NYC turning up its nose at food-scrap

NEW YORK — New Yorkers are so far turning up their noses at the city’s ambitious organics collection program, which has stalled because not enough people are participating in the chore of separating out table scraps, spoiled meat, rotted vegetables and cut grass.

Mayor Bill de Blasio introduced his pilot program five years ago, hoping hundreds of thousands of tons of the city’s leftovers and yard waste would be churning their way through the system by now to be turned into compost, gas or electricity.

But expansion has been put on hold because not enough people are pitching in to make it cost-effective. The city collected only about 13,000 tons from residents last year and found that the 3.5 million people in the voluntary program are only separating 10.6 percent of their potential scraps.

“Honestly, I think it’s a complete waste of time,” said Anselmo Ariza, who maintains the trash and recycling bins for several blocks of apartment buildings in Brooklyn. “Some people use them, but most of them just put trash and plastic bags in there.”

Marzena Golonka complained that the city’s oncea-week pickup at her apartment building in Brooklyn is not frequent enough to keep the odors and rats away.

“It’s vile,” she said. “Until sanitation starts doing their job effectively, I’m not going to have a brown bin.”

De Blasio’s goal of sending zero waste to landfills by 2030 depends on residents and businesses separating their organic waste, which makes up a third of the trash that ends up in landfills and is a major producer of greenhouse gases.

But when not enough people use the service, the city’s trucks devoted to such waste are not filled, increasing the costs per ton. And without a steady stream of scraps, the expensive infrastructure that needs to be built to process the waste into compost, gas, or electricity is not worth it.

The city is still committed to expanding the program to all 8.5 million New York City residents at some point but right now is focused on making the system more efficient, Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia said last week.