“It stayed outside my house for two weeks,” confessed Nancy Gasparino, 57, as she walked her dog down a tree-lined block of tidy homes last Monday, three weeks after sanitation workers first collected the bins. “I know it’s a good thing, I really do. I have four kids — I want the environment to be better for them. But I hesitated to start it.”

Ms. Gasparino worried it would stink. She worried ants in her kitchen would swarm it. She worried that the cats and raccoons would rummage through it. She did not look forward, she said, to serving as “the garbage police” for her children at dinnertime.

But she noticed a bar code printed on the back of her bin and could not quell the suspicion that the city maybe, who knows, just might be keeping tabs on her and her composting compliance. “Why do they put that on there?” she said doubtfully.

And so, Ms. Gasparino is now a full-fledged composter.

Despite instructions that came with each bin, many residents have called the local councilman’s office in alarm, demanding to know: Do I have to do this?

The answer is no, not until the city makes the program mandatory, which may not happen for several years. But the talk of the neighborhood has gradually shifted to focus on where to buy biodegradable bags to line kitchen compost buckets and how best to neutralize unpleasant odors: Storing compost in the freezer works; Febreze vanilla air freshener, for unknown reasons, makes it much worse.