RecyclingMonster - City officials and residents are scrambling to preserve as much of the organic waste recycling program as they can after Mayor Bill de Blasio all but obliterated New York's efforts with his coronavirus budget cuts.
Council Member Antonio Reynoso, the chairman of the sanitation committee, plans to introduce bills that would expand organics recycling in the city. The first piece of legislation would add new drop-off sites for compostable materials throughout the five boroughs. Another bill that is still being drafted would eventually make the recycling of organic waste mandatory for all New Yorkers — a push kicked off by Council Speaker Corey Johnson before the virus took hold in the city.
Meanwhile, some residents are turning to the private sector to pick up their food waste, with a few residential buildings already inking contracts with commercial haulers.
Proponents say it’s a worthy cause.
“It’s hard won — this concept of [managing] to create some kind of closed loop system in New York and reduce your waste,” said Gabriela D’Addario, a 32-year-old Greenwich Village resident and avid composter. “The culture is so driven by disposable stuff [and] there’s something very satisfying about standing up to that and finding out there are other people in New York that care about these things.”
Before the pandemic, D’Addario collected her leftover food scraps in old milk cartons, which she dropped off once a week at the Union Square Greenmarket compost bin. She was working to enroll her building in the city’s curbside collection program for organic waste when the budget was cut.
“I think it’s a tragedy,” D’Addario said of the proposed cuts. “I feel like it’s unlikely it will ever come back.”
Leftover food waste and yard scraps make up one-third of the residential waste stream, amounting to roughly 1 million tons of refuse a year. This so-called organic waste is then sent to rot in landfills across the Eastern seaboard, where it emits methane — a potent greenhouse gas.
The city’s organics program attempted to put the trash to better use.
The Department of Sanitation had a voluntary curbside organics program that picked up waste from 470,000 buildings and single-family homes. That waste was then repurposed at several sites in the area, from a compost farm on Staten Island to the Newtown Creek anaerobic digester. The agency also helped fund 175 food scrap drop-off sites throughout the city where residents like D’Addario dropped off everything from egg shells to vegetable peels.
A vibrant organic waste recycling program is a key part of de Blasio’s “zero waste” goal of slashing the amount of waste the city sends to landfills by 90 percent.
But as POLITICO previously reported, the program has struggled in many ways. Participation in the curbside program was low, and city budget makers warned it was too costly for what it produced.
De Blasio repeatedly promised to make the program mandatory, a priority for his sanitation commissioner and environmental advocates who argue it would improve the city’s paltry recycling rate and reduce the amount otherwise spent to ship the refuse to landfills. But even during boom times, during which de Blasio ballooned the city budget by $20 billion, city bean counters cited pecuniary concerns in prohibiting a larger expansion of organics pickup.
“It just speaks to the priorities of this administration and whether or not they were committed to organics ever, if the first chance they get they want to scrap every portion of the organics program,” Reynoso said.
The city’s proposed budget cuts to organic waste recycling total $24.5 million — the large majority coming from the curbside program. It was a part of the $2.7 billion in budget cuts proposed by the mayor, as the city braces for a $7.4 billion revenue hit over the next two years because of the coronavirus pandemic.
While the Council must ultimately sign off on the budget and will hold hearings on the proposed cuts in the coming weeks, the city has already suspended the organics programs slated to face long-term funding cuts.
“The City is facing an unprecedented crisis, and these service reductions will allow the City to maintain emergency services and its core municipal services," Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia said in an April statement. "We look forward to a day when we can restore our full suite of composting and electronics collection programs.”
Reynoso is focused on preserving the $3.5 million that funds compost outreach at botanical gardens and pays for three food drop-off sites and compost facilities throughout the city.
The Lower East Side Ecology Center derives roughly 80 percent of its funding from the Department of Sanitation, said Renée Crowley, the site’s project manager. Under normal circumstances, more than 3,500 people drop off eight tons of food scraps in the center’s communal container each week — which is then turned into fresh soil for use at nearby parks.
But it has stopped collecting from residents since the coronavirus pandemic hit New York and is currently focused on maintaining its existing compost piles. The center had to lay off three full-time workers in response to the budget cuts and is currently looking into whether there are other private funding streams that could keep it afloat.
“It feels like to remove community composting or public support for community composting sets New York back to a place that was 20 to 30 years ago,” Crowley said. “$3.5 million, I would argue, is not that much money in comparison to the [$87 billion] city budget.”
Reynoso said the city needs drop-off sites to ensure residents still have an avenue to repurpose their yard waste and orange peels in absence of a curbside collection program. He plans to introduce a bill at the next stated meeting that would place one community recycling center in each community district to accept organic materials, electronic waste and textiles no later than June 2021.
Reynoso also said he's also pushing to introduce legislation that would create a mandatory organic waste recycling program before the end of this year.
Johnson called for mandatory organics in his State of the City policy agenda in March, but the effort was sidelined once the public health crisis took hold. Reynoso said he still wants to pass the bill that reflects the phased-in approach Johnson has called for, but push back the implementation date to 2022 or 2023 to account for the city’s budget crisis. While discussions are ongoing because of the coronavirus pandemic, Reynoso said he's aiming to have the bill out before year's end.
“Whether or not that pilot program or voluntary program stays active is not consequential to whether or not we’re going to have mandatory organics in this city in the short-term,” Reynoso said.
In the meantime, residents are turning to the private sector to collect their food waste.
Jacquelyn Ottman, who sits on the co-op board for her Upper East Side building, said they have already signed a contract with Royal Waste to pick up their organic waste once a week in lieu of the city’s program. The service is expected to cost $195 a month for their 120-unit building.
“Once people do have it and see how much food they actually collect and get into the habit and realize there’s not a lot of flies and smell … they’re committed to it,” said Ottman, who also sits on the Manhattan Solid Waste Advisory Board.
Royal Waste has heard from 25 properties who are interested in securing the service, and has already signed contracts with nearly half of them, said John Reali, co-director of sustainability for Royal Waste Services. Most of the organic waste Royal Waste collects from commercial businesses is sent to McEnroe Farm in upstate New York, where it’s turned into fresh soil.
Other haulers are also publicizing their interest in providing the service, including Recycle Track Systems and Avid Waste.
“I think a lot of residents bought into it and their overarching goal for zero waste and it’s kind of tough it got cut, but I understand why it happened,” Reali said.
Others are turning to home-bought solutions. In addition to signing up for a pick-up service, D’Addario said she bought a compost tumbler for her boyfriend’s terrace and is also contemplating buying a worm bin for her own apartment.
“I haven’t really thought through where it will go and if I can stomach the worms,” she said.
And as the Council and residents sift through their options, those who saw the program’s inception from its early days are lamenting its loss.
“Thank you men & women of @NYCSanitation? who, for the last ~315 weeks, have come to pick up our food scraps every Thursday,” Stu Loeser, the press secretary to former Mayor Mike Bloomberg, tweeted on the last day of his organics pick-up service. “NYC had an ambitious municipal composting program - many many [pounds] a week just from us. I hope some day it can come back.”
Courtesy : politico.com