Rats to the rescue: could pesky rodents finally get New Yorkers composting?
At an August rally on the steps of New York’s city hall, rats were in the crosshairs. “No to rats”, read one poster. “Starve a rat”, read another. On a third, a pink rodent in a crown lounged on a throne of black garbage bags.
The demonstration wasn’t a generalized expression of anti-rat fervor. It was a gathering of sustainable waste activists. They had a proposition: composting could solve an escalating rodent problem that’s spreading across the city. “Our streets and sidewalks will be cleaner”, said New York City council member Carlina Rivera, “They’ll smell better and they’ll provide less food for rats, which is a public health crisis right now.”
Rats have long been a scourge of New York City, but the pandemic made them public nuisance number one. A rise in outdoor dining and delivery, paired with reduced waste services, created unusually favorable conditions for them. “The rat population has exploded,” says Ushma Pandya Mehta, a zero waste activist and co-founder of Think Zero, a waste management consultancy. The total number of rat complaints since the pandemic began is close to 45,000. Some months, the city receives 60% more calls about rodents than it did before 2020.
In response, New York City has declared a crusade against the rodents, unleashing an arsenal of anti-rat policies. It has expanded the availability of rat-proof waste containers, and established new rules limiting how early trash can hit the curb before pickup – reducing the amount of time rats have to tear into the ubiquitous black plastic trash bags.
Now, the city’s rat problem could hasten a revolutionary change in waste management that advocates and city council members have been attempting to push through for years. Organic waste advocates are wielding the power of New Yorkers’ rat revulsion to advance a cluster of bills, known as the Zero Waste Legislative Package, that would expand composting services throughout the five boroughs.
“It’s going to create the most tangible, actionable path towards achieving a very significant benchmark,” says Sandy Nurse, one of the three council members behind the suite of bills: “Capture a third of the waste stream and divert it from landfills or incineration.”
Almost 40% of the city’s waste is organic – theoretically compostable. City compost advocates say that putting those materials, including food waste, into rat-proof compost bins would keep methane-producing waste from both landfills and the paws of rats.
In addition to creating drop-off sites for organics across the city and compelling the sanitation department to send zero waste to landfills by 2030, the bills would establish curbside compost pickup citywide – an addition to existing services for general waste and recycling. If passed, Nurse says the package would create “the largest, most robust organics diversion sets of operations in the country.”
Simultaneously, the New York City department of sanitation (DSNY) revived enforcement of pre-pandemic rules around commercial composting. It’s also preparing to launch a boroughwide composting pilot program for Queens that will begin this October.“Rat mitigation is one factor we consider in every policy decision,” the DSNY press secretary, Vincent Gragnani, wrote in an email.
The bills would fulfil long-held ambitions for zero waste advocates. “In the activist network I think we always have dreamed about getting there,” says Christine Datz-Romero, executive director of the Lower East Side Ecology Center. Several of the bills are reintroductions. Rat-proof bins were introduced years ago. And environmentalists say that composting has long been promoted as an anti-rat measure.
Yet it was only after Nurse was appointed as the chair of the council’s committee on sanitation and solid waste management this year, amid the rodent population explosion, that the anti-rat strategy took center stage. Her conversations with colleagues revealed the extent of the rat problem, as well as the opportunity it provided.
Nurse claims that the package currently has enough support to override the mayor if he opposes it. But without participation from the public, such an ambitious plan could fall flat. “With recycling, if it’s done right, you get a valuable product,” says Oliver Wright, chair of the Brooklyn Solid Waste Advisory
Board (Swab).
That product can be used to offset the costs of waste collection, in the form of saved landfill dumping costs. In 2021, the city’s independent budget office estimated that recycling 35% of organics would make processing prices comparable to how much it costs to process general waste. Large investments in composting infrastructure, on display in cities like San Francisco, could even drop costs below that of trash pickup.
Here’s the rub: a large share of residents would need to participate in composting for what’s collected for the program to pay for itself. Otherwise, it becomes a budgetary burden, rather than a cost-saving measure.
Former attempts, however, do not inspire confidence. Pandemic-related budget cuts suspended many of the city’s existing composting operations, including an opt-in system that covered much of the city. Gragnani concedes that even before the cuts participation rates were less than ideal. In 2018, less than 2% of New York City’s waste was composted.
But the DSNY has tweaked the approach. Unlike pre-pandemic efforts, the city is automatically servicing an entire swath of the city, rather than implementing a sign-up process. All Queens residents who wish to opt in simply need to leave a marked compost bin on the street, and the city is also distributing brown rat-resistant capsules for free. According to Gragnani, rats also make an appearance in the marketing strategy.
“It’s a great opportunity to interest people in sanitation issues who wouldn’t ordinarily be interested,” says Wright, the Brooklyn Swab chair. “People who don’t give a shit about recycling frankly give a shit about rats on their streets.”