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Brace Yourselves For Composting, Williamsburg
By
Nell Casey
Published Jun 2, 2015
Modified Jun 2, 2015
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Scott Lynch/Gothamist
By
Nell Casey
Published Jun 2, 2015
Modified Jun 2, 2015
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The city's burgeoning composting program is set to expand beyond its pilot locations in Brooklyn and Queens with the little brown buckets set to pop up on curbs in Greenpoint, North Williamsburg and three neighborhoods in the Bronx (Riverdale, North Riverdale and Fieldston). The areas will add 33,000 more households to the 100,000 already hoarding their banana peels for conversion into nutrient-rich soil, reports the Wall Street Journal. Though already successful in diverting food waste, it's still a drop in the landfill of the megatons of trash produced daily in the city.
As more neighborhoods join the program, the dilemma of what to do with all of the egg shells and pork bones becomes a larger one. Late last year it was revealed that the scraps being sent out of state were too much to handle for the Delaware composting company that was supposed to process them. The plant was forced to shut down due to fires and "standing pools of leachate, the cloudy, smelly, liquid that often trails garbage trucks." Blech. The city now diverts the compost to a multitude of smaller facilities in Connecticut, Staten Island, the McEnroe Organic Farm and other local facilities.
Even with the increased number of outlets, there are still non-compostable items slipping through, and it'll only be more difficult once the program grows. To expand the program to every city resident would require finding facilities to process one million tons of food detritus annually, according to environmental group Global Green. Still, if you can compost, you probably should—it's easy!—until such a time as we can be insufferably low-impact by ourselves.
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Nell Casey
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