New York City is making people compost — or pay up

Property owners and landlords in New York City can now be fined $25 or more if residents are found throwing a banana peel in the trash. As of April 1, all New Yorkers must separate organic waste — that includes food scraps, food-soiled paper (like empty pizza boxes), and leaf and yard waste — from the rest of their trash, similar to how metal, glass, paper, and plastic is set aside for recycling. 

This is how the city is encouraging — or indeed, mandating — participation in its curbside composting program, where food waste is collected weekly by the sanitation department, same as the trash and recycling. Mandatory curbside composting is still relatively new in New York City; the program only rolled out in all five boroughs late last year. 

The best use of food, of course, is to feed people. When it can’t do that, composting is one tool to help reduce emissions from organic waste — the methane released as food decays in landfills is a major driver of global warming. As a whole, the United States wastes as much food as it did nearly 10 years ago, despite setting an ambitious goal to cut food waste in half. 

Getting New Yorkers onboard with composting will take time — and effort. When it comes to diverting food waste from landfills by composting it instead, New York lags far behind other large U.S. cities. The city recovered less than 5 percent of eligible households’ organic waste in the 2024 fiscal year. The fines announced this month are designed to boost compliance; in the first week of April, the New York City Department of Sanitation, or DSNY, issued nearly 2,000 tickets for allegedly failing to separate organics.  

“That is only half the story: We picked up 2.5 million pounds of compostable material last week,” said Vincent Gragnani, press secretary for DSNY, “a 240 percent increase over the 737,000 pounds collected during the same week last year.”

But critics say the city should focus more on educating residents on the benefits of composting. 

“My concern is that, instead of doing outreach, we’re focusing on fear-mongering,” said Lou Reyes, a local composting advocate. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Reyes and his partner started a volunteer-run effort in Astoria, Queens, to collect and compost neighborhood food waste. He described the city’s recovery rate of organic waste prior to the rollout of fines as “pretty shameful.” 

The lackluster participation in the city’s composting program may be a function of time — Seattle, for example, banned organics in the trash 10 years ago. In San Francisco, composting has been mandatory since 2009. 

Still, experts say boosting food waste collection in New York, a metropolis with more than 8 million people, will also take dedicated education and outreach.

“I would say our biggest tool that the department uses is education,” said Joseph Piasecki, the public affairs and policy coordinator for San Francisco’s environmental department. He mentioned that the city’s organics hauler works to notify residents and businesses of potential mix-ups before fining them. 

“They will reach out, our department will reach out, we will call, we’ll put boots on the ground to go, like physically go, there, and be like, How can we help you be successful?” said Piasecki. 

At a preliminary budget hearing last month, DSNY said it has sent out citywide mailers about the composting fines; the department is also meeting with every community board and holding information sessions for residents and property managers to better educate the public about the program. And Piasecki stressed that San Francisco’s composting program should not serve as a direct comparison for New York’s. About 800,000 people live in San Francisco, roughly a tenth of the population of New York City. It also covers a much smaller geographic area: about 50 square miles compared to just over 300. A better comparison might be Los Angeles, a city of more than 3 million that just rolled out a mandatory curbside composting program two years ago.

But adding to DSNY’s composting woes is that the agency has failed to reassure critics of the composting program, who argue the city is misleading residents about what happens to their food scraps while also creating an environmental justice issue.  

As of now, food waste that gets picked up by DSNY will usually wind up in one of two places: a composting facility on Staten Island or a wastewater-treatment plant on the edge of Brooklyn and Queens. But last year, DSNY reported that only one-fifth of food waste collected actually makes it to the composting facility. The rest is sent to the wastewater-treatment plant in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint. (Asked for updated figures, Gragnani said the department did not have a precise breakdown, as the numbers often fluctuate.) 

 At the wastewater-treatment plant, organic waste is mixed with sewage sludge and broken down in an anaerobic digester, where it produces methane and other gases. This cocktail of gases — known as biogas — can then serve multiple purposes: It can be used on-site to power the facility itself, or it could be refined into renewable natural gas and used to heat homes. Instead, the New York City plant has been blasted by locals for flaring off excess methane. 

The solids leftover from this process — known as the digestate — could technically be used to enhance soils. However, advocates worry it may be too low-quality to be of any use to farmers and gardeners since it was originally mixed with city wastewater, which means it may ultimately end up in landfills, too. (Asked for comment, Gragnani directed Grist to New York state’s Department of Environmental Protection, which operates the digesters.) 

In Los Angeles, the city’s guidance on curbside organics collection is clear about where it goes: Food scraps and yard waste collected are turned into compost that is then used by farmers to grow organic products. In San Francisco, according to Piasecki, some of the compost created by scraps is then used by Napa Valley wineries. He added that this could be a moment “for New York to develop that kind of story,” especially if compost from the city eventually helps rural communities throughout the state.

For now, DSNY may have its hands full, answering to critics who say the anaerobic digestion process further entrenches the fossil fuel industry at a time when cities need instead to decarbonize.  

For example, when biogas is converted into what’s known as renewable natural gas and then given to the local utility company for free, it’s “creating an incentive for rebuilding all the [gas] pipes and making the investments in this fossil fuel infrastructure,” said Eric Goldstein, the New York City environmental director for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Asked to respond to these criticisms, Gragnani, the press secretary for DSNY, said, “Would the ‘local environmental advocates’ you spoke with prefer that we use fracked gas to heat homes and businesses? Unfortunately, their rhetoric can discourage participation and send more food and yard waste to release methane in faraway landfills.”

Anaerobic digestion can play an important role within food-waste reduction programs, said Marcel R. Howard, zero-waste program manager at the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives. But he added that it “must be implemented within zero-waste and social justice frameworks to prevent environmental harm and prioritize community needs.” 

In the end, New York City has its work cut out for it. Reyes said that he wants to see “real, legitimate” outreach from DSNY on why separating food waste matters. “I am a huge supporter of municipal organic recovery that actually works,” he said. That means having the community actually buy into the idea of keeping food out of landfills and ensuring environmental justice issues — like flaring methane in a populous neighborhood — are not created in the process.

“Those are, I think, more acceptable and more dignified solutions than the mess that we have in New York City,” he added.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline New York City is making people compost — or pay up on Apr 10, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Frida Garza.