Tuesday, September 08, 2015

Organic Waste Collection To Start In Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, Gowanus, And Red Hook This Fall

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If you, like me, have faithfully saved your food scraps and brought them to the Carroll Gardens Greenmarket for composting every Sunday morning for the past few years, you will be very excited by this news.
Being 'green' will be a lot easier starting this fall, when the NYC Department of Sanitation is expanding its organic collection into our neighborhood.  This means that we will all soon have a brown collection bin in front of our house, which will be emptied by Sanitation twice a week.

From a recent announcement by Community Board 6:
This Fall, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, Columbia Waterfront, Gowanus, Red Hook and North Park Slope will start to receive a twice weekly organic waste sanitation collection which includes food scraps, food-soiled paper, and leaf and yard waste. Central and South Park Slope began receiving this service since Spring 2014.

How will it work?
Starting October 1st, the Department of Sanitation will deliver brown organics collection bins and starter kits to all single family homes and residential buildings up to nine units.

Participating is easy:
Collect food scraps and food-soiled paper in your kitchen.
Place food scraps into your brown organics bin.
Set out brown organics bin for DSNY collection on your normal trash schedule. Set out extra yard waste next to the brown bin in lawn and leaf bags or unlined containers.
Why participate?
Collecting food scraps and yard waste helps us limit greenhouse gas emissions, achieve zero waste goals, make compost, a valuable soil amendment for gardening and agriculture, and generally contribute to a cleaner, greener City.

We hope that everyone will take full advantage of this expanded service. Interested in how the existing program is going? Sanitation put out a series of three reports on their organics collections program which you may find interesting.

Sanitation representatives will be presenting their expansion plans to our Environmental Protection Committee at their next upcoming meeting on Monday, September 28th if you'd like to learn more about this. Check our calendar for committee meeting details. You can also visit nyc.gov/organics.

According to the NYC Department of Sanitation, Organic waste accounts for about 31% of all waste generated by residents in New York City. Let us hope that the program will soon be available city-wide.


4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Katia, we just received our bin today, but do you know if pick up of waste in Carroll Gardens is once a week (recycling day) or twice a week? From the 311 website, it seems parts of Brooklyn have once a week pick up, parts have twice a week, but Carroll Gardens isn't yet listed on the website. Thought you might have info if you received your bins earlier in the month.
Thank you.

Katia said...

Hi there,
My understanding is that the compost bin should be placed out on the same days as garbage pick up, so if you have twice weekly pick-up, Sanitation will also pick up compost.

Anonymous said...

I've been told by a highly reliable source that after all is said and done, the compost ends up mixed with the standard trash at the dump site anyway...

Anonymous said...

Thanks Katia! (OP 12:30)