Composting in New York City has been a battleground in the past several months. Mayor Adams’s administration and the Department of Sanitation (DSNY) first slashed budgets for community composting in November of last year, forcing organizations like GrowNYC to shut down their composting programs. Then, after months of public outcries and rallying throughout early 2024, the City Council restored $6.2 million of the original $7 million annual budget.
The long history of community composting in NYC had built a foundation of sustainable waste management, something the Adams administration has claimed to strive for. Despite sustainability goals for the city, DSNY decided to completely cut the budgets of community organizations that provided composting services. The mayor’s curbside composting program was supposed to take up the extra burden. However, about half of the food scraps and yard waste put into the city-provided compost bins do not go back into the earth to create and replenish healthy soil but end up in an anaerobic digester creating biogas. The other facility that DSNY has to manage food scraps and yard waste is on Staten Island, with free compost pickup available to New Yorkers. This facility is already slated to expand in anticipation of greater volumes as curbside composting comes to all five boroughs.
Unfortunately, this facility is inaccessible to many New Yorkers who do not have the spare time, energy, and ability to travel to and from Staten Island to collect a forty pound bag of compost when the need arises. It also means that urban farms and community gardens that require compost inputs have to spend more money to get the nutritious soil that they need.
Now, DSNY is opening a new compost pickup site in Greenpoint, attempting to fill the gap created when their budget decisions forced community organizations to shut down. Money for the new compost site in Greenpoint is coming out of DSNY’s $1.9 billion budget for the fiscal year 2025, the same budget that community composting funding is coming from. It is counterintuitive to have kicked out Big Reuse from their main site in favor of a city employee parking lot, only to create a new compost site two miles away that offers fewer services. Though it is good that the new DSNY site will be more accessible to New Yorkers than that in Staten Island, it is unfortunate that it came around as community organizations are struggling to recover from their budgets being taken away.
The effects of the budget complications have been severe. 115 green jobs have been lost in the past 10 months throughout the city. Essential services regarding organics waste management have been significantly reduced. Big Reuse provided compost to parks, people, and farms at no cost, at different locations throughout the city. Now, they are going to have to use the money that the city restored to their budget to find and set up a new site that centralizes their work, since their Queensboro location was taken away. GrowNYC has shut down all organic waste collection, after years of managing peoples’ food scraps through their greenmarket drop off locations. Each of these organizations, along with many others, provided urban farms with a source of healthy, nutritious soil to grow local produce and sell it at a heavily reduced rate to those who otherwise would not be able to access it.
Community composting is now protected from budget cuts in the future, thanks to the tireless work of community advocates. This is a step in the right direction for sustainable waste management in New York City. It is a shame that the cost of getting to this point was so high.
