Starting October 3, 2022 New York City’s Department of Sanitation will start offering curbside composting to all of the residents of the borough of Queens. This makes the New York program the nation’s largest composting program offering composting services to over 2 million residents. The program will run through late December before it takes a three-month break for the winter. You can see the announcement from New York City Mayor Eric Adams in the video below.
“Mayor Adams tasked us with developing a new program that would be effective, affordable, and equitable,” said DSNY Commissioner Tisch. “We looked at what had worked in the past, as well as what hadn’t, and developed a smart, innovative solution that is going to be easier for the people of New York City, harder for rats, and better for the planet.”
The program adds to New York’s current program collecting leaf and yard waste in the borough. Being that Queens is home to almost half of all the street trees in New York, this is a wonderful opportunity to ensure that fallen leaves are composted and provided back into the environment.
Queens was selected because the borough generates approximately a quarter of the organic waste for the city. Currently, the program will be voluntary. There is legislation being discussed with widespread support among the city council to require the Sanitation Department to roll out a citywide program for collecting residential organics.
Residents don’t need to sign-up for the program. It will be offered every week to all Queens residents. Brown bins are being given to all Queens residential addresses with 10 or more units. Otherwise, residents can use any sealed container. For yard waste, they can use bags. The residential program adds to a commercial program that requires certain commercial enterprises in New York to compost organic material.
Besides improving sustainability, this also offers the opportunity for a form of pest control in the city. As we have seen with many compostable materials like meat, onions, and others, they tend to attract mice and rats. Since trash is often left out on the curbside in the city’s current sanitation program, adding it to compost should help attract (and feed) fewer rats and mice.
New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) residents may contact sustainability@nycha.nyc.gov with questions about the New York City composting program and how to participate.
In addition, the Adams Administration also announced today that they would be placing 250 new “smart” composting bins starting this Fall. Earlier this year, they had promised 100 bins, far exceeding that commitment. The bins will be placed on publicly accessible streets, and residents (or visitors) can use a smartphone app to open them.
This is building on a small-scale pilot program that began in late 2021. They were a popular and effective way to keep waste out of the city’s landfills. The bins will be placed in all five boroughs, not just Queens. They will focus on areas like Manhattan above 125th Street, South Bronx, Staten Island on the North Shore, and central Brooklyn.
It’s exciting to see municipalities committing to composting programs. Composting is a great way to reduce our carbon footprint by sending less material to landfills which reduces greenhouse gases, recycles organic material, and helps to create healthier plants that have their own carbon footprint benefits through carbon fixing. These are just some of the benefits of composting programs.
If you don’t live in a municipality that is starting its own composting program, or if you want to ensure that you can benefit from composting in your garden, lawn, or flower bed, why not start your composting system at home? There are several easy ways that you can compost at home. They are all affordable and can be a lot of fun.