Riverside Park Opens Composting Site At 96th Street: Photos

UPPER WEST SIDE, NY — Riverside Park opened its first composting site on Tuesday. The Conservancy launched the composting program in partnership with the Lower East Side Ecology Center, to be housed at 96th Street near the West Side Highway.

Now, instead of carting off horticultural waste to landfills, the Conservancy will keep it in the park, "turning it into nourishing, healthy compost that will be returned to the environment."

“This initiative will help us to significantly reduce the waste coming out of the Park, and to move us toward becoming a ‘closed-looped’ operation,” said Dan Garodnick, President & CEO of Riverside Park Conservancy, in a news release. "Our own Conservancy gardeners brought this initiative to life, and we expect it to have a huge impact."

While the public won't be able to use the composting site at first, the park will eventually set up a process that allows parkgoers and locals to dump their compost at the Riverside Park site.

For those who might not know what composting is, it's a natural process of decomposition, in which organisms break down material until nutrient-rich soil remains. It significantly reduces organic waste.

The Riverside Park composting site is for horticultural waste only, not food waste.