New York City residents will soon have to compost their food scraps

For New Yorkers, the battle against the city’s waste is about to strike.

On Thursday, the New York City Council is expected to pass a bill that will require New Yorkers to separate their food waste from the regular trash, just as they already do with recyclables.

The residential mandate would be rolled out borough by borough, starting with Brooklyn and Queens in October, followed by the Bronx and Staten Island in March 2024, and Manhattan in 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.

The timing roughly approaches the rollout of the mayor’s previously announced composting program, but the two differ on one key point: the mayor’s plan is voluntary.

While some experts believe making the program mandatory is key to financial sustainability, the mayor believes New Yorkers need time to adjust to a new regime. It is unclear whether Mr Adams will sign the bill into law, but it appears to have enough support to override a mayor’s veto.

“We have a supermajority on all bills,” said Sandy Nurse, the councilor who chairs the Sanitation Committee and is one of the three main sponsors of the legislation package. “Whether the administration wants these bills or not is irrelevant. They happen.”

A spokesperson for the mayor declined to comment.

The success of the Council’s mandate will depend on the effective implementation of the program by the Sanitation Department. But the city’s sanitation commissioner Jessica Tisch declined to comment directly on the Council’s legislative package, instead proclaiming her own department’s volunteer program as “easy, no drama, focused on service.”

And she noted that starting June 30, the city will be rolling out its own mandate on a smaller scale: Queens residents will be required to separate their leaf and yard waste during certain months of the year. This mandate does not apply to leftover food.

Apart from that, the Council intends to require the city to set up e-waste recycling and collection centers for biological products in each congregation and to codify its purpose to eliminate remove all recyclable and organic substances from the waste stream by 2030.

From a waste management standpoint, New York City is lagging behind. Starting in 2009, San Francisco and Seattle began mandating composting. California has a statewide composting mandate. Barcelona’s dumpster techniques have become the envy of urban planners in New York City.

In New York, the financial and cultural capital of the United States, access to organic produce collection points is hit and miss, largely dependent on location and administrative arbitrariness. New Yorkers who want to dispose of their hazardous waste, including electronics and paint, responsibly have done so even fewer options; many are waiting for a city legislature to sponsor an ad hoc disposal grant.

This legislation aims to bring New York City’s waste management practices into the modern era and enshrine them in law. Like recycling, separating food waste becomes enforceable with fines.

But if recycling enforcement is any indication, the penalties are likely to be few. Lily Baum Pollans, an associate professor at Hunter College who studies waste management, said the lack of enforcement was a factor in the city’s low compliance. The overall city curbside recycling diversion rate is about 17 percent.

The composting mandate includes all residents of New York City, in buildings large or small, with the exception of the approximately 400,000 New Yorkers who live in public housing, because the public housing authority is “characterized as a federal agency” and is not subject to such city mandates, Shahana said Hanif, who along with Keith Powers are the other two main sponsors of the legislative package.

To further the goal of reducing methane, some of the organic waste to be collected will be composted, a process that “produces hardly any methane,” said Eric A. Goldstein, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

But until the city puts in better composting infrastructure, much of that organic matter will be fed into anaerobic digesters, which Mr. Goldstein says is superior to using landfills, but not ideal. In those digesters, “the methane is captured to generate energy, replacing fossil fuels,” he said.

About half of New York City’s household waste is organic material, and it “represents the majority of New York City’s municipal solid waste that could not be disposed of in landfills,” according to a Report 2021 of the New York City Independent Budget Office. (The Department of Sanitation sets the proportion of organic waste at a more conservative 37 percent of the city’s waste stream.)

The report noted that the cost per ton of shipping organic waste is significantly higher than for recyclable and regular waste, a situation that can only be resolved by expanding the program to the entire city.