ICYMI: You Can Now Get Your Compostable Waste Picked Up From Your Manhattan Apartment Building

WILLIAMSBURG, NY — A million more New Yorkers will soon be able to take their food scraps straight to their curbs with the expansion of the city's curbside pick-up for compostable waste.

The city's sanitation department announced that the city's curb-to-compost pick-up service would more than double in size, expanding to service more than 2 million New Yorkers in 2017. Currently, curbside pick-up is available to nearly one million residents.

Neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx will automatically be able to participate in the organics pick-up rollout, and large apartment buildings in Manhattan can elect to enroll in the program.

Here's map of neighborhoods that currently have curbside pick-up, and which neighborhoods will be getting them in the future:

You can see this map, and the expansion plan, in greater detail here.

The good news for compost-happy Manhattan residents is that although no neighborhoods will be automatically enrolled in the pick-up service, your building can enroll for pick-up this year. If your building has 10 or more units, you can start the enrollment process by requesting an inspection for your building here, but city officials say they're also working with individual building to create individualized plans for expanding the curbside collection. Small residential buildings in Manhattan that house between one and nine units are not part of the current expansion, but the city's sanitation department says that residents of smaller buildings can compost their waste at at drop-off point throughout the city.

The city's composting program, NYC Organics, has been faulted by some people who say that the cost of the program is too great to justify what can be negligible or minimal environmental gains. The Citizens Budget Commission criticized the city's expansion of the program in a report on Thursday, faulting NYC's municipal waste and compost pick-up as costly and with negative environmental impacts.

This post has been updated.

All images courtesy of the NYC Department of Sanitation.