NYC gears up for citywide food scrap composting rollout
NEW YORK - Food recycling is coming soon to your neighborhood.
Council Member Sandy Nurse chairs the Council’s Sanitation Committee and co-sponsored a bill passed by the Council mandating all New Yorkers compost their food scraps. That means separating food waste from your regular trash.
Apartment buildings will have to provide composting bins just like they do for recycling, but Council Member Nurse says this will be even easier.
"Plastics and metals are really confusing because there's so many different types. With food waste, food scraps, it's very clear. You got a bag of oranges, you got leftover meat, you got chicken scraps, you got eggshells, coffee grounds. All of that stuff it's very simple," Nurse said. "You take all of that stuff and put it into one bin."
FOX 5 NY's Linda Schmidt spoke with some New Yorkers.
"It's an extra step, but it's not too much," a New Yorker said.
Some New Yorkers aren't sure if they are going to follow this new rule and Schmidt asked if people are really going to follow through.
"I don't think so. I'm being truthful," a New Yorker said.
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"I'll do it. I'm all for recycling," a New Yorker said.
"The one's that come home tired from work and just want to hit the sack, I doubt that very much," a New Yorker said.
But a question on the minds of many is, how is the city going to enforce it?
Columbia University Professor Steven Cohen says," the enforcement of this mandate is a little ridiculous. There's no way to really enforce it."
Professor Cohen specializes in Sustainability Policy and Management.
He says another issue is the city does not have sufficient composting facilities to handle the food scraps.
"The volume of food waste is basically half of the waste we produced every day and there's no place to compost all that," Cohen said.
The city will be rolling out the food composting starting with Queens and Brooklyn this October, the Bronx, and Staten Island in March 2024, and then Manhattan in October of next year.