To get more New Yorkers to compost, the city plans to allow residents to put their yard waste on the curb in clear plastic bags — a move that some environmental advocates say undermines the spirit of the program.
The change comes as the Sanitation Department moves ahead with a requirement for everyone in the city to separate their leaves and twigs from the rest of their trash. Previously, paper bags and bins were the only permitted receptacles for yard waste.
During a public hearing on the new rule last week, Christine Datz-Romero of the LES Ecology Center urged officials to only allow compost to be put out in paper bags or bins “to avoid the negative impacts of plastic production and pollution, which I think we should try to do in any small way we can.”
Rhonda Keyser of the Brooklyn Solid Waste Advisory Board urged the city to reduce or eliminate plastic bag usage in the program as soon as possible.
“We believe that the use of plastic bags should be phased out through outreach and education to minimize environmental and health impacts,” Keyser said, adding that “organics diversion collection and processing must be executed in a way that maximizes participation and minimizes environmental and health impacts.”
Sanitation Department spokesperson Vincent Gragnani said the move to allow plastic bags for yard waste is intended to make the composting program “as easy as possible for residents to participate in.”
“While food waste must be in a sealed bin to keep rats out, if residents are disposing only of yard waste, they are free to put it in bags, just as many of them already do,” he said in a statement Monday, adding the yard waste approach is modeled after other major cities like San Francisco and Toronto.
The city’s mandatory composting requirement is already in effect in Queens. Officials plan to roll out the requirement in Brooklyn later this year, and the remaining boroughs next year. The plastic bag policy will go into effect immediately, according to the Sanitation Department.
Eric Goldstein of the Natural Resources Defense Council said plastic bags also slow down the composting process because they have to be separated out from the organic matter and the flimsy material can snarl machinery.
But he acknowledged the scale of the city’s mandatory composting program requires the Sanitation Department to make some compromises.
“The department’s approach is making it as simple as possible …to get people into the habit of separating their yard waste for collection,” Goldstein said. “That makes sense as an initial approach to jumpstart participation in the program.”
“But once New Yorkers get into the habit of placing their yard waste out year-round in separate containers or separate receptacles, the department should come back and suggest paper bags.”
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