Curbside Composting to Arrive in Brooklyn in October

By Oona Milliken | omilliken@queensledger.com

Curbside Composting is coming to Brooklyn stoops Oct. 2, according to a schedule released by the Mayor’s Office. The program, which includes free bins for all Brooklynites who sign up before Oct. 13, is a part of a larger rollout to make composting mandatory across all five boroughs. 

Gil Lopez, an urban ecologist, compost applicator and educator for Big Reuse, said the program is important in making composting accessible to all New York residents. 

“The great thing about the brown bin, and the reason that I’ve been wanting to mandate compost forever, is until everyone in New York City, undocumented or documented, has access [to composting] and they don’t have to do anything special to get it, there is inequity built into our system,” Lopez said. 

Informational sticker on acceptable forms of waste to be disposed in the brown bins. Photo credit: Oona Milliken

The program began Oct. 2022 in Queens and resumed services in the borough in March after a winter hiatus. In 2024, brown bins will start to appear regularly in Manhattan, Staten Island and the Bronx. The Curbside Composting initiative, sponsored by Park Slope Councilmember Shahana Hanif, is just one part of the Zero Waste Act initiative passed by the City Council in June of this year. 

The Zero Waste Act is a five-bill initiative that also includes annual reporting measures on the 11,000 tons of waste created in New York daily, community food scrap collecting centers, new construction of recycling facilities, as well as the city’s general efforts to withstand climate change. Under the new legislation, composting will be compulsory by the year 2025, when fines will be imposed on NYC residents who decline to sort out their organic waste. The fines will increase after each violation, starting at $25, then $50, and finally $100 for every following fine. According to Michael Whitesides, the communications director for Councilmember Hanif, the plan is to reduce the carbon footprint of the city and expand composting access to a broader range of people. 

“We’ve also really been focusing on getting multilingual outreach. A lot of the areas that we have composting right now tend to be white, wealthier, mostly English speaking communities,” Whitesides said. “The Councilmember has been really involved in trying to get some translated materials, not only about what is composting but also how to sign up for brown bin. We’re not just going to communities that already have access to curbside compost but really doing our work to expand it citywide.” 

The composting collection will be handled by the Department of Sanitation of New York and will be picked up on the same day that recycling is gathered. According to Whitesides, DSNY is putting in the work to let Brooklanites know about the brown bin rollout, including putting up flyers, doing social media outreach, and knocking on people’s doors. On Twitter, DSNY shared that more than 23,000 people have signed up for a brown bin in Brooklyn, and urged more people to participate in the program. 

According to an email response by Vincent Gragnagi, the DSNY press secretary, the compost will be sent to one of five locations across the city: the DSNY’s Staten Island composting facility, the Department of Environmental Protection’s waste management location in Newton Creek, an organic processing facility in Massachusetts, and Nature’s Choice composting plant in New Jersey. Gragnagi said the curbside composting initiative makes it easier for residents in the city to do their part in combating climate change, and in turn, also allows the city to reuse the organic material collected from community members. 

“We all share the goal of making it easy for New Yorkers to do the right thing and compost — and that is exactly what universal curbside composting does,” Gragnagi said in an email. “The goal of the procurement is to ensure that material collected in our curbside composting program goes to a variety of facilities, each of which will process the material and turn it into something beneficial, either renewable energy and fertilizer, or compost for parks and gardens” 

Whitesides said that composting organic material alone can reduce the city’s environmental impact by a third of its current carbon footprint. According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, composting will reduce t

Gil Lopez speaking at an worm composting educational event for Big Reuse at the Park Slope Public Library. Photo credit: Oona Milliken

he amount of organic waste going to landfills, which produce a significant amount of harmful methane gas. Pilot composting programs in cities such as San Francisco have managed to reduce the amount of trash going to landfills by 80 percent, where the municipality has managed to compost 255,500 tons of organic waste each year, according to the Public Interest Network. According to Lopez, though the fight to increase composting has been active amongst grass-roots environmental circles in the area since the 1990s, this is NYC’s first large-scale initiative to enact mandatory food waste processing. 

Katie Cunningham, a Park Slope resident, said she wanted her neighbors to do their part to reduce methane gas from landfills by composting their organic material, and hopes that the brown bin program will increase the number of people who take the time to do so. After 15 years of living in the area, she said she has just started composting because of the readily available service, and in part, she said because the sign-up process to get a brown bin delivered to her home

 was so simple. 

“I’ve only been composting recently, I hate to admit. I’m excited that they’re invested in expanding this program and bringing it to Brooklyn,” Cunningham said. “The sign-up process is straightforward, you just go online and order the bin that you need. I’m hoping it will motivate more people in the neighborhood and more people in Brooklyn to start composting.” 

Lopez said many residents in cities assume that they are far away from the harm occurring to forests, oceans and other ecosystems and that New Yorkers should do anything they can to reduce their environmental impact. According to Lopez, composting is a big part of that. 

“We are part of the ecosystem. Period. We never separated from the ecosystem,” Lopez said. “People assume that they are not a part of the natural world. If that were true, we wouldn’t be experiencing the tripartite climate catastrophe that we’re in right now … We live in a world where everything is connected, and there’s no way you can sever that connection, no matter how big, bad, rich or elected you are.”

Thomas Leeser, a Park Slope resident, said he is glad that composting is coming to Brooklyn, and that he has been composting since he moved to the area three years ago. Leeser said that he had no issue with the program being mandatory, as composting is good for the environment. 

“It’s a good thing, you know, I’m happy that it’s happening,” Leeser said. “We should all do our part for the environment.”

Curbside composting returns next month

Curbside composting is returning this October.
Any resident can sign up for curbside composting regardless of whether or not they were in a zone before the pandemic derailed the service. Signing up will help the Department of Sanitation (DSNY) understand where the demand for curbside composting is high.
“Outreach and education around this initiative is important to get residents to sign up and then to those where service will be offered, to participate,” said Amy Marpman, chair of Queens Solid Waste Advisory Board (QSWAB).
Mary Arnold, co-founder of CURES, a group in central Queens that works to mitigate the impact of freight trains, said composting has the potential to remove more than 30 percent of the waste that is sent to landfills.
“Composting has the potential to reduce waste-by-rail diesel pollution from locomotives that are used to haul the waste and reduce noise in the middle of the night, especially from moving giant rail cars about to old locomotive engines,” she said.

NYC needs to restart composting program

One of the best ways for New Yorkers to significantly lower their greenhouse gas emissions is by separating their food waste, and handing it off to the city’s organics collection program, also known as composting.
One-third of the city’s waste stream is made up of organic waste, much of it from food scraps and leftovers.
When food waste isn’t separated from regular garbage, it’s often sent to be burned in incinerators or buried in landfills, where it decomposes in the absence of oxygen and produces the greenhouse gas methane, which is up to 34 times more powerful than carbon dioxide.
Municipal solid waste landfills are the third largest source of human-related methane emissions in the U.S., and produced about 15 percent of U.S. emissions in 2018.
Landfills around the country are filling up and becoming more costly for cities to use for their waste. To meet the city’s goal of sending zero waste to landfills by 2030, we will need to prioritize composting our organic waste.
New York City has had the largest curbside organics recycling program in the world, serving 3.3 million people, supplemented by many food scraps drop-off sites throughout the five boroughs.
To fund emergency responses to the pandemic, Mayor Bill de Blasio cut $28 million for food waste collection and composting from the Department of Sanitation’s budget, which led to the suspension of many related programs in spring of 2020.
The mayor recently announced that curbside organic collection will be starting back up in communities where it was offered prior to the pandemic, but that service wasn’t available in Forest Hills.
All we had available was a weekly food waste drop-off site at the MacDonald Park greenmarket on Sundays, and the volunteer-run Compost Collective on Yellowstone Boulevard and Kessel Street on Saturdays.
Ever since that service was suspended, residents were asked to discard food scraps and yard waste with their trash, which has resulted in a tremendous loss of momentum for these vital programs.
Community outreach will have to be redoubled before their reintroduction. We urge the mayor and City Council to restore funding to composting‬ and recycling programs as soon as possible, and to invest in community education about the many benefits of composting.
Fortunately, another option will soon be available. Starting May 16, Queens Botanical Garden is partnering with volunteers from Forest Hills Green Team and Friends of MacDonald Park, who will staff a Sunday food waste drop-off collection site at MacDonald Park in Forest Hills adjacent to the greenmarket.
Residents will be able to drop off their food scraps between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. QBG will pick up their containers and compost the food waste at their main facility. The finished compost will be returned to the community for distribution at the site.
QBG is seeking other organizations willing to host food waste drop-off locations in their community, perhaps where sites have previously been co-located at some of the 50-plus greenmarkets operated by GrowNYC.
We encourage other local groups to partner in these important efforts towards a sustainable future, and look forward to seeing our neighbors at our new composting site.

Dan Miner is co-chair of the Forest Hills Green Team. Aleda Gagarin is candidate for City Council District 29.

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