Chef George Duran produces a lot of food waste. Recently, however, collecting them from the city has not only brought confusion – but also challenges.
Duran’s large kitchen—where he does all of his recipe development—is set up for composting. It was built with four bins – for general waste, paper, plastic/metal/glass and rubbish.
“I hate food waste going into the trash or landfills,” said Duran, who owns a three-family coffee shop in Harlem, where he lives with his wife and two children. “But composting has been a hassle.”
Since Manhattan’s mandatory composting began in early October, the Sanitation Department has skipped its weekly compost pickup several times, he said — though it has been more consistent recently. A tree eats up most of his sidewalk, and it was difficult to figure out exactly where to put his trash can, which can’t be picked up until 6 p.m.
When he chained his bin to his front gate – worried it would be stolen – sewer workers told him he was in the wrong place.
Then, even with his address inscribed on it, the bin was eventually stolen. He witnessed the theft on his security camera. “I saw the guy take out an 80-pound bag of trash, throw it in front of my house and flip the bin over,” Duran told The Post.
A few days later, he saw his bin in a nearby building, so he grabbed it. And he hid an AirTag inside so he can track it if it’s stolen again.
As the city rolls out its composting program, confusion is rife.
In their space-starved apartments, residents complain that they don’t have a good place to store their growing food scraps. Some have almost no refrigerator space, so they can’t easily follow the Department of Sanitation’s suggestion to refrigerate leftovers, thereby preventing the smell of rotting food—not to mention the risk of bugs—from seeping through. through their homes.
Small buildings must have a designated area with clearly labeled bins, but not all are in compliance — and that area may already be filled with other trash and recycling bins, as required by the city as it moves forward with the program. of containerization to reduce rats.
Some residents complain that they take an extra step up to the bin in the basement. Others have to wait for a molasses-slow elevator because the basement is not accessible by stairs.
“People will say to take out the compost and throw it away once a day, but that’s easier said than done,” said Ashley Pelton, who grew up in Maine with a pile of trash and now lives in a walk-up. on the fifth floor on the Upper East Side. Her building’s trash can is kept in the basement.
“For New York, we have a good kitchen,” she said. However, the small freezer compartment doesn’t have room to hold a bag of food scraps. “Even with a garbage can, you’re only looking for fruit flies,” she said.
Pelton didn’t want to spend hundreds of dollars on a desktop composter, but managed to get a Vitamix FoodCycler PC-50 on sale for $150. It consumes 1 cubic meter of space. She keeps him in a small room that doubles as an office and music room, and also keeps the cat’s litter box.
Dominick Romeo, the super activist in Chelsea who plans to run for City Council, advocates regular garbage pickup six days a week, with three days for recycling and garbage.
So far, his building’s compost has been missed on several occasions, either by accident or on purpose, he told The Post. “So I have to bring all that disgusting liquid material back into my building. It rots and turns into liquid and attracts more rodents.”
Brown trash cans are small compared to regular trash cans. Compost is heavy, “so superstars fill their compost bin maybe 30% of the way and tie it up and store it somewhere, which attracts rats,” Romeo said. If the bin is too full and therefore too heavy, “DSNY has the right to say it’s not taking it.”
Some residents throw cat litter, both bagged and unbagged, into the trash.
“It’s a hard conversation to have,” Romeo said. “You don’t want to embarrass the building by mentioning it, so I’ve been going to the individual cat owners to find the culprit and they won’t admit it.”
Although Romeo is a proponent of composting, “it’s about distribution, and that’s where the City Council, Mayor Adams and DSNY fail every time,” he said. “They don’t include those of us who have to deal with it.”
Some residents have trouble figuring out how to turn off the cisterns, said executives at FirstService Residential, one of the city’s major management companies.
The company has utilized the Department of Sanitation’s educational efforts, which include published materials and informational seminars.
A 16-story apartment building in affluent Gramercy began with a trash can in the basement. “In four days, it was full and people were really interested,” said Stephanie Cardello, FirstService’s vice president of compliance. The building added another brown bin, but “after mandatory composting started, they required a bin in every compactor room. So now there are 16 bins, and we had to make sure the staff had time to empty those bins.”
A common question is whether people should remove the glue from their banana. The answer is no. Sorting machines take care of that, Sanitation Department spokesman Joshua Goodman said.
Similarly, residents do not have to use a separate composting bag to dispose of in the bin. “We’ve acquired a specific new technology — a machine that can filter plastic bags from us,” Goodman told The Post. People can also throw their compost, without any bags, directly into the bin.
As for the greasy pizza box, the department offers two options: a clean box can be put in the paper recycling, and a dry box — “food-soiled paper” — can be put in the trash, though the assembly its may require cutting or folding, and even then it may block the bin.
People shouldn’t overthink the program, Goodman said. “We want to make it easier,” he told The Post.
The Department of Sanitation distributes free kitchen containers at periodic events – one per customer, on a first-come, first-served basis.
Compost is not the new garbage, Goodman said. “These are things you would have thrown in the trash. If this program didn’t exist, every pound would go to landfill.”
Manhattan is currently in a “warning period,” before composting rules begin to be enforced in the spring. “Local Law 85 says DSNY has the authority to write tickets, and we intend to do that,” Goodman said. “There will be a way to report to 311 anonymously. We are now working on the correct protocols.”
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