Composting requires infrastructure

Most Saturdays, I start my day by walking 15 minutes from my apartment to Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn. This morning walk isn’t meandering or aimless. Rather, it is an errand I’ve incorporated into my lifestyle to drop off my compost that I have diligently collected throughout the week. There are a variety of reasons why we should compost, but what drives me to compost is I’m doing my part in mitigating carbon emissions.

There are various individualistic lifestyle changes we as society can make to help mitigate climate change. You can consume less meat products. You can reduce your use of single use plastic. You can buy an electric vehicle. Composting reduces the methane gas released by landfills. Each of these seemingly individualistic lifestyle choices are in fact undergirded by a larger public infrastructure that either make these choices a no brainer or next to impossible to actualize. In New York City, composting individually would be tough to accomplish. With a lack of additional space, much less outdoor space, composting would require undue individual effort.

When most people think of infrastructure, they envision building roads and new buildings that need to be created entirely from scratch and are permanent fixtures. But infrastructure for public policy can also include structures that are more malleable. Composting and Open Streets are two NYC examples. By incorporating community composting at weekly farmer’s markets, introducing curbside programs, or piloting composting trash cans, the city is meeting the community where they shop and reside. The community can plan to compost around the public infrastructure implemented and maintained by the city.

Unfortunately, the public infrastructure for composting in New York City has been touch and go for the last 30 years. While there are amazing local organizations like GROW NYC and LES Ecology Center that have been championing community composting for decades, the city’s support has waxed and waned based on administration and available funding. While composting funds were steadily growing since the Bloomberg administration, the De Blasio administration slashed composting availability in 2021 citing lack of funding in the wake of Covid-19.

Today, in an effort to combat the rodent issue, Mayor Eric Adams has actually reversed planned reductions in funding to community composting. We now have expanded curbside composting where residents can set their compost on the curb. The city has implemented Smart Composting Bins across the boroughs where residents can drop off their compost any time of day. They require a smartphone app to unlock the bin to utilize. The question now will be successful execution and enforceability of composting in NYC. In 2013, NYC City Council passed a local law for certain businesses to separate and compost their organic waste. The law was set to be enforced by 2015. It is unclear if the law had any impact on waste diversion.

According to the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability and Environmental Justice, NYC produces more than 14 million tons of trash every year. A third of this trash is food waste that could be diverted from landfill and composted. Instead, it is sent to a landfill where methane gas is produced increasing our greenhouse gas emissions. Not only is this an ecological crisis but a financial burden for the city. The city currently pays $94 per ton of trash to be collected and sent to landfills as far away as North Carolina. There is a huge opportunity to reduce the financial burden of DSNY and divert these funds to supporting composting programs in NYC.