Let’s talk about education for a minute,” said Matthew Civello, CEO of Scanscraps, at a recent roundtable talk at the Conference of Climate and Compost at Baruch College in New York City. “I’ll just take a show of hands. How many people here today are familiar with alternate-side-of-the-street parking?” Civello’s question was met with laughter and a near-unanimous show of hands in the audience. “It’s probably the most successful program the city has ever rolled out,” he continued. “And how many of us own a car?” More than half of the hands went down. “Even if you don’t own a car, you know about alternate-side-of-the-street parking. … [So, for composting,] education is great, but there has to be a motivational stimulus to make people want to participate. You need to incentivize people with rewards, and also with enforcement, and it has to be on an individual level. It’s a behavioral exercise. First and foremost, it has to become part of our city’s DNA.”

Civello is illustrating the paradox of NYC’s new boroughwide “mandatory” curbside collection of organic waste: How can you compel more than 8 million residents to separate food scraps and other compost from their garbage? How can you regulate the wide-scale collection of different kinds of waste? And how can you even make a smidgen of difference in the composition of some 14 million tons of garbage that NYC annually feeds to landfills?

Structure and Consistency

“Changing behavior requires structure and consistency,” said Baruch conference organizer Samantha MacBride, a sociologist and professor at the college’s Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, in her keynote address. “Once you get behavior going, if you don’t have the physical structure for it to mean something, and the consistency of information being provided, the behavior’s going to peter out.”

A former director of research and operations at the New York Department of Sanitation (NYDS), MacBride cited statistics from earlier pilot programs (2013 to 2023) for curbside organics collection in parts of Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx that showed a continuous decline in participation. “The prior efforts were rolled out district-by-district,” she said. “The current program is now rolling out to entire boroughs, and the trends are all showing declining capture rates—and the capture rates were never high to begin with. The capture rates of the new districts are even lower.”

In recent years, NYC has managed to “divert” about 20% of its recyclables from landfills. But with collection rates of just under 5% for organic waste—in a pilot, no less—New York is a long way from, say, the 80% total diversion rate boasted by San Francisco. MacBride called the New York program “inefficient,” with a lot of trucks bringing in very little material. “You’re paying a lot of money for labor, fuel, with nothing to show for it,” she said. “Municipal programs like that cannot survive.”

MacBride said that the Queens pilot’s low capture rates stem from a lack of education about the curbside organics program; frustration with the city’s on-again-off-again approach; problems with missed collections; and, especially, the structural challenges of separating trash in large buildings. “You can have people wanting to participate all you want in their own kitchens,” she said. “If they don’t have it properly set up in their building, it won’t matter.”

Access and Incentive

Back in the early aughts, when my family started composting in our apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, we dutifully set up a bin in the kitchen and periodically took the contents to our neighborhood garden, which had a public compost bin. At some point that became too much for the garden to manage, and they quietly removed it. We started taking our compost to nearby farmers markets, until they stopped collecting during the pandemic.

In 2023, the New York City Council passed the five-part Zero Waste Act, designed to expand curbside organics collection, set “zero waste” targets by the year 2030, provide yearly progress reports, set up at least three food-scrap drop-off sites in each district, and provide a recycling center in each district. (This follows suit from successful programs in other cities, such as San Francisco and Seattle, whose organic-waste-disposal ban garnered headlines and diversion rates of around 60%.)

To its credit, the Adams administration answered the NYC legislation with its citywide curbside composting program, led by NYDS Commissioner Jessica Tisch (who recently moved on to become police commissioner). The city has touted the benefits of separating compost and food scraps—from the diversion of organic waste from landfills, where it generates greenhouse gasses, to the reduction of rats on the streets—while offering organics bins to buildings in all five boroughs and installing more than 400 app-driven “smart bins” throughout the five boroughs (more on those below).

And yet, it’s not clear what’s going to happen with the curbside program. “All buildings are now supposed to have access to the brown bins,” says Clare Miflin, architect and executive director of the Center for Zero Waste Design. “And as we all know, from the pilot programs in Queens and Brooklyn, even though it’s mandatory, many buildings don’t maintain these bins for their residents.” 

NYC’s “mandatory” program is based on the participation of buildings. And its enforcement will fall—not unlike the enforcement of recycling collection—on those buildings, in the form of fines for noncompliance, due to take effect next year. According to an NYDS educational video, the “warning period” for all five boroughs will extend until the spring of 2025. “That’s when you really need to look at participation,” Miflin noted wryly, “because lots of people don’t do anything until they start enforcing it, right?”

Cultural Mosaic

From a waste-disposal standpoint, Gotham was unusual from the get-go. “Most other U.S. cities, like Chicago and Philadelphia, have alleyways where garbage can go to await pickup; the men who designed Manhattan’s grid in 1811 didn’t give us such spaces,” Miflin writes in the essay “Vital City.” “Continuous street facades—with few loading docks or parking garages—create a lively, walkable city, but they make it hard to hide the trash.” Another unique challenge is NYC’s polyglot population. “New York is tough because it’s such a variety of density,” Miflin says. “What works here is different—actually, it’s better to take from Europe, where cities don’t have garages or alleyways.”

Then there’s New York’s decades-long infatuation with big black garbage bags, where most trash currently resides on streets until pickup. Many reports trace this practice to a 1968 sanitation-workers strike, which plunged the city into a garbage crisis, yet led to widespread use of plastic bags in place of Oscar the Grouch–style metal cans. But the trash bags, a ubiquitous part of the cityscape, generate their own problems: they create litter, smell, and block sidewalks; they’re susceptible to vermin, require a lot of cleanup, and, according to Miflin, are socially inequitable: “It’s why richer parts of the city are clean and parts of the city that don’t have the staff to clean up are dirty, because we have a system that requires a lot of labor to do it properly.”

Miflin’s firm has been advocating for “containerization” of NYC’s garbage for years; in 2017, it published Zero Waste Design Guidelines, with strategies ranging from shared, permanent public containers for lower-density neighborhoods to big four-wheel bins that can be stored in large multifamily buildings and rolled out for collection. “The larger buildings have waste rooms,” Miflin said. “Many of them have trash chutes. They can just store the stuff inside and wheel it out to a temporary place on the street. Whereas the smaller buildings don’t have trash chutes and don’t have as much staff. It makes sense that their residents take stuff straight to the street and put it in permanent containers.”

In 2023, the DSNY published its “Future of Trash” report, pointing to containerization models from other cities including Paris, Barcelona, and Amsterdam. “In that report, the DSNY suggested they would have all four waste types in the street,” Miflin said, referring to organics, glass and plastic, mixed paper, and trash. “Then they realized it would eliminate too much parking, so they said, ‘OK, we’ll just do it for trash.’ In places where they’re trying shared containerization—such as Morningside Heights—I’ve talked to residents who say, ‘Oh, I can just take the trash straight outside, but I have to go to the cellar to get rid of my recycling and organics?’ It disincentivizes people to separate garbage if it’s easy to throw away trash and more difficult to throw away recycling and food scraps. It perpetuates this trash-centric system.”

Where Does it Go?

The “smart bins” for compost started appearing on Upper West Side streets in 2023, to the bafflement of many of my family and friends, until it became clear that downloading the NYCCompost app provided access to unlock the bins any time day or night. Voila! The bin on our nearest corner became our go-to place to deposit food-scraps—unless the app said it’s “full,” which happens fairly frequently, leading to a search for another bin or a wait until another day to get rid of compost.

We also were pleased when our co-op building (with 40-plus units) acquired a brown bin for organics from the city in October. However, that bin was used for just a few short weeks before it disappeared from our garbage area. One night, when asked where it went, one of our building workers replied that it was “taking up too much room,” then added, paradoxically, that it “didn’t hold much stuff.” So we reverted to the nearby “smart bin” for dropping off compost.

“The smart bins are a great idea,” said MacBride. “They’re part of the solution because they’re convenient, and they absolutely do bring in cleaner organics than curbside collections. Unfortunately, right now, the smart bins are being mixed with school organics on collection truck routes, and school organics are highly contaminated. The material that’s coming into the smart bins is being wasted in terms of being good clean organics that could be composted locally.”

Both MacBride and Miflin pointed out that collecting organic waste on a citywide scale inherently involves contamination—which means it’s less “pure” and reusable. About 80% of the organic material collected by the NYDS goes to sewage-treatment plants, where it’s anaerobically treated. “Those are the big silver digestion eggs you see at Newtown Creek, where it’s made into this kind of slurry,” Miflin said. “That’s way better than having it all go to the landfill, hundreds of miles away. But it’s not true composting.”

Miflin said there’s no substitute for the kind of compost that NYC community groups have been collecting for decades. “With these grassroots groups, they check it when people drop it off. People don’t put in plastic bags, so it’s very good quality compost. They then apply it for street trees, or they bring it to school gardens or community gardens. That compost is used in the city to make soils healthier.”

Grassroots Groups Struggle 

In NYC’s never-ending budget battles, collection of compost and organic waste has often been treated like a bastard stepchild. In 2020, neighborhood composting groups, as well as curbside composting pilot programs, were defunded by the de Blasio administration during the pandemic. “It wasn’t purely because of Covid,” MacBride said. “It was already going on the chopping block.” 

After a public outcry from New Yorkers, a segment of the neighborhood composting funds were restored for the 2021 fiscal year, only to face new budget cuts from the Adams administration early this year. Another public outcry ensued, leading to another partial refunding announcement by the City Council. Meanwhile, Grow NYC, which has spearheaded many of the composting efforts at neighborhood farmers markets and community gardens, gets a much smaller part of the fiscal pie. “Most likely, all those dropoffs you saw in farmers markets are not going to come back,” Miflin said. Indeed, Grow NYC has permanently closed a long list of compost dropoff sites, directing residents to the curbside composting page of nyc.gov for alternatives.

“This administration made it clear, with their initial cuts, that they didn’t value the contribution of community composters—which is, in my opinion, morally wrong,” MacBride said. “You have people who have voluntarily taken it upon themselves to do something that is nothing but positive for the city—they’ve proved that they can do it for close to 30 years. And they’re still fighting being displaced from plots of land where they operate and for relatively small amounts of funding. Still viewed as extraneous to the issue of sustainability in waste.” She advocates a broad-based, cooperative approach that includes staffed community drop-off sites allowing micro-haulers—small bike- or e-vehicle-based neighborhood-level collections—to work alongside DSNY, picking up organics as a service to buildings.

Building Education

While individual behavior is key, the success rate for the curbside compost program will hinge on the participation of buildings, where education and outreach should be intensified. “The labor—the work that’s going to make or break this program—is with the porters,” MacBride said. “These are some of the lowest-paid, lowest status folks who will be asked to do a lot of extra work without necessarily extra pay or resources. The porters and their supers and the building managers should have much more direct attention from DSNY.” 

Such efforts are ultimately intertwined with enforcement of the program. “When we start enforcing, we’ll need to go in and check on arrangements,” MacBride said. All of this will require major groundwork at the building level: How’s the recycling, garbage and organics room set up? What kind of bags line the receptacles? Does the porter have to carry an organics bin upstairs? Where’s the set-out area? Are there signs on every floor in the building telling people where to take their organics? Has educational material been handed out? Has each tenant received a kitchen container for use in their home? “These steps are hugely labor-intensive,” she said. “They involve an agency working with people who do the labor in the building. This is not being carried out—on anywhere near enough of a scale that I believe New York City needs.”

Featured montage by the author.