New York City Mayor, Eric Adams, announced the city’s new composting program on 8 August. Unused food accounts for roughly 24% of the material in American landfills and is the largest category of residential waste. Beginning on 3 October, every household in the borough of Queens will receive weekly collections of food scraps, organic material such as leaves and brush, and soiled paper. This will be the largest composting program in the United States, serving 2.2 million people. The separate compost will be picked up regularly, so signing up for the program is not necessary. Residents who wish to take advantage of this program must simply set out a separate, marked bin. Queens residents already separate yard brushes, so adopting the practice of mixing in food waste and other compostable material presents a low barrier for residents to adopt the practice.
Queens was chosen over the other boroughs as the starting place for this program because of its unique demographics and geography. It has a diverse population of residents, many of which belong to historically underserved communities. Queens is also home to 41% of New York City’s street foliage, making the collection program more necessary here than in other parts of the city. The city and the New York Department of Sanitation have developed new route efficiencies that allow it to service its geographically largest borough with the lowest cost per district of any previous composting program.
This program is part of a larger initiative by policymakers to clean up the city. New York City has exceeded its target for increasing the number of compost bins on streets and the frequency of collection which prevents waste from piling up. The relegation of food and organic waste to a hard, plastic bin prevents rats and other animals from ripping into trash bags, and scattering waste. Keeping biodegradable material out of landfills also prevents excess greenhouse gases, such as methane, from entering the atmosphere.
This program fits a densely populated, metropolitan area. Policymakers would have had to be conscious of a multitude of logistical and information dissemination issues. It deals with recapturing already wasted food and preventing organic matter from decomposing in landfills. SITES’ Food Waste program is meant to apply to the other end of that chain, preventing food from being wasted in the first place. Combined, there is potential for even more efficiency.
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