New Yorkers already have blue and green bins for recycling glass, metal, paper and plastic. But now brown bins for organic waste are starting to appear all over the city. These plastic totems are part of the city’s multimillion-dollar campaign to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions and reliance on landfills, and to turn food scraps and yard waste into compost and, soon, clean energy.
In the 19th century, the city had a simple method for dealing with organic rubbish: It enlisted scavenging swine to nose through the gutters for leftovers. Now, the city is employing the primal chemistry of decay.
About 14 million tons of waste are thrown out each year. It costs the city almost $400 million annually just to ship what it collects from homes, schools and government buildings (by rail, barge or truck) to incinerators or landfills as far away as South Carolina. (In addition, dozens of private companies put trucks on the road to take away refuse from office buildings and businesses.)
The largest single portion of the trash heap is organics, or things that were once living. That apple core, that untouched macaroni salad, that slice of pizza and the greasy paper plate it was served on are heavy with moisture, which makes shipping expensive. As they decompose, they release methane, a greenhouse gas.
Former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg declared food waste the “final recycling frontier” when his administration began its ambitious curbside program in 2013 as the linchpin of the city’s sustainability goals.
That effort has continued under Mayor Bill de Blasio, and the project is on the verge of an expansion that could change how all New Yorkers deal with refuse, and test the city’s ability to manage organic materials on a scale never seen in the United States.
Smaller cities like Portland, Ore.; San Francisco; and Seattle all have mandatory programs. But the population of those three places combined is smaller than Brooklyn or Queens alone.
New York’s residential organics collection program is already the largest in the country: More than a million residents in parts of all five boroughs have curbside service. By the end of next year, officials say, all city residents will have a way to recycle their food scraps and other leaf and yard waste.
On her first day as sanitation commissioner, in 2014, Kathryn Garcia said that she wanted her agency to lead the nation in organics recycling. While businesses are gearing up to use machinery and technologies that will turn food waste into new products, the department has to make sure there are enough facilities (and willing neighbors) to accommodate and sort tens of thousands of tons of putrescible materials.
So how will it work?
Picking Up
New York’s dense, vertical landscape makes collection a labyrinthine endeavor. Creating all-new routes just to fetch organics would be expensive and snarl traffic. The city is finding ways to modify existing routes, using trucks with separate compartments for trash and organics.