New York City’s Composting Delusion

After forcing New Yorkers to spend billions of dollars for the privilege of sorting their garbage into recycling bins, municipal officials have found an even costlier—and grubbier—way for residents to spend their time in the kitchen. They must now separate food waste into compost bins or face new fines imposed by the city’s garbage police, who will be digging through trash looking for verboten coffee grounds and onion peels.

Composting is the most nonsensical form of municipal recycling: it delivers little, if any, environmental benefit at the highest cost. In addition to wasting people’s time, it attracts rats to compost facilities, puts more fuel-burning trucks on the road, and diverts tax dollars from what was once a core priority of the Department of Sanitation—keeping the streets clean. Whatever its appeal to suburbanites with yards and gardens, composting is absurdly impractical in a city—especially one facing a massive budget deficit.           

Where are New York apartment dwellers supposed to find space in their tiny kitchens for yet another waste bin? It’s bad enough that elderly residents must schlep their newspapers and bottles to basement recycling bins instead of simply using the trash chute—now they’re expected to haul bags of rotting food, too. (New Yorkers have long been denied another convenient option, garbage disposals, because the city’s onerous plumbing regulations have prevented most buildings from installing them in kitchen sinks.) Under the new rules, landlords are on the hook: fines of up to $300 will be imposed if their buildings don’t comply with composting requirements. But how are they and the superintendents of large buildings supposed to enforce the law? Unlike the city’s inspectors, they never signed up to be trash detectives, much less dumpster divers.

Over three decades of chronicling the folly of recycling, I’ve described it as the sacramental ritual of a well-intentioned but misguided religious movement. That’s no longer an adequate explanation. Moral fervor may account for why some New Yorkers are willing to store their leftovers in a smelly bin for a week, but it doesn’t explain why a city too broke to maintain basic services would splurge on a policy so pointless and irritating to voters. The composting mandate makes political sense only when you consider the motivations of the industries and progressive activists who lobbied for it: money and power.        

Recycling has always been a solution in search of a problem. When New York launched its curbside recycling program in the 1990s, it was justified by the media-driven “garbage crisis”—we were supposedly running out of landfill space—and by warnings of imminent depletion of the planet’s natural resources. As metals and other resources became scarce, the thinking went, commodity prices would soar, making it profitable to recover the “gold in garbage.” City officials confidently predicted that the new curbside program would lower the cost of waste disposal.

The opposite happened. Recycling brought not only much higher costs but also dirtier streets: budgetary pressures led the Department of Sanitation to slash the number of street cleaners from 1,500 to 600. Collecting and processing recyclables has remained far more expensive than sending trash to landfills—which, contrary to earlier fears, still have plenty of space—because demand for recyclables is so low that the city often has to pay to get rid of them. In a 2020 report for the Manhattan Institute, Howard Husock estimated that eliminating the recycling program would save the city $340 million annually—more than half the entire budget of the Parks Department.

As expensive as recycling is, it’s a bargain compared with composting. The Sanitation Department told me that it has no way to compare current costs—why expect bureaucrats to know the price of their own decrees?—but the city’s Independent Budget Office reported in 2021 that collecting and processing a ton of organic waste costs more than three times as much as handling a ton of recyclables. Even under the most optimistic (and unrealistic) assumptions about future efficiency, the report concluded, “the value of the city’s organic waste will likely never offset the cost of processing or collecting organics.”

Now that the original rationales for recycling have fallen away, environmentalists defend it as a means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This rationale is dubious, both because there are far more cost-effective ways to cut emissions and because it relies on the Environmental Protection Agency’s overly generous estimates of the energy saved by using recycled materials. Those estimates don’t account for additional energy use in the recycling process—like the extra car trips made in rural areas to drop off recyclables, the hot water people use to rinse bottles, or the freezers some buildings have installed to store reeking food waste until weekly collection.

But even if you accept the greenhouse gas justification and the EPA’s numbers, composting still doesn’t add up. According to the EPA, nearly all the energy savings come from recycling just a few materials—primarily metals, cardboard, and paper. Recycling plastic saves so little energy that you’d need to recycle 40,000 plastic bottles just to offset the carbon emissions of one round-trip coach flight between New York and London. If you (like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) prefer to fly first class, it would take 100,000 bottles—and if you rinse them in hot water, the net result would probably generate more greenhouse emissions than sending them to a landfill. Even Greenpeace now concedes that plastic recycling is futile. Yet the greenhouse gas savings from composting food waste are even smaller than for plastic—and the benefits from composting yard waste are smaller still.

Meantime, composting facilities come with their own environmental problems—like the rats and defecating sea gulls that led residents in Delaware to shut down a site processing organic waste from New York City. In an effort to reduce the volume of exported waste, the city has begun sending some of it to a waste-to-energy facility in Brooklyn that produces natural gas. But this is an extremely costly way to generate a minuscule amount of energy. If you’re determined to turn waste into energy, landfills already do it more cheaply by capturing methane from all decomposing materials (not just food scraps) and converting it to natural gas.

So why bother with compost bins? Why waste tax dollars to irritate voters while doing little or nothing for the environment? Because it benefits progressive politicians seeking endorsements and campaign contributions from the special interests pushing an agenda called Zero Waste. In 2015, Mayor Bill de Blasio embraced this agenda, pledging that New York City would stop sending any trash to landfills by 2030—thereby helping to “save the earth.” It was a ridiculously unrealistic goal (the city still sends about 3 million tons to landfills annually, roughly the same as in 2015), but chasing it creates jobs and profits for professional activists, lobbyists, environmental groups, green-energy firms, and the waste-management industry.

The recycling religion has matured into a lucrative arm of the environmental-industrial complex, sustained by vast corporate welfare. The federal Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 was budgeted to allot nearly $400 billion for green projects—including recycling—but independent analysts calculate that in the next decade it will actually cost taxpayers at least double that amount, and possibly as much as $2 trillion. Federal, state, and local governments support the recycling industry not only through tax dollars and credits but also by mandating that businesses, government agencies, utilities, and consumers use recycled materials and other green-approved commodities. The waste-to-energy facility in Brooklyn, for example, benefits from direct subsidies and from selling the environmental equivalent of indulgences: credits that utilities buy to comply with the state’s renewable energy mandates. These mandates are part of the reason New Yorkers pay some of the highest prices in the country for electricity and natural gas.

But it’s not just about the money. The composting mandate also appeals to progressive politicians and activists because it satisfies the same impulse we saw so vividly in blue states during the pandemic. As H. L. Mencken put it, “The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.” Forcing people to use compost bins makes no more sense than padlocking  playgrounds or requiring masks outdoors during Covid—decrees that devout progressives eagerly enforced. For them, petty tyranny is a feature, not a bug. Never underestimate the satisfaction some people take in bossing everyone else around.

Photo by THOMAS URBAIN/AFP via Getty Images