NYCHA buildings not following Mayor Adams’ own composting mandate

The vast majority of New York City Housing Authority residents have no way to comply with the sanitation department’s new composting rules that require everyone in the city to separate their organic waste from their regular trash.

The sanitation department on Tuesday began issuing tickets to property owners who fail to follow the mandate. The enforcement launched six months after curbside compost collection rolled out to the entire city.

But NYCHA, the city’s largest landlord with more than 500,000 tenants, doesn’t yet have the infrastructure in place to follow the rule. What’s more, the sanitation department has no way to force NYCHA to set up a composting program because there’s no legal mechanism for one city agency to issue a summons against another.

NYCHA officials said they’re working to resolve the issue by next year.

But in the meantime, the composting requirements put in place under Mayor Eric Adams aren’t being followed by the very housing projects under his control. That means nearly all the compostable material tossed out by NYCHA residents will continue to head to landfills.

“I’ve heard of it, but not in NYCHA,” said Ingersoll Houses resident Sharon Lee. “We have recycling bags, but everything else just goes in those garbage bags.”

NYCHA representatives did not explain exactly what prevented curbside compost collection from being offered at the agency’s properties. Owners of large privately owned buildings across the city have also struggled to find ways to provide compost bins for their tenants.

Sanitation department spokesperson Vincent Gragnani said NYCHA residents can call 311 to report their building if it’s not complying with the curbside composting rules. He said the department will only issue formal notices to NYCHA for not complying with sanitation department rules.

“The law is clear that all residential properties in New York City are required to comply with the compost laws,” Gragnani wrote in a statement.

NYCHA has also struggled to comply with the city’s recycling rules: The agency rolled out a comprehensive plan to follow them in 2016 — 27 years after they first went into effect. City officials in 2019 estimated that only a tiny fraction of recyclable material was actually being collected from NYCHA, compared to the citywide recycling rate of around 50%. The housing authority has also over the last six years been overseen by a federally mandated monitor following a series of scandals tied to dangerous living conditions for tenants.

Sanitation officials said every NYCHA building is within 1,000 feet from one of the department’s compost “smart bins” that can be opened by scanning a QR code with a smartphone. But those bins are often far from NYCHA residents. At the Farragut Houses in Brooklyn, the closest bin is in Manhattan, across the East River.

NYCHA spokesperson Michael Horgan said the agency’s workers have begun separating all the yard waste at its properties for composting. Horgan said NYCHA also offers on-site composting programs in partnership with the nonprofit groups like Compost Power, which runs composting sites at eight NYCHA campuses. The group’s CEO Domingo Morales said the agency is slated to fall short of its ambitious sustainability goals if its residents aren’t educated about the value of composting.

“When I started working in public housing campuses everyone thought composting was nasty,” he said. They thought composting was equal to a landfill and the education really wasn’t there.”

A further complication is NYCHA’s outdated waste management infrastructure. Most NYCHA residents rely on trash chutes that lead to compactors. That system has been blamed for deadly fires, and the lack of dedicated trash and recycling storage areas was identified in a 2015 study as a major challenge for the city’s aging public housing stock.

Morales said it’s unfair many public housing residents are excluded from curbside composting, despite paying taxes that subsidize the program.

“Everyone in New York City should have access to this, whether they’re rich, whether they’re poor.”