The city sanitation department’s rollout of curbside composting program is facing a rotten problem: Most New Yorkers are still throwing organics in the trash, and landlords of many large buildings haven’t bothered to set up bins allowing tenants to participate.
The city expanded the service to the Bronx, Manhattan and Staten Island last month, a year after it launched in Brooklyn and Queens. Now, nearly every New Yorker is required to separate food scraps from their regular trash and sort them in bins that are set out for collection on the same day as recycling.
But city data shows the program, which is still in its infancy, has diverted minimal compost away from landfills. Sanitation workers hauled off roughly 3,500 tons of curbside compost across the five boroughs last month, according to city data. That’s up from the 2,300 tons they picked up October last year, but still less than 5% of the 78,000 tons of organic waste sanitation officials estimate is thrown out in the city every month.
Interviews with supers and tenants of large buildings pointed to one major reason why composting has yet to truly catch on: Many supers said they have no room for compost bins, and little time to add new garbage duties to their long list of daily tasks.
Downtown Brooklyn resident Michael Patterson, 42, who lives in a high-rise building with more than 400 apartments, said his property management had never brought up composting.
“I’ve never heard anyone mention anything about it,” he said, adding that he’d like to participate.
Allan Goldstein, who lives in a building in Yorkville with more than 40 apartments, said he and his neighbors had tried separating organics, but then gave up.
“We started composting, and then it wouldn’t be picked up because we didn’t have the correct bucket,” Golstein said. “They wouldn’t pick it up, so we had to stop.”
Sanitation officials have promoted the composting program as an environmental win that could also help fight the city’s rat population by reducing the time food scraps sit out on the street. So far, the department has issued notices to building owners that aren’t complying with the mandate. But come April, sanitation inspectors will audit trash bags across the city, and issue $50 tickets to landlords if they find organic waste mixed in with regular garbage.
The incoming fines came off as unfair to some people, like Samantha MacBride, a faculty member at Baruch College who used to work for the sanitation department as a research director. She’s spent years diving into the sanitation department’s pile of trash data.
“It’s my personal opinion that enforcement of recycling is hard enough. Enforcement of organic separation borders on cruel,” she said, explaining that inspectors would be forced to poke through rotting waste to issue summonses.
“I would say, at the very least, the buildings that are going to get enforced upon need to have far more support and attention from sanitation before that hammer of government is brought down,” she said.
Astoria super Robert Stefanovic, 45, said getting tenants in his 66-unit building to follow recycling guidelines has been an ongoing battle. He said getting them to compost is even harder.
“You got a better chance of flying to the moon than them doing the compost,” he said.
He previously managed compost bins for his 66-unit building, but gave up after they were stolen.
“Every time I put them out, they disappear,” Stefanovic said.
Sanitation department spokesperson Vincent Gragnani said the department is taking an “education first” approach to the compost rollout, but eventually plans to enforce the rule.
“Remember that it took 20 years of mandatory recycling to get to a 50% capture rate,” he said. “We continue to do a ton of outreach — media, social media, door-knocking, mailers, information sessions, etc. — and this will be enforced with fines in April.”
MacBride found composting rates have recently dropped in Brooklyn and Queens neighborhoods that previously had some of the highest rates in the city.
Even in neighborhoods in Queens Community District 11, which reached a compost capture rate of 16.5% in 2017, composting participation has fallen to a 7.4% capture rate in the 2024 fiscal year, according to MacBride’s analysis of city data. She said the city needs to spend more money on compost staffing and education in order to stop the rates from dwindling.
The composting rollout faces an even bigger challenge in larger buildings, MacBride said. One- and two-family homes typically have a higher adoption rate for curbside composting.
“It’s very hard to control tenant behavior,” she said. “This is a whole new area. It’s not a small thing to ask buildings to add staff to handle this.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
