Manhattan Dead Last In Curbside Composting Pickup Program

NEW YORK CITY — Manhattan composting gets a Bronx cheer from Mayor Adams.

One of the densest islands in America will be the last to benefit from a citywide rollout of curbside composting, according to an announcement Wednesday afternoon.

Sanitation commissioner Jessica Tisch also gave a precise date when the brown residential composting bins will finally arrive to the curbs of Manhattan's packed streets: Oct. 7, 2024.

"By 2024, New York City residents will have access to clean convenient curbside compost pickup from the Department of Sanitation," Mayor Eric Adams said at an announcement Wednesday, resulting in "the largest composting program on the planet."

"It is a win for New Yorkers and it's a win for all of us. The only one that loses are those rats," the mayor added.

The citywide composting rollout — a much discussed goal for over two decades and promised by multiple mayors — was announced on the heels of a successful three-month pilot across all of Queens which saw over 13 million pounds of organic waste, like food scraps, diverted from the main trash stream — and off of rats' dinner menus.

Tisch said their office was impressed at how Queens participated in composting at a higher rate than neighborhoods that already had access to curbside composting pickups, like Park Slope.

"In the borough wide program we started last October, eighth districts in Queens each diverted more material than Park Slope," Tisch said, adding that Jamaica and St. Albans composted more organic material than the entire existing curbside composting program.

Messaging about the array of benefits that focused "less about methane and more about giving rats hunger pain," Tisch said, also contributed to the program's success.

"We knew that New Yorkers wanted to do the right thing, and that if we just made it easy, they would," Tisch said.

The year-round curbside composting pickup will restart in Queens this spring. Brooklyn will begin to see curbside composting pickup this fall, followed by the Bronx and Staten Island in spring 2024.

So why the delay for Manhattan? While the city currently has the capacity to process the compost, it still needs to increase transfer capacity to get the stinky stuff to its final destination, according to the sanitation department.

Plus, the density of Manhattan means the department needs to stock up on additional trucks.

To tide over the residents of New York County, Tisch announced that the borough will be getting 150 smart composting bins, which, in addition to the 50 or so already installed uptown, would give Manhattan nearly half of all of the bins citywide.

The locations of the bins has not be set yet, but the department says residents can expect to see the orange bins pop up sometime this summer.