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.****
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.
kind of surprised they arent already doing that. will the compost then be used to fertilize the green spaces or what?
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.
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.
