People like Vivian Lin, who quit her job at an architecture firm to start a composting business, have helped fill the void after the city suspended curbside organic waste collection.
By Amelia Nierenberg, The New York Times
In the months since New York City scrapped the bulk of its voluntary composting program, Vivian Lin has reoriented her life.
In May, when budget cuts caused by the coronavirus pandemic led to the suspension of the program, Ms. Lin created a private composting service almost overnight. Her idea was simple: For a small fee, New Yorkers could give her their kitchen scraps and yard waste to recycle. Additionally, for a few extra dollars she would provide them with produce from local farmers.
The first few weeks of the program were hectic, as she filled friends’ cars with pungent buckets of rotting food. Eventually, she swapped the cars for U-Haul vans, but still could barely keep up with demand. Two months in, Ms. Lin, 25, quit her job at an architecture firm to pursue the project, called Groundcycle, full time.
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Offering fresh produce is a way to get people interested in recycling organic matter, she said on a recent Sunday, the smell of compost wafting through the vans.
New York’s organics collection was once hailed as a triumph in a city looking to declare itself a climate leader. Just days before the coronavirus shuttered the city, the Council speaker, Corey Johnson, had proposed a mandatory expansion of the brown bin program, even as several critics raised concerns about the cost.
But in a post-outbreak effort to shore up the already-wheezing budget, the city’s Department of Sanitation weathered a $106 million cut, $24.5 million of which funded organics recycling. After pressure from climate advocates, officials provided the department with $2.86 million to reinstate some composting services. But residential pickup and collection at some GrowNYC farmers’ markets will likely remain paused until at least next summer.
“It’s purely a budgetary consideration,” said Bridget Anderson, the Sanitation Department’s deputy commissioner for recycling and sustainability. “Sanitation’s budget has been restricted to the core, core services of what we provide.”
A small army of community-based composters have stepped up to fill the void. In Astoria, Queens, and Greenpoint, Brooklyn, for example, residents are volunteering time at homespun drop-off sites.
Some small-scale collectors, known as “microhaulers,” like Ms. Lin, take compost to Fred Wolf, an educator and ecological designer. Each Sunday, he parks his pickup truck outside of Nature Based, his nursery and design company in Brooklyn’s Gowanus neighborhood. Then on Mondays, he spends the day driving upstate and back, to deliver the compost to McEnroe Organic Farm.
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