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.****
Good luck enforcing something like that.
There are plenty of places where grrenbin compositing is mandatory. It’s not enforced.
The vast majority of people do it anyway, because most people are ok with following basic rules.
Plus, it keeps critters out of the garbage.
Yeah, we have it where I live. Not enforced per se, but trash pickup is every two weeks where recycling and compost is every week. Haven’t had a problem with it.
Yeah that’s our municipality’s approach too. Combine that with garbage bag limits and it is in your best interest to use the green bin as much as possible.
In Germany this is already done in many places (e.g. Aachen). Additionally, it’s a social norm here, to the point that I don’t think that i know anyone who doesn’t compost.
We have community composting, it’s pretty awesome. 3 garbage bins: recycling, organics, and trash. All get picked up weekly. The organics go to a municipal compost facility. The resulting compost is used in the city parks and landscaping and also bagged for sale at garden centers.
Ours, too, and its so cheap.
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.
We have organic green bins in my city. We mostly just use it for grass clippings though. We only have a recyclable can and garbage can inside the house.
does the small, personal compost not also make the methane? or is that the difference between aerobic compost vs anaerobic breakdown?
Correct, aerobic decomposition does not produce (nearly as much) methane. The more oxygen that is present during decomposition, the more carbon dioxide is produced instead of methane.
so THEN… we can intentionally make small, personal digesters that make high enough pressure/volume methane to run our stoves, to cook more food, to add to the digester! Perpetual energy.
But all joking aside, I think I have seen people do just this (online) - and it made enough to run a stove.
More about the infrastructure for composting in NYC here. Food scraps and sewage sludge are digested in giant tanks to make methane, which is provided to the natural-gas utility; the solids can then be turned into soil.
USAs garbage System is a gigantic mess in general when compared to the one in Germany.
kind of surprised they arent already doing that. will the compost then be used to fertilize the green spaces or what?
