Olga Ginzburg for NY Post
Chef George Duran produces lots of food scraps. Recently, though, having them collected by the city has not only brought confusion — but also challenges.
Duran’s huge kitchen — where he does all of his recipe development — is set up for composting. It was built with four bins — for regular trash, paper, plastic/metal/glass and compost.
“I hate food waste going into the trash or landfill,” said Duran, who owns a three-family brownstone in Harlem, where he lives with his wife and two children. “But composting has been a hassle.”
Since mandatory Manhattan composting started in early October, the Sanitation Department has skipped his weekly compost pickup several times, he said — though it has been more consistent recently. A tree consumes much of his sidewalk, and it was tough to figure out where exactly to place his compost bin, which can’t go out for collection until 6 p.m.
When he chained his bin to his front gate — worried it would be stolen — sanitation workers told him it was in the wrong spot.
Then, even with his address carved on it, the bin was ultimately stolen. He witnessed the theft on his security camera. “I saw the guy pull out an 80-pound bag of compost, drop it in front of my house and roll the bin away,” Duran told The Post.
Several days later, he saw his bin at a nearby building, so he snatched it back. And he hid an AirTag inside, so he can track it down should it be stolen again.
(A compost bin can be chained to a front gate, according to the Sanitation Department — as long as it is then released to the curb for collection.)
As the city rolls out its compost program, confusion is widespread.
In their space-starved apartments, residents complain they have no good place to store their mounting food scraps. Some have almost no freezer space, so they can’t easily follow the Sanitation Department’s suggestion to keep the scraps in the freezer, thereby preventing rotting-food odors — not to mention the risk of insects — permeating throughout their homes.
Small buildings must have a designated spot with clearly labeled bins, but not all are in compliance — and that area may already be crammed with other trash and recycling bins, as required by the city as it proceeds with its rat-reducing containerization program.
Some residents complain of taking an extra flight of stairs down to the bin in the basement. Others must wait for a slow-as-molasses elevator because the basement isn’t accessible via stairs.
“People will say to take the compost out and dump it once a day, but that is easier said than done,” said Ashley Pelton, who grew up in Maine with a compost heap and who now lives in a fifth-floor walkup on the Upper East Side. Her building’s compost bin is kept in the basement.
“For New York, we have a good kitchen,” she said. Still, the tiny freezer compartment has no space to hold a bag of food scraps. “Even having a compost bucket, you are just asking for fruit flies,” she said.
Pelton didn’t want to spend hundreds of dollars on a countertop composting machine, but managed to nab a Vitamix FoodCycler PC-50 on sale for $150. It consumes 1 cubic foot of space. She keeps it in a small room that functions as an office and music room, and also holds the cat’s litter box.
Dominick Romeo, the activist super in Chelsea who plans to run for City Council, advocates for regular trash pickup six days a week, with three days for recycling and compost.
So far, his building’s compost hasn’t been picked up on several occasions, whether accidentally or on purpose, he told The Post. “So I have to bring all that disgusting liquifying material back into my building. It rots and turns to juice and attracts more rodents.”
The brown compost bins are small compared with regular trash bins. Compost is heavy, “so supers fill up 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 they’re not picking it up.”
Some residents throw cat waste, both bagged and unbagged, in the compost bin.
“It’s an awkward conversation to have,” Romeo said. “You don’t want to embarrass the building by mentioning it, so I’ve been going to individual cat owners to try to find the culprit, and they are not going to admit to that.”
Though Romeo is a proponent of composting, “it’s all about the rollout, and that’s where the City Council, Mayor Adams and DSNY fail every time,” he said. “They do not include those of us who have to deal with this.”
Some residents have trouble figuring out how to latch the bins, said executives at FirstService Residential, one of the city’s large management companies.
The company has availed itself of the Sanitation Department’s education efforts, which include published materials and informational seminars.
One 16-floor condo building in affluent Gramercy started with one compost bin in the basement. “In four days, it was full, and people were really into it,” said Stephanie Cardello, FirstService’s vice president of compliance. The building added another brown bin, but “once mandatory composting kicked in, they asked for 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.”
One common question is whether people must peel the sticker off their banana. The answer is no. The sorting machines take care of that, said a Sanitation Department spokesman, Joshua Goodman.
Similarly, residents need not use a special compostable bag to drop in the bin. “We purchased specific new technology — a machine that can filter out plastic bags on our end,” Goodman told The Post. People can also dump their compost, without any bag, directly into the bin.
As for that greasy pizza box, the department gives two options: a cleanish box can go in with paper recycling, and a gooey box — “food-soiled paper” — can go in the compost bin, though fitting it might require cutting or folding, and even then it can clog the bin.
People should not overthink the program, Goodman said. “We want to make it easy,” he told The Post.
The Sanitation Department distributes free kitchen containers at periodic events — one to a customer, on a first-come, first-served basis.
“Compost is not new waste,” Goodman said. “This is stuff you would have put in the trash. If this program didn’t exist, every single pound would go to landfill. A huge number of people are using this program thanks to the creative way it was designed — for ease of use.”
Manhattan is currently in a “warning period,” before enforcement of compost rules, with fines, begins April 1. “Local Law 85 says that DSNY has the authority to write tickets, and we intend to do so,” Goodman said. “There will be a way to report to 311 anonymously. We are working on the exact protocols now.” In February, he said, DSNY will begin issuing warnings for “failure to separate.”