New York always has some impossibly monumental city-improvement project in the works (hello,听Hudson Yards and听Second Avenue subway), but truly one of its more ambitious plans is to send听zero waste to landfills by the year 2030. One of Mayor de Blasio鈥檚 big goals for doing this has been to expand the recycling and composting programs. It makes sense when you think about it, but the bulk of the city鈥檚 trash is organic waste 鈥� lots of paper and grass clippings, but also a really heaping pile of food scraps. And this effort is actually about to expand considerably. The New York听Times took a look听today at the magnitude, and the story walks readers through changes it says will affect 鈥渉ow all New Yorkers deal with refuse, and test the city鈥檚 ability to manage organic materials on a scale never seen in the United States.鈥�
New York鈥檚 organics-collection program is already America鈥檚 largest, and by the end of next year, every person in the city is supposed to have a way of recycling food scraps. This costs about $28 million, and involves distributing millions of brown bins for food scraps that go beside the traditional blue and green ones for recycling. As you might imagine, this is a difficult task, filled with logistical problems. Taller buildings are a particular struggle: Every floor鈥檚 trash room has to be reorganized, and somebody has to haul all those brown bins out to the curb 鈥� probably against their wishes. High-traffic parts of town present another issue; the city can鈥檛 do curbside pickup here as easily. The solution for now is drop-off sites at subway stations, libraries, and local businesses that volunteer as sites for bins.
Composting is the next program. New York has two sites suited for food waste. One鈥檚 at Rikers; the other is Fresh Kills on Staten Island; and neither location is what you鈥檇 call 鈥渃onvenient.鈥� As a result, most organics will be hauled off to third-party facilities located outside the city. (The听Times听reports the hardest part of the entire endeavor is finding places capable of 鈥渉andling the Chinese takeout and fettuccine Alfredo that city dwellers toss.鈥�)
Eventually, the city would also like to use food leftovers to power apartments and buildings, because a process called anaerobic digestion can break waste down into a slurry that can be refined and used as fuel. The only problem with that is, it takes months of calibration, since it鈥檚 done naturally with microbes.
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