Faced with budget cuts, community composting is a victim of its own success
A few years ago, Jasmine Singh started volunteering at the Queens Botanical Garden, where she first learned about composting. She became addicted.
“It’s not the sexiest hobby,” said Ms. Singh, 23, who works for a nonprofit and lives in North New Hyde Park in Queens. But “it showed me I could do more on my end.”
This fall, Ms. Singh completed a Master Composter Certificate Course, brought to you by the New York City Department of Sanitation. “I absolutely loved it,” she said.
The free program, which includes 30 hours of volunteer work, “is designed to build a citywide network of educators, advocates and community composters,” according to the website.
But now the stock is on the chopping block. Initiatives like these, along with seven community programs that have been working with the city, many for decades, to make composting a reality in New York, could be eliminated if the budget cuts recently proposed by Mayor Eric Adams take effect.
The city’s new compost collection service, which is being rolled out across the boroughs, aims to do much of the work that has been associated with community groups in the past. According to the Sanitation Department, New Yorkers produce about eight million pounds of compostable waste per day.
“Composting programs work best when they are easy, and the programs being implemented today are for everyone, not just true believers,” said Joshua Goodman, the department’s deputy commissioner for public affairs and customer experience.
But community composting leaders say the abrupt end to funding could take away options that appeal to New Yorkers and provide a safety net for waste disposal that is still desperately needed.
“This is devastating to the composting network as a whole,” said Sandy Nurse, the council member who chairs the Sanitation Committee and comes from a community composting background.
“A successful organic farming program depends on maintaining a vibrant, diverse, neighborhood-based community composting network,” said Eric Goldstein, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Currently, the curbside program primarily converts waste into fuel, with some of the compost processing taking place at the Sanitation Department compost facility on Staten Island. But the initiative is still evolving, Ms Nurse said, as community groups provide an established network for making and distributing compost.
If the cuts go ahead, 198 of the city’s 266 food scrap drop-off points, including those in the city’s green markets, will close and more than 100 workers will lose their jobs, Ms Nurse said.
Mayor Eric Adams announced the cuts in November. They affect all city agencies and are being incurred because of the costs of the migrant crisis, slowing tax revenues and the end of federal pandemic relief, according to a statement from the mayor’s office. According to the Sanitation Department, community composting efforts represent one-tenth of the $33 million in the city’s composting budget.
The cuts will also affect smaller, independent composting groups, which rely on the larger, city-funded community organizations to handle their excess food waste. When Mrs. Nurse first started her group, BK Rot, “The volume coming in was more than we could handle,” she said. So the group collaborated with Major reuse, one of the organizations that could lose its funding. The nonprofit collected the extra food scraps from BK Rot for processing. “If this service ends,” Ms. Nurse said, “we will have to turn people away.”
The Big Reuse composting project receives all funding from the city. Each year, the three processing sites convert more than two million pounds of food and yard waste into compost, which goes to hundreds of local groups, such as Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens and Randall’s Island Farm in Manhattan, said Justin Green, the nonprofit’s executive director.
“Community composting is popular because it allows people to know and connect that their food scraps are being composted to improve New York City’s soil and green spaces,” Mr. Green said. “Large-scale systems do not have this impact, they are designed to scale.”
Earth Matter NY on Governors Island, another city-funded group also has a site that handles food and yard waste on a large scale. This year it produced 800 tons of compost, made with 20 percent of the waste produced on the island. Finished compost is used on the island and also shipped to community gardens and city parks, said Marisa DeDominicis, the group’s executive director. “If DSNY funding is lost, our processing site and half of our staff positions will be at risk,” she said, referring to the Sanitation Department.
On average, the department’s composting facility on Staten Island turns up to 150 million pounds of food and yard waste into about 42 million pounds of compost per year, with about 40 percent given away to parks and community gardens and the rest sold. But it is also undergoing an expansion that will boost its capabilities 20-fold, Mr. Goodman said.
The facility’s field service, which unlike most community operations accepts meat and dairy waste, is operational in Brooklyn and Queens. But budget constraints have delayed its rollout in the Bronx and Staten Island by six months. Now the two boroughs, along with Manhattan, will receive the service next fall.
Mr. Goodman suggested that New Yorkers who had yet to receive curbside service could drop off their food scraps at the bright orange, smart compost bins located throughout the city that are managed by an app.
A large portion of the food waste collected by the Sanitation Department ends up in… a treatment plant in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, which converts it into natural gas that is piped to homes. However, between August and early November a technical problem occurred at the plant, causing carbon dioxide to be flared into the atmosphere.
“Many New Yorkers want to compost their materials,” Ms. Nurse said. “They don’t want it to be turned into a greenhouse gas that’s burned over Greenpoint.”
Flaring could happen when National Grid, which supplies gas to 1.9 million customers in New York City and on Long Island, cannot accept the gas produced at the plant, said a spokeswoman for the Department of Environmental Protection, which oversees at the facility. A National Grid spokeswoman said the problem had been resolved and the system was back online.
“These large industrial systems are extremely vulnerable,” said Ms. Nurse, who was instrumental in developing the curbside program and who is encouraging New Yorkers to use it, along with community composting. “We need resilience in the system.”