Renée Crowley, project manager of the Lower East Side Ecology Center in Manhattan | Sally Goldenberg/POLITICO Wasted Potential: New York City's food recycling failures exacerbate climate crisis

Click here to view POLITICO's video on composting organic waste in New York City.

Mayor Mike Bloomberg was winding down his final year in office when he gathered residents of a high-rise Manhattan co-op and announced plans to tackle what he called the “final recycling frontier — organic waste.”


Six years later, the now presidential candidate’s goal of a robust recycling program for food and yard scraps remains a pipe dream — the victim of municipal budget skeptics who think it's too costly and a current mayor who has heeded their concerns and suspended the program's expansion.

The unkept promise amounts to Mayor Bill de Blasio’s most profound failure to improve the city’s dismal recycling rate and thereby reduce the amount of trash New Yorkers send to landfills around the region. Food and yard rubbish make up one-third of the residential waste stream and, left to rot in landfills, emit methane — a greenhouse gas considered far more potent than carbon dioxide.

“If we can divert those organics, it completely changes the dynamics of how waste management works in the Northeast, not just New York City,” Ron Gonen, former deputy commissioner for sanitation, recycling and sustainability under Bloomberg, said in an interview.

As a candidate in 2013, de Blasio got on board, vowing in his campaign literature to "create a mandatory city-wide municipal composting system within five years."

Instead, the city’s sanitation department — which called organics recycling “the biggest new opportunity not yet tapped” — collected just 13,000 tons of organic waste that residents left in brown curbside bins in 2017, about 1.2 percent of more than 1 million tons of that type of refuse tossed out that year. An analysis conducted by the agency concluded that “there is still a steep learning curve for residents who have never been asked to separate and store food scraps for recycling.”

The agency hasn’t issued a comprehensive report on organics recycling data since then, but the overall recycling rate that includes food waste has hardly budged since 2017.

The program is voluntary, and so far, 470,000 buildings and single-family homes have signed up for the pickup service, according to a sanitation agency spokesperson. Still, there are large swaths of the five boroughs where residents are unable to secure a brown bin even if they want one.

At the Lower East Side Ecology Center, an acre of land that sits between the FDR Drive and the East River, some 3,500 people drop eight tons of food scraps in a communal container every week.

One rainy afternoon last November, the bin was filled halfway with banana and onion peels, noodles and egg shells, which would eventually be mixed with wood chips from Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. The marriage of materials creates a blend that warms over time, reaching temperatures as high as 160 degrees and producing a chimney effect of steam. Within a year, the waste decomposes into fresh soil that gets donated to parks and community gardens around the city.

Some New Yorkers are notably committed to the cause.

“There’s one guy I caught one day — he bikes from Staten Island, bikes all the way up the greenway and then drops his food scraps here before going to work in Midtown,” said Renée Crowley, project manager of the compost center.

But aside from recycling zealots, the city has struggled to entice most residents, which is why Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia has long pushed for a citywide mandate.

“The organics program is important. It is the part of our waste stream that is going to be converted into the most greenhouse gases,” she said in an interview last month at her agency headquarters. Without it, she said, the mayor will not meet his goal of virtually zeroing out the amount of waste the city exports to landfills by 2030.

“The less time we have to change behavior, the harder it will be,” she said.

West Coast cities like San Francisco and Seattle, which mandate organic waste separation, enjoy recycling rates roughly three times higher than New York’s. In fact, both cities have achieved the rare feat of recycling and reusing more garbage than they send to landfills.

In Seattle, homes and businesses recycle 60 percent of their waste, Hans Van Dusen, who manages the city’s public utilities contracts, said in a recent interview. Seattle began collecting yard detritus more than 30 years ago, and added certain food scraps to the system in 2005. By 2009, the city included meat and dairy waste and finally required organic recycling five years ago.

“You can really see our organics collection go up after 2009, so people were ready for it and embraced it,” Van Dusen said. “As much as anything, we’re keeping up with them as they are keeping up with us.”

San Francisco mandated organic waste separation in 2009, nine years after launching the voluntary program, said Robert Haley, the city’s “Zero Waste” program manager. The city now boasts a diversion rate of 57 percent for residents and small businesses.

“Just by announcing that we were making recycling and composting mandatory, our numbers started going up,” Haley said.

Back on the East Coast, Bloomberg’s initial steps looked promising: Residents of the Morningside Heights co-op he visited in 2013 proudly showed off their sorted scraps to an administration focused on combating climate change. Garbage that isn’t recycled is hauled across the Eastern seaboard to landfills and incinerators, which spew particulate matter as they burn waste.

Bloomberg at the time predicted the new initiative “will help us double our recycling rate by 2017 and reduce the amount of trash sent to landfills.”

But the city’s recycling rate has only inched up since then — from 15.1 percent in 2013 to 17.4 percent in 2017. The “capture rate” that demonstrates how much eligible material actually ends up getting recycled improved over that time.

Meanwhile, de Blasio vowed at a sustainability forum during his 2013 mayoral campaign to make recycling of food and yard waste “a way of life.” A year later, he released an online video showing his family tossing orange rinds and grape pedicels into a countertop bucket in their Brooklyn home.

Over time, however, de Blasio deserted his commitment.

He was troubled by low participation rates, leaving him hesitant to commit to his promised mandate, according to several former city officials familiar with the issue. They also said unions raised concerns over contractual changes to trash collection.

He pledged to expand collection to the entire city by 2018, only to freeze funding. An aide at the time blamed it on a need for “finding efficiencies” and “fine-tuning.”

And when 2018 came and went, the mayor punted to the City Council, which has yet to take up the cause.

“They’re just slow to do everything. And there’s a lack of vision, and boldness and leadership,” Council Member Antonio Reynoso, who chairs the sanitation committee, said in an interview.

City officials and others familiar with the delay said Garcia has consistently advocated for a more expansive program, only to be bested by city budget officials who argue it is too costly. Gonen, who now runs a firm that invests in sustainability ventures, said Garcia and her deputies “aren’t given the resources or the leeway to do what needs to be done.”

Garcia insisted last month that the mayor is supportive, despite evidence to the contrary. “I heard once from another commissioner that he threw a banana peel into a garbage can and was scolded,” she said. “The mayor scolded said commissioner.”

When asked the reason for the holdup, she demurred, saying, “That’s the thing that will not be said.”

The nonpartisan Citizens Budget Commission concluded in 2016 that organics collection would cost the city between $177 million and $251 million each year. That figure, which the study deemed “prohibitive,” took into account an estimated 88,000 new truck shifts the sanitation department would need.

It also identified a supply and demand problem: The commission said facilities in the region that turn the waste into fertilizer could not handle the additional capacity necessary for a comprehensive expansion. The report also identified plans for anaerobic digesters to turn food waste into biogas, but noted many of those had not been built yet.

Ana Champeny, who has studied this issue for the commission, said the city now has contracts with facilities that can handle 250 tons of residential organic trash daily. If 20 percent of all food and yard waste was separated, it would need capacity for 800 tons per day, she said.

Garcia argued there is enough capacity in the region to handle the city’s organic waste, though she has not conducted a recent study on availability for residential trash as she has for commercial institutions, which contract with private garbage haulers.

A former sanitation department official, Bob Lange, said he studied regional capacity for organic waste in 2015 and determined it is sorely lacking. He said Garcia watered down his findings before publishing them. “The commissioner knew what City Hall wanted and she wanted the report to reflect that,” he added.

Garcia dismissed Lange as a “naysayer” and disputed his assertions.

“The good news is there’s a lot of companies super excited about building anaerobic digesters or compost facilities for New York City, but it’s too risky for them to do so if they don’t have a line of sight into when is this going citywide,” Gonen said.

De Blasio on Monday said the organics program has “reached a pretty substantial swath of the city,” and said he believes the city is still on track to meet his “zero waste” goal of reducing trash exports by 90 percent by 2030.

His spokesperson, Laura Feyer, said the organics program is available to 3.5 million residents — far more than those actually taking advantage of it. “We need New Yorkers to join us in this effort and do their part,” she added.

As the residential program falters, restaurants are gearing up for expanded rules about how they handle their food scraps.

The city mandates some of its largest trash producers, such as stadiums and restaurants in large hotels, separate their food scraps, and it proposed a rule that smaller venues follow suit this year.

A sanitation department analysis conducted last year found 15 regional facilities, including McEnroe Organic Farm in Millerton, N.Y. and Quantum Biopower in Connecticut, which could handle up to 185,000 tons of organic waste each year from business establishments.

For Trademark Taste + Grind in Herald Square, the mandate has spurred a new mindset around consumption.

Adrienne Guttieri, the restaurant’s executive chef, said composting allowed her to “see really quickly how much food is wasted,” encouraging her and the staff to devise clever ways to avoid producing the garbage in the first place.

“My first year I created a rose sangria and each batch took 12-and-a-half ounces of lemon juice,” said Mariel Burns, a bartender at the restaurant. Now she simply uses a mixture of citric and malic acids to mimic the sour taste, preserving roughly 200 lemons each week.

“It didn’t change the flavor at all and it looked prettier,” she said. “The lemon juice tended to have sediment that would sit at the bottom of the bottle. With the acid correcting, it’s just clear now.”

The citrus fruits she does juice are then dehydrated and turned into garnish for drinks — a colorful decoration that has the added benefit, she said, of tasting “like fruit roll-ups.”

Guttieri said reducing food waste helps cut costs, but she conceded some dining habits are hard to break.

Patrons didn’t take kindly when the restaurant limited plastic straws and replaced sugar packets with a communal container, she said. “They want a packet of sugar and it’s like, okay, well you don’t understand, if everybody in New York opens a packet of sugar, how many packets of sugar that is."

Composting also comes with growing pains.

On one occasion, the restaurant was fined over a single misplaced onion peel. “It was almost as if this onion peel kind of blew off into his garbage pail … and the sanitation police see this onion peel and they write us a $250 fine,” she recalled. The restaurant successfully contested the fine.

Difficulties aside, environmental advocates say the benefits of recycling organic trash are unmatched.

Eric Goldstein, head of the New York City chapter of the Natural Resources Defense Council, laid much of the blame for the city’s trash troubles at the feet of the stalled effort.

“If there were one knock on our sustainability efforts on the waste front it would be the — I was trying to find some word other than dismal — disappointing progress we’ve made in organics collection, despite the commitment of the sanitation commissioner,” he said.

On Wednesday, POLITICO will evaluate recycling challenges in public housing in our ongoing series, "Wasted Potential."