NYC mayor announces citywide curbside compost collection

In his Jan. 26 State of the City address, New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced plans to establish a citywide curbside composting program.

“We’re going to get stuff cleaner by launching the country’s largest curbside composting program,” Adams said in the address. “By the end of 2024, all 8.5 million New Yorkers will finally have the rat-defying solutions they’ve been waiting for two decades.

Over the next 20 months, the City of New York Department of Sanitation (DSNY) will implement a free, weekly collection of compostable material for all residents across all five boroughs. This will be the first program to reach 100 percent coverage citywide, providing residents with simple, weekly collection of leaf and yard waste, food scraps and food-soiled paper products.

RELATED: Filling in the gaps | NYC food-related businesses required to recycle organic waste

Photo courtesy of New York Department of Sanitation

Adams says city leaders have been trying for years to enact citywide composting.

Full details on the 12.7 million pounds of compostable material diverted from landfill in the first three months of the Queens pilot program are available on DSNY’s website.

“Thanks to the cooperation and enthusiastic participation of Queens residents, the boroughwide curbside composting program instituted here last October proved to be a massive success,” Queens Borough President Donovan Richards Jr. says. “I am thrilled the program will soon be instituted citywide. This is a great day for our city, and, frankly, for our entire planet, as we are taking a major step forward in our efforts to protect our environment and address the climate change crisis that has negatively impacted our borough for years.”

The curbside compost collection program will mark the end of years of exporting food waste and other compostable materials to landfills, NYC Deputy Mayor for Operations Meera Joshi says.

“Building on the commonsense approach used in the Queens organics pilot, today we are announcing the reversal of this costly and carbon-producing activity,” she says. “Instead of creating more landfill, our food scraps will be separated, contained from rats and turned into renewable energy, biosolids and compost.”

The new program is built on a number of efficiencies that drive costs down, including the use of dual-bin trucks and a right-sizing of the workforce to reduce overtime, according to the city.

The leaf-and-yard-waste-first approach was designed based on successful programs in other cities, including San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto and Portland, Oregon. 

Service will begin on the following timeline:

• March 27, service resumes in Queens following a pause during the winter;
• Oct. 2, service begins in Brooklyn;
• March 25, 2024, service begins in Staten Island and the Bronx; and
• Oct. 7, 2024,  service comes to Manhattan.
  

No seasonal pauses are planned once the citywide composting is established.

Since last April, NYC says it has committed $31 million toward sustainability efforts. This funding includes investments in a number of programs in addition to curbside composting and the Smart Bins. It will help expand composting to every NYC public school by next school year, fund a comprehensive waste characterization study and expand funding for community composting.

Because they piloted the curbside composting program, Queens residents can pick up 40-pound bags of compost for use in their yards and gardens. As the program proceeds, DSNY will conduct more compost giveback events in which the material that residents put out for composting is given back to them the following year as usable soil.