The City Council passed a bill on Thursday requiring New Yorkers to separate their food waste from regular trash, with mandatory composting coming to all five boroughs by next year.
The residential mandate will roll out borough by borough, starting with Brooklyn and Queens this October, followed by the Bronx and Staten Island in March 2024, and Manhattan that October.
The goal is to reduce the amount of organic waste the city sends to landfills, where it produces a particularly potent greenhouse gas called methane.****
I love to hear news like this. Sure not everyone will do it, but if it gets more people to compost that is great. It makes no sense to trap so much biomass in landfills when it could be reused. Keep as much energy as possible in the system.