New York mayor announces city-wide curbside composting program, impacting 8.5 million residents by 2024

On the heels of a successful 3-month-long pilot program in Queens, New York City has announced the largest curbside composting program in the United States. The initiative will begin following a winter-long hiatus of the Queens pilot, which is set to return permanently March 27. Curbside service to Brooklyn will begin Oct. 2, followed by the Bronx and Staten Island next March. Manhattan’s curbside program will kick off next October, “with access for every New Yorker by the end of 2024,” according to a statement from the mayor’s office.

Its purpose is twofold: reduce the city’s emissions and get rid of rats—the city’s longtime nemesis.

“Most people don’t know this about me, but I hate rats. And pretty soon, Commissioner Tisch, they’re gonna hate me,” said NYC Mayor Eric Adams Thursday during his annual State of the City address. He commended Jessica Tisch, commissioner of the New York Department of Sanitation, for her work implementing the successful Queens pilot.

“When we allow quality of life to deteriorate, it is working class New Yorkers who suffer the most,” Adams continued. “By the end of 2024, all 8.5 million New Yorkers will finally have the rat-defying solution they’ve been waiting for for two decades. In just three months, a pilot compost program right here in Queens kept nearly 13 million pounds of kitchen and yard waste out of our landfills.”

For perspective, there are about 2.4 million residents in Queens. The pilot program allowed Queens residents to compost leaf and yard waste, food scraps, and food-soiled paper products like napkins, paper towels, and unlined plates. There is no sign-up required. Residents simply set out waste in a brown container at the curbside. 

The amount of waste composted during the pilot program equaled “more than the weight of 300 city buses. Imagine how much we will accomplish when every family in the city is participating,” Adams said.

The announcement is an example of the unprecedented steps cities across the United States are taking to reduce waste in the face of the climate crisis. It also highlights how perspectives on waste disposal within municipalities are evolving.

“Composting operations are relatively non-existent in the solid municipal waste sector, as the market has molded itself and grown into a standard ‘bury-or-burn’ model,” according to a study published at the end of last year by the National Library of Medicine’s National Center for Biotechnology Information. ”As humans are trying to address global warming, composting proves to be a promising climate change mitigation option, benefiting societies in terms of the environment, the economy, and overall health.”

The study projects that, in a decade, the U.S. can reduce its carbon emissions by 30 million tons through composting while saving about $16 billion in municipal waste management costs.

“Composting is one of the environmentally friendly ways of reducing organic waste. It is economically viable since it cuts costs associated with the hauling of wastes and enables farmers to reduce the use of fertilizers,” the report says.

Elsewhere in the United States, Boston, which started its curbside composting program last year, collected 500 tons of organic waste through the initiative. And in Austin, Tx., the city is looking to expand its curbside composting program to multifamily dwellings. More than half of city residents live in such complexes.