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Budget cuts threaten NYC community composing
Mayor Eric Adams' new budget is slashing city services left and right, including at least four community compost organizations. FOX 5 NY's Teresa Priolo spoke with composting supporters demonstrating at City Hall on Thursday about what losing these programs would mean.
NEW YORK - The budget cuts unveiled by Mayor Eric Adams are slashing service across New York City, including at least four community composting programs, threatening 115 jobs and entire initiatives.
The Department of Sanitation provides brown composting bins for residents in Brooklyn and Queens, with orange bins given to those in other boroughs.
The city composts some of the waste in those bins, but some is turned into bioslurry, potentially releasing methane gas into the atmosphere.
RELATED: NYC gears up for citywide food scrap composting rollout
Community groups handle green-colored bins, composting 100% of the materials inside and turning them into nutrient-rich soil.
The announced budget cuts will force the elimination of 115 jobs and entire programs, impacting the transparency and community bonding advocates say the initiatives bring.
"We have a system of transparency that the city isn't able to ensure, we have really great connections within the community and it's also a and it's a system that brings us together," said Dior St. Hillaire of GreenFeen OrganiX.
The funding cuts may hinder the City Council's goal to reduce food waste by 20-30%, according to City Councilman Keith Powers.
"These programs always filled in the gaps by being the places where you can drop it off in your neighborhood," Powers said.
The city told FOX 5 NY that the cuts only constitute a tenth of the overall composing budget.
In a statement regarding the cuts, the Department of Sanitation said:
"For more than two decades, past administrations have been working to achieve citywide composting – to make the separation and diversion of food waste and yard waste go mainstream. Today, despite a massive fiscal challenge, the Adams administration is on track to do just that, and to get this waste material to a beneficial use, both as compost and as renewable energy.
We’re running the biggest, easiest curbside composting program ever, covering ALL of Brooklyn and ALL of Queens, every week on residents’ recycling day, and in October that program comes to the rest of the City as promised.
In addition to curbside service, we’ve built a network of 400 Smart Composting Bins for New Yorkers who want to drop off compost. These bins are accessible 24/7 via the NYC Compost app – no more worrying about limited hours – and they accept EVERYTHING from the kitchen, and EVERYTHING from the garden, unlike some past programs with complicated exclusions. The same goes for our curbside program.
We’ll also be collecting compostable material from every public school in the City by the end of this school year.
Composting programs work best when they’re easy, and the programs being implemented today are for everyone, not just the truest of the true believers. This is a program decades in the making, and everyone who believes in getting this material out of landfills should be celebrating. By reducing the food waste that we put into trash bags, our streets will look better and smell better, this waste will be put to beneficial use as soil or renewable energy, and best of all, we will be dealing a blow to New York City’s number one enemy: rats."