News and observation on the American food system.
Community composters are popular (and found) all over the city.
By Doug Bierend
July 15, 2024
On an unusually sunny day in March, on a networked lawn in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood, Dan Gross and Shaq Benn moved piles of wood chips and watered shoulder-deep rows of compost. Located beneath expanded exercise tracks, Know Waste Lands is home to BK Rot, a nonprofit organization that transports compost.
Its quarter-acre lot houses sheds for traditional tools and water pumps, solar panels for charging phones and e-bikes, and a motorized filter designed by Gross. While the two men were working, a small number of citizens stopped at the front to leave kitchen scraps; not garbage, but “black gold”. Thanks to careful management, even on this pleasant day, the steaming piles of rotting vegetables did not emit an unpleasant smell. “I really like the smell,” Gross said during a break from work.
BK Rot is part of a diverse ecology of networked composting organizations throughout New York City. For decades, thanks to the important New York City Compost Project, network composters have taken a small but significant portion of the approximately 4,000 tons of biowaste that New Yorkers generate each day and turned it into a valuable resource.
Food scraps and garden scraps, instead of being sent “out of sight” to landfills, where they emit significant greenhouse gases, are turned into fabrics that house local gardens, the city’s population of trees that buffer the heat and remediate infected soils. At the same time, local citizens are knowledgeable and empowered to manage their own waste, the shipping and processing of food scraps leads to less pollution, and network links are strengthened.
Community composting is a valuable component in many New York neighborhoods. But its long term is uncertain. In November of last year, under the leadership of Mayor Eric Adams and the new commissioner of his Department of Sanitation, Jessica Tisch, New York’s composting allocation was completely removed from the city’s budget. So did a contract with the nonprofit GrowNYC, which operated dozens of food delivery locations across the city, processing millions of pounds of leftovers each year.
The cuts have decimated networked composting operations, costing dozens of jobs, closing many processing sites and cutting educational programs. All of this is to save about $7 million, or just 0. 006% of the city’s budget, or “less than a rounding error,” Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine said at a recent rally outside City Hall. NY.
After a massive pressure campaign by activists, city council members and other elected officials, investment recovered in late June. With this vote, the budget for network composting is the responsibility of the New York City Council, not the city’s sanitation. department.
“I hope it’s less negotiable every budget season,” says Anna Sacks, legislative chair of the Manhattan Solid Waste Advisory Board and co-founder of New York’s SaveOurCompost coalition. “There is so much more we can do, and we will end up having to concentrate our efforts on preserving what exists, rather than imagining a broader future. “
The New York Department of Sanitation began supporting networked composting in the early 1990s. It introduced the New York City Compost Project, building and supporting composting operations at four of the city’s botanical gardens, as well as service satellites in parks and gardens of the network. The task also supported the beloved Master Composter program, now discontinued, to which many New York network composters hint their roots.
As network composting has evolved, the city has also developed its own curbside recycling programs, which rely on contractors for off-site transportation and processing. The city generates its own compost at a large, recently expanded facility on Staten Island; Composters in the network point out that inconsistent sorting of incoming waste produces lower quality compost. In 2016, the City of Newtown Creek’s anaerobic biogas digester began accepting food scraps. Developed in partnership with the power company National Grid, the gigantic “digester eggs” obtain a combination of biological waste streams and add wastewater.
Instead of creating compost, the procedure produces methane that is burned for energy (and profit), as well as biological sludge that is deposited in landfills. In addition to construction land, critics say, the formula reinforces infrastructure’s reliance on fossil fuels. , a potent greenhouse gas, has just been released into the atmosphere.
Biogas and centralized collection of biological waste are the other side of the network compost coin. They constitute what Guy Schaffer of Composting Utopia: Experimental Infrastructures for Organics Recycling in New York City calls “neoliberal waste management. ”
“There is a downward trend in many places where other people are looking to solve waste problems by creating new markets for waste,” said Schaffer, who is also a member of the BK Rot board of directors. According to his analysis, these market “solutions” tend to perpetuate social inequalities. “We can imagine giving value to waste so that other people have to pay for it, but this creates a situation in which waste ends up being collected by the most marginalized people. »
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BK Rot is a rather exclusive example among the city’s network of composters. While it’s funded largely through grants, adding a number of new additions to New York’s restored Compost Project, it works like a business: For a fee, the nonprofit collects biological waste from apartments and small businesses, hiring local Black people and young brunettes who send the device on shipping motorcycles to be placed in rows. The resulting compost can be purchased directly on-site or from local food co-ops, where it is sold in fancy colored bags reminiscent of branded coffee bags.
“We can create a formula that can create green jobs for young people, that can serve as an option to eliminate fossil fuel waste and even redefine what waste is. “
The upshot of BK Rot paints is that, in addition to creating a valuable resource and reducing landfills (they claim to have diverted 1. 5 million pounds of biowaste to date), it offers opportunities for paints within a network where Gentrification has created those opportunities. increasingly scarce. Meanwhile, less leftover food fills garbage bags on street corners to attract rats, or fills trucks and landfills operating near marginalized neighborhoods.
“Bushwick is a desirable focal point for thinking about waste inequities and intersectional inequities in their relationship to environmental justice,” said Nora Tjossem, co-director of BK Rot. “[BK Rot] is literally a reaction to say, ‘Well, what if we could believe in another formula?’What if we could solve all of those disorders at once, or at least many of them?Array Array We can create a formula that can actually create green jobs for young people, that can serve as a fossil-free option to waste, and even redefine what waste is.
Each example of netpaintings compost takes a different approach, responding to local situations and needs. This is what Schaffer calls experimental infrastructures, opportunities for the prestige quo established within them. To address the inequality of sources of income in the neighborhood where it operates, BK Rot adopts a painting-centric vision, prioritizing the engagement and employment of local youth. Other composters would likely rely more on volunteer paints and try to take advantage of the price of the curtains themselves, using marketplaces to foster other relationships between communities and waste.
“These interventions are not idealistic escapes from reality,” Schaffer writes in Composting Utopia. “They’re remaking the systems they live in. Community composters looking to figure out whether or not net compost will work as a solution to New York City’s waste problems, are construction worlds in which net compost works and invites other people to prevent and grab a fork. Training”
Despite the investment challenges, networked composters continue the city’s various efforts to divert biowaste. In April 2023, Mayor Adams unveiled an initiative called PlaNYC: Getting Sustainability Done. Among his promises were expanding tree canopies, sidewalk rain gardens and green jobs, as well as reducing emissions. All of those goals are aided through networked composting, making recent struggles over investment and access to land especially vexing to networked composters, who see their efforts as complementary, while noting that the city has enough budget for projects like a quarter of a billion dollars. Police education center.
The city’s recovery of the New York City Compost Project in June means that compost netpaintings can continue to thrive; the form it will take is indeterminate. Several smaller operations will benefit from the restoration of funding. “GrowNYC no longer operates food waste drop-off sites at Green Market,” Sacks said. “This gave us cash that we can reallocate to other teams. As a coalition, we have long sought to not only fund composting teams from established netpaintings across the city, but also to fund new teams that make wonderful paints.
“Community composters looking to figure out whether or not netted paint compost will work as a solution to New York City’s waste problems, are construction worlds in which netted paint compost works and invites other people to prevent and take up a pitchfork.
But those discounts have had lasting consequences. The nonprofit Big Reuse lost access to its Brooklyn Salt Lot site in January following a rezoning. Since 2011, it has operated a composting facility under the 59th Street Bridge in Queens, composting more than 3 million pounds of leaves and wood chips from the Parks Department. Last year, 700 cubic meters of compost were generated in another 154 parks, schools, networked gardens and various ecological projects. Cuts to the Community Compost Project also forced Big Reuse to reduce staff and coincided with the loss of access to its Queensbridge site. The city’s parks section said it needed the site to build a parking lot, even though it owned an empty lot next to it.
All of this highlights the very important role of the territory and the positive link with the municipality when it comes to allowing network composting. The Queensbridge site closed despite overwhelming public outcry, expressed through representatives, petitions, letters and public testimony at hearings, press meetings and rallies. “It’s literally heaven to have a parking lot,” said Eric Goldstein, an attorney with the National Resources Defense Council who works to protect net composting. Other composting operations in the network have been at least partially interrupted, including the Lower East Side Ecological Center, Earth Matter and the 4 botanical gardens.
Still, many city leaders see the advantages of network composting. Twenty-nine of the 51 city council members and 4 of the five borough presidents signed letters to the mayor and the New York City Department of Sanitation Decomponent supporting the payback for networked composters this summer. More than 49,000 New Yorkers have also signed an equally difficult petition, as part of an effort organized through the SaveOurCompost coalition.
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In addition to the city’s growing curbside pickup program, networked composters will once again have the means to expand experimental infrastructure while filling gaps in the city’s waste treatment. With the right support, the diverse network of networked composting operations can offer a significant option and complement to carbon-intensive centralized systems, which lately in New York capture only about 5% of the biological matter in the waste stream. The hope among networked composters is that the price of what they do now will be transparent to the city and the public, and that New Yorkers will treat food scraps not as waste but as an opportunity for city living.
“I hope that all this drama gives the public a greater understanding of what composting is and what is needed as a land movement,” said Gil López, a composting network activist and council member. Queen’s Solid Waste Advisory Board. “I think what the mayor and [the sanitation department] need to accomplish is to make waste invisible. This allows [and] requires that the public not think about it once they leave the house. Community composting humanizes “waste” and transforms it into a local resource and a tool to develop ecological knowledge, civic engagement, physical activity, and a local duty to reduce our own effects on environmental injustice.
This article was updated to include main points about the Staten Island composting facility in New York City and to reflect the fact that Dan Gross designed the sieve used through BK Rot.
Doug Bierend is an independent publisher founded in the Hudson Valley. He is the author of In Search of Mycotopia: Citizen Science, Mushroom Fanatics, and the Untapped Potential of Fungi. Read more >
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