Why New York’s Curbside Composting Program Will Yield Hardly Any Compost

Moving to New York can be a culture shock. When Liz French decamped from Indiana to Long Island City, Queens, in 1989—well before it was a trendy place to live—she was sad to learn she’d lost access to a beloved childhood ritual: composting. Her parents, “kind of hippies,” had introduced her to the practice growing up in Bloomfield, Indiana, but, in the Big Apple, there was no gardening “or any sort of composting,” she said. Back then Long Island City was, even for New York, very much an industrial environment.

Five years passed before French, now an editor for Library Journal, found a way to compost again. While visiting the Union Square Farmers Market, which was near where she worked at the time, French met a German woman, Christine Datz-Romero, a composting pioneer in the city. Datz-Romero ran a compost collection stand four times a week at Union Square, accepting New Yorkers’ food waste (sans meat and bones) and turning it into soil. Since French lived in Queens, the woman recommended she freeze her discards, and bring them to the drop-off station at the market whenever she could. 

So she did. For almost a decade, French froze her scraps, rinds, grinds and peels, put them into a plastic bag or milk carton, tucked that into her backpack, and hopped on the train to work, stashing the cargo under her desk once she arrived. During her lunch breaks, French would drop the stuff at Union Square, then sit in the park and enjoy her lunch.

Gradually, composting caught on in New York, and French could travel to drop-offs a little closer to home, which, most recently, was a collection station run by GrowNYC in Ridgewood, Queens.

Then, last October, New York City made it so that practically all French had to do to discard her food waste was chuck it outside her front door. The Adams Administration rolled out what it has since called a voluntary “curbside composting program” across all of Queens, giving residents the option to set a bin of organic waste on the sidewalk for the Department of Sanitation (DSNY) to collect on designated recycling nights.

“I was overjoyed,” French said. The program was convenient for her, and she considered it a sign that the city was finally getting serious about composting—and she was right. 

Earlier this year, Mayor Eric Adams announced the extension of the voluntary program to all five boroughs by 2024, touting it as the largest composting program in the country, beginning in all of Brooklyn on Monday. And, this summer, City Council passed a law that will require all New Yorkers to separate their organics from the rest of their trash—much like they already do for recycling. If all goes according to schedule, every household in New York will be diverting food from a landfill by the spring of 2025.

But most of the food scraps collected in Queens, and all of the food waste in Brooklyn, are unlikely to ever be used as compost to enrich soil by increasing nutrient retention and delivering nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium to plants.

Instead, New Yorkers’ food scraps will get turned into an “engineered bio-slurry” by WM, a multinational, multibillion-dollar private waste management company, and fed to microbes at a city wastewater treatment plant in Brooklyn, boosting the production of methane gas that National Grid can then use to help heat local homes and businesses.  

The environmental implications of all this are murky, at best. On the one hand, the natural gas the food waste generates is un-fracked, freeing it from the greenhouse gas emissions and toxic waste associated with extracting oil and gas buried miles below the earth.

But, as composting advocates like Datz-Romero and Brooklynites who live near the wastewater treatment plant where the natural gas will be generated point out, this scraps-to-energy process is energy intensive, creates extensive truck traffic transporting the slurry and has the potential to leak methane, a climate super-pollutant. Methane has already been “flared” or burned off as part of the testing process, and creating gas to heat homes cuts against the city’s broader policy of moving away from gas heat and appliances toward renewables.

“I’m a little bit skeptical about the environmental benefits that are created through that,” said Datz-Romero, referring to “anaerobic digestion,” the process by which the microbes create natural gas. “Is that really the highest use we can think for our organics? I don’t think so.”

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