New Compost Collection Program Attracts Locals, Not Flies

At 11 a.m. last Saturday morning, four large, clear recycling bags sat conspicuously on the mall at Cadman Plaza, exhibiting a colorful assortment of bright fruit rinds, leftover baguettes, coffee grounds and other gastronomic odds and ends.   

This new pop-up compost center of sorts at our neighborhood’s Saturday Greenmarket is attracting a steady stream of intrigued passersby. Some hurried shoppers seem propelled out of sheer curiosity – as if against their will – to the cute orange tent sitting square in the middle of the plaza.

They ask questions. "Do you take compost? Awesome!" They grab informational pamphlets and promise to be back next week. Others, despite the recent inception of this "Sustainability Center," casually stop by and unload a week’s worth of kitchen scraps from assorted receptacles into a giant clear plastic bag as if they’ve been doing it for years.

One man emptied four plastic containers of food scraps.

"My wife is the brainchild behind our composting," he said. 

The orange tent is part of an expanded pilot project administered by the environmental non-profit GrowNYC and funded through City Council Speaker Christine Quinn's office.  Greenmarket, a subdivision of GrowNYC, is implementing the initiative.

According to GrowNYC’s website, food makes up 17 percent of our total waste stream. Compostable food scraps can be diverted from landfills and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as well as cut the cost to taxpayers for overall waste collection. Moreover, finished compost becomes a useful nutrient-rich organic fertilizer for urban farms and gardens, parks, street trees and houseplants.   

The GrowNYC pilot features seven new drop-off sites, including the Fort Greene and Borough Hall Greenmarkets.

Christine Hey, a teacher from Portland, ME, stopped by to express her support.

"What an awesome idea! We aren't doing this in Portland," she said. "I'm going to take this back to my Permaculture Club!"

The four-month pilot, which began March 5 and runs through June 25, invites New Yorkers to bring their food scraps to select Greenmarkets. Locals can bring their fruit, vegetable and other non-greasy food scraps (for a full list of accepted materials visit GrowNYC.org/compost), which are then collected by truck and re-distributed for processing, either to local community garden groups or a regional compost facility, where they are transformed into an odorless, super fertile soil amendment.

The Lower East Side Ecology Center -- collecting household compostables at the Union Square Greenmarket since 1994, the Ft. Greene Compost Project -- collecting since 2004 at the Ft. Greene Greenmarket and the Western Queens Compost Initiative are partnering with GrowNYC to help process and distribute finished compost to local sites such as the Added Value Farm in Red Hook. What cannot be processed by these local groups is trucked two hours away to the Peninsula Compost Company in Wilmington, Delaware.

Peter Tzannes, one of GrowNYC's compost coordinators has been manning the Cadman Plaza tent for the past four weeks. He says he's seen a steady increase in drop-offs, from one bag filled on the first Saturday, to four bags (160 pounds) the second week and eight bags (300 pounds) the third week. 

According to Greenmarket Publicity Coordinator Jeanne Hodesh, a total of 10,000 pounds of food scraps were collected over the past three Saturdays from all seven sites combined.

"Our short term is goal is to make people aware they have this option – while limited – for their food scraps," said Hodesh. "We'd like to grow the program to expand to as many of our operating Greenmarkets as we can."

For many New Yorkers who lack the backyard space to set up a composting bin, or are uninterested in keeping an indoor worm-bin composting system (also known as “vermiculture”), this new pilot project may be just the ticket. Of course, many Greenmarket shoppers are already food-wise, aware of the environmental impact of industrial farming and eager to find ways to lighten their carbon footprint.

"[Composting] goes hand in hand with agriculture," said Tzannes. "There's really no small scale farm without compost. We've become so distanced from our food that it has led to anxiety. So we're reaching back and rediscovering food -- this is part of that." 

The idea interests many.

"When I saw the word 'compost' at the tent, I just had to stop and take a peek," said Diane Giammarino-Tedaldi, 49. 

Giammarino-Tedali is an avid backyard composter and maintains a compost bin in her mother's backyard in Borough Park.

"We use old coffee containers. I think that it is just a matter of awareness and changing habits," she said. "It really is not any work at all once you get the hang of it and it is so rewarding to see your pile shrink down to a few inches of beautiful, rich soil!"

GrowNYC's pilot program is not the first of its kind; an "Intensize Zone Pilot" for curbside compost collection was tested by the Department of Sanitation in 1991 accross a 22,000 household section of Brooklyn's Community District 6. This included parts of Carroll Gardens and Gowanus, as well as Park Slope.

Composting often arouses fear among novices that it will be messy or smelly. 

"My husband was reluctant to do it fearing that wild animals would start visiting our property [and] that it would smell and attract bugs," said Giammarino-Tedali. "On the other hand, his father used to compost in Brooklyn when he was a child and he said how he remembered their soil being so black and beautiful! My mother was afraid of bugs, odors, animals also. Now she's hooked."

Tzannes explains that many children seem less wary of compost compared to their parents. 

"Hopefully people's perspectives will change," he mused. "Kids walk by, and they say, 'Oh look -- compost!'"

Though most locals seem extremely supportive of the project, GrowNYC has come under some fire for the outsourcing of compost processing to Delaware. Hodesh says it is difficult to locate a reputable composting facility closer than two hours away -- whether that is upstate or elsewhere in the region.

"If we had a more proximate option, we would be using it," she said.

Composting is certainly catching on. Fall leaf curbside collection and "Compost Givebacks," in which New Yorkers could pick up free finished compost at select locations citywide, was suspended in 2009, but will be reinstated in 2012, according to the NYCWasteless website.

The continuation of the project will depend on its success and the amount of individual contributions made -- at each "Sustainability Center" there is a donation jar.

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New Yorkers interested in composting in their own backyards should visit NYCWasteless to learn how they can purchase compost bins at reduced cost throughout the city. Information on about the history of NYC’s municipal composting programs, including the 1991 Intensive Zone Pilot, can also be found at that site.