New Yorkers are uncertain about what to do with their organic waste as the number of curbside composting sites across the five boroughs dwindles.
The nonprofit group GrowNYC closed its Fort Greene Farmers’ Market community composting sites on Saturday, leaving residents wondering what to do without the service, which operated for years at Fort Greene Park between Myrtle and Willoughby Avenues.
The Fort Greene site was one of many locations GrowNYC closed over the last several weeks after Mayor Eric Adams eliminated city funding for community composting programs in budget cuts announced last year. The city announced $3 million in cuts to the composting program in November of last year, but reversed some of those cuts in January.
Although the city is rolling out a universal curbside collection program, that service is still only available in Brooklyn and Queens. Advocates for community composting argue that their programs are already established in their communities and help educate New Yorkers about how composting works.
An anonymous donor in December gave GrowNYC an undisclosed amount of money, which allowed the nonprofit to continue community composting operations through the winter and spring. The group announced on its website that services at most of its composting locations would close by May 20, and said it would lay off more than 60 employees from its compost program as a result.
Without community-based locations like Fort Greene’s, many dedicated composters expressed concern about how they would deal with trash like food scraps.
“When we moved into our apartment, we got the impression that it was just being put into the regular trash by our building maintenance person, so there was a lack of trust that it was ending up in the right place,” said Fort Greene resident Gwen Arriega.
She decided to start dropping her compost off at the park in 2020, and has been doing it every Saturday since.
Misha Avrekh, another Fort Greene resident who has composted for about 5 years, said the GrowNYC site was the neighborhood’s only easily accessible composting dropoff. Without anything local, he said he will start taking his waste to the Union Square Farmers Market, which has a community compost site run by the Lower East Side Ecology Center.
But he acknowledged that not all his neighbors have the same privilege.
“It’s probably not convenient for everyone to go to Union Square or wherever this is still available,” he said.
Union Square will run its composting site on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m. The Lower East Side Ecology Center will also operate at Tompkins Square Park on Sundays from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m.
Nathalie Huang is a compost coordinator with GrowNYC who worked at locations across Brooklyn. On her last day collecting compost in the community, she said residents were in shock.
“Many of my participants, they live in apartments where the building doesn’t participate in the curbside program, and there’s all these barriers keeping them from doing it,” she said.
Though Huang, Arriega and Avrekh all expressed concerns about curbside composting’s availability in apartment buildings, all residences in Brooklyn and Queens must separate their organic waste from other garbage, according to New York City law.
But until spring 2025, the city Department of Sanitation can only issue warnings to buildings that fail to comply with the law.
In a statement, sanitation department spokesperson Joshua Goodman said that in the meantime, “Residents who want to compost but feel their large building is not making it easy… should remind the property owner: this helps the environment, it fights rats, it’s easy, and it’s the law.”