Forest Hills City Council Candidate Wants Mandatory Composting

FOREST HILLS, QUEENS — Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Thursday that New York City's municipal composting program will return this October, but a City Council candidate running to represent Rego Park, Forest Hills, Kew Gardens and Richmond Hill wants the program to be mandatory.

Aleda Gagarin, who has been endorsed by local organizations and Queens politicians on the basis of her environmental policy proposals, talked to Patch about an Earth Day-themed op-ed in the Forest Hills Post on Thursday demanding that the city's curbside composting program — which the Mayor announced would be reinstated this October with enrollment in August — expands to become mandatory.

"It's a step in the right direction to have the opt-in composting come back, but when it's opt-in we're not going to collect enough waste for the amount of money invested in it," Gagarin told Patch, pointing to a stat in her op-ed that the city's voluntary program only diverted 4 percent of organic waste from landfills, but that San Francisco, which mandated composting in 2009, now diverts 80 percent of their waste from landfills — rerouting that same percentage of organic matter from NYC's waste stream would be akin to the environmental impact of removing 400,000 cars from the road, she said.

Gagarin also told Patch that she wants New Yorkers to think about composting as an act on behalf of our "eight million person New York City community" since it has economic and social benefits, too.

Sending less waste to landfills saves money in the long run, she argues, and removes waste from working class communities of color, which already process a disproportionate amount of the city’s trash, she said.

Gagarin's op-ed comes as the Mayor announced that voluntary municipal composting, which was suspended as a cost-saving measure amid the pandemic, will be reinstated in the upcoming months.

In an Earth Day segment of his daily press briefing, during which Mayor de Blasio had a conversation with a brown composting bin, he described the city's opt-in approach to curbside composting as "the right way to restart the organics effort and composting effort."

New York City's Department of Sanitation Commissioner Ed Grayson — who questioned on the press briefing whether he could be "as dynamic" as the inanimate composting bin — also said that the opt-in model for curbside composting is "the right way to get back into the curbside program."

Sanitation Commissioner Grayson also announced that the DSNY will set up smart bins throughout the city, which people can unlock with an app and use to dispose of organic materials, resume curbside composting at nearly 1,000 schools next fall, and double the amount of community composting sites around the city.

But for Gagarin these options fall short, especially in a community like Forest Hills where community composting sites are limited — right now the Compost Collective is the only location in Forest Hills that supports community composting.

"Community sites are great, but when you only have a set time a couple of times a week it makes composting less available to community members, she told Patch, adding that a citywide mandatory municipal composting program is "the best return on investment, both environmentally, financially, and socially."