For Earth Day: A New Effort in Composting

Posted in Uncategorized on April 22 2010, by Plant Talk

You Are Part of the Solution in the Garden’s Cafe Waste Program

Daniel Avery is Sustainability and Climate Change Program Manager at The New York Botanical Garden.

Every day New York City’s households and not-for-profits that receive waste handling services from the City of New York such as The New York Botanical Garden generate about 12,000 tons of garbage and recyclables that must be hauled away by trucks to distant landfills and incinerators. The city’s businesses contribute an additional 10 million tons per year of garbage, recyclables, construction waste, and fill material.

Of the 11,500 tons per day of so-called municipal waste, about 36 percent is recyclable material as designated under the city’s current recycling program. That means that, even if every accepted item was recycled, there would still be almost 7,360 tons of waste a day to get rid of.

As it turns out, recycling is not even the biggest component of the waste stream—organic waste such as grass clippings, food, and the like make up almost 40 percent of the city’s household waste. Much of this organic material is technically compostable, but composting at a large scale in the city has proven difficult due to odors, rodents, and other problems. Nonetheless, converting a larger share of organic waste into compost is both a compelling prospect and a necessity if we want to reduce the financial and environmental costs of shipping garbage vast distances.

For this reason, the Botanical Garden is proud of its composting tradition. We convert all of our plant waste into compost on site, saving the city from transporting 716 tons or 1,432,000 pounds of waste per year and using the compost on our own grounds to help keep our plants healthy and to reduce the need for other inputs such as fertilizer.

We have also been separating the kitchen food waste generated by our cafes for pickup by Action Carting Environmental, which turns it into compost for commercial sale.

And just this month we began collecting the food waste and compostable containers from the cafes’ customers as well. This  requires customers to separate their waste following a four-step process that is explained through simple signage (see photo). They  place their metal utensils in one bin, their recyclables in a second bin, and their non-compostable garbage such as condiment packets and chip bags in a third. The remainder of their waste, which is the bulk of it as all containers and food are compostable, is placed in a compost bin. So, when you visit the cafes, look for the signs, follow the instructions, and let us know if you have any questions.

By composting plant and food waste, the Garden is taking action toward managing organic waste in a more environmentally sound way. For more information on composting at home, contact the NYC Compost Project in the Bronx, a program of the Department of Sanitation’s Bureau of Waste Prevention, Reuse & Recycling hosted at The New York Botanical Garden, at 718.817.8543 or bronxgreenup@nybg.org.