Show ’Em You Give a Scrap: City Launches Mandatory Food Waste Pick-Up This Week
A sobering data point: One third of New Yorkers’ garbage is food scraps and other organic waste. (“Other,” in this case, is yard waste, although that is less prevalent in Lower Manhattan.) When this detritus lands in landfills, it rots and releases methane, a gas that is a more potent contributor to global warming than carbon dioxide. The eco-friendliest solution is composting — the diversion of food scraps from garbage into a recycling process that results in clean, beneficial material.
New York is a late bloomer in the composting scene. San Francisco, for example, established a composting program in 1996, and by 2012, the city was diverting more than 80 percent of its waste from landfills — avoiding more than 90,000 metric tons of emissions each year. (That’s the equivalent of taking 21,420 passenger cars off the road.) But on October 6, New York City catches up when the Department of Sanitation (DSNY) begins weekly collection of food scraps from all residential buildings in Manhattan, Staten Island, and the Bronx. (Brooklyn and Queens residents have enjoyed composting services for the past year.) The city’s compost program is mandatory; buildings will be fined for failure to comply.
Advocates rave about how easy composting can be. Just keep adding to a bag of scraps in your freezer and when it gets full, bring it to the compost bin. What goes in the bin? All organic waste such as fruit and vegetable scraps, meat, fish, dairy, coffee grounds, and food-soiled paper products like coffee filters.
The Battery Park City Authority (BPCA) has offered composting services to residents for the past 15 years. Recently, the Authority invested in new compost machines that can handle 50 percent more volume, along with a wider range of materials, and process it all faster than ever before.
Within BPC Parks headquarters at 75 Battery Place, two shining Rocket A900s are ready to start up in early December, after one more machine — a macerator — is delivered. The BPCA composting program used to accept only raw fruits and vegetables, but the new system can process cooked food, plus breads, meats, and even small bones.
Once activated, the metal paddles of the machine will turn continuously. After food scraps are poured into a hatch at the top, the material is churned for about two weeks and then discharged from the far end. While individual buildings in Battery Park City have yet to get their own compost bins, BPCA plans to increase the number of bins in the neighborhood from the current six. Look for the first new compost drop-off location on the esplanade by North Cove Marina, a site that BPCA vice president of parks operations Ryan Torres calls “a missed opportunity.”
“What we’ve been missing is the whole lunch crowd — Brookfield, Goldman Sachs — which is huge,” she says.
BPCA director of horticulture David Wallace says he feared the program had reached maximum capacity years ago when they were composting 35,000 pounds of waste each year, “but we always found a way to compost more.” Fast forward to last year, when BPC Parks staff composted more than 76,000 pounds of material — and began to worry about how much harder they could push the aging machines. Now, with a couple of gleaming new Rockets, they are looking to compost more than 100,000 pounds annually.
Lower Manhattan residents in Tribeca, the Financial District, and the Seaport neighborhood may find out more about the mandatory composting program that begins this month by clicking here. Look for the brown DSNY bin or talk to your building manager.