the program eventually becomes mandatory for businesses and homes, as does waste management.
She said Barnard was committed to introducing composting, but it took a “cultural shift” to help people understand the benefits.
“Your house is actually a lot better — no big, big trash bags full of smelly, disgusting things,” she said. “You put wet food waste in a separate container so that all your trash is less gross.”
Post time: Feb-08-2023