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Residential compost pickup is coming to all five boroughs.
City officials confirmed that Mayor Eric Adams will announce on Thursday that the sanitation department’s popular initiative to divert food scraps from landfills will be expanded throughout the entire city. Curbside compost pickup has already launched in Queens.
No registration will be required. The ease of participation was hailed by city officials as one of the reasons why the program is so much more popular in Queens than in seven communities in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan that currently have curbside composting pickup.
But participation will also not be mandatory, for now.
A sanitation official said the city is considering making the separation of yard waste mandatory.
“This program is going to represent the first time that many New Yorkers have ever had access to curbside composting. Let them get used to it,” Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch told The New York Times, which first reported the expansion of the program.
Compost collection in Queens is on pause for the winter and will resume on March 27. Brooklyn residents can begin separating their compost for curbside collection on Oct. 2. The Bronx and Staten Island will join the program on March 25, 2024, while Manhattan will be the last borough to receive the service on Oct. 7, 2024.
Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine tweeted that he hopes the city will “accelerate this for Manhattan.”
While the Queens pilot program cost the city $467,000, officials said citywide service will cost $22.5 million by 2026. The city expects to spend $45 million this fiscal year for new compost collection trucks.
Large yard debris is separated from the city’s collected organic waste and sent to a compost facility in New Jersey. The remaining organic waste is sent to the Pine Island Farm in Massachusetts or the wastewater treatment plant at Newtown Creek in Greenpoint – where a long-delayed project with National Grid aims to turn organic waste into biogas.
Sanitation department officials said they’re also looking for other transfer stations to handle the extra compost.
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