New York is gradually implementing the collection of organic waste throughout the city, a turning point for the metropolis, but the method upsets the historic local compost players, whose funding is cut.
John Surico started separating his food scraps seven years ago. At the time, this resident of the Queens borough had to cross the entire neighborhood to find a collection site for his organic waste, frozen over several days in his fridge.
“You had to be motivated,” he remembers. “But now I just have to go downstairs.”
After Queens and Brooklyn, the municipality plans to equip the entire city with these new brown and orange trash cans by the end of the year. Next year, sorting will become compulsory and punishable by a fine.
The stakes are high for a city which generates 11,000 tonnes of waste daily, a third of which is food waste. Last year, organic waste collection represented only 3% of the total collected, according to figures from sanitation services (DSNY).
“This is an incredible achievement,” said Mayor Eric Adams at the beginning of January, during the grand inauguration of an extension of the city’s largest compost site, in the Staten Island district.
Thanks to a new accelerated method, that of the static pile aerated by pipes which makes it possible to reduce the transformation time by more than half, it will now be able to treat some 95,000 tonnes of organic waste per year.
The Staten Island composting site, in New York, January 4, 2024 / ANGELA WEISS / AFP
“New York is becoming a national model on environmental issues,” said Jenifer Rajkumar, elected from Queens to the New York State Assembly.
The city will also strengthen the network of “smart bins”, “intelligent” trash cans on the sidewalks in which New Yorkers can deposit their organic waste at any time.
“Human dimension”
However, the historical compost community, associative actors and volunteers, welcomed this turning point with reservation.
On the one hand, because a considerable part of the waste collected is not transformed into compost, but feeds a digester located in Brooklyn, which produces city gas by methanization.
The other reason is the concomitant elimination of subsidies granted to existing associations, as part of a municipal savings plan, which endangers the entire environment.
John Surico collects his trash bin dedicated to organic waste, January 26, 2024 in New York / Thomas URBAIN / AFP
Big Reuse, the largest of them, had to let go of 16 of its 19 employees, explains Gil Lopez, a member of the organization, and risks losing its main site, located in Queens.
Several members of the municipal council pleaded for a restoration of municipal funding, but “the mayor did not give in,” regrets Gil Lopez.
The start-up Mill made a donation of $350,000, which only pushed back the deadline by a handful of months.
“No one wants to finance local composting if the city does not get involved,” says Marisa DeDominicis, co-founder of the Earth Matter NY association, which allows the island of Governors Island, in New York Bay , to compost your own organic waste.
“I know that when you are at the head of a city, you have to monitor your finances, (…) but you have to take into account the human dimension,” argues Andrea Lieske, of Earth Matter NY. “The idea is to come together around composting and a sustainable system.”
Beyond the sites themselves and their management, local composting involves numerous community gardens and other places which rely on the logistics of associations and their technical knowledge.
The history of composting in New York also highlights that the carbon footprint of local activities is significantly better than that of collective collection, whose trucks sometimes travel several tens of kilometers to their final destination.
Big Reuse, like others, also works with schoolchildren, high school students, students and businesses, during awareness-raising actions on the recovery of organic waste.
For Gil Lopez, “it’s a whole movement in New York that is being deprived of service.”
2024-03-06 08:52:01
#York #launches #compost #large #scale #method #irritates
