New Yorkers can now get fined for not separating their food scraps. Some critics say that's not the right approach.

Property owners and landlords in New York City can now be fined $25 or more if residents are found throwing a banana peel in the trash. As of April 1, all New Yorkers must separate organic waste from the rest of their trash, similar to how metal, glass, paper, and plastic is set aside for recycling.

This is how the city is encouraging participation in its curbside composting program, where food waste is collected weekly by the sanitation department, same as the trash and recycling.

Getting New Yorkers onboard with composting will take time — and effort. When it comes to diverting food waste from landfills by composting it instead, New York lags far behind other large U.S. cities. The city recovered less than 5 percent of eligible households’ organic waste in the 2024 fiscal year. The fines announced this month are designed to boost compliance; in the first week of April, the New York City Department of Sanitation, or DSNY, issued nearly 2,000 tickets for allegedly failing to separate organics.

https://archive.ph/iLpO5

    • BrightFadedDog@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      3·
      2 months ago

      As in thought they were talking about composting people? Yes. Yes I did.

      They are doing that in some places, but is generally something you have to fight to be allowed to do rather than compulsory.

  • ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    2·
    2 months ago

    I’m not sure how this is going to work, except for single-family homes. Apartment buildings with hundreds of units are common, and some of the residents inevitably won’t compost. It’s relatively inconvenient in a large building where residents didn’t have to go outside to throw anything out before. (A lot more inconvenient than recycling, which is usually placed into a bin by the compactor chute.) Is the city just going to fine each building $25 every time an inspector checks? That would be like a new tax, but a low one by NYC standards. Or is the fine going to be larger? Then it would still be a tax, just a higher one, because individual tenants have almost no financial incentive to avoid triggering it.