The Fight to Keep Community Composting Alive & Thriving in NYC

Nando Rodriguez from Brotherhood Sister Sol is leading a campaign to bring 1,000 composting sites to every borough. Here’s why he’s doing it.

Meet Nando Rodriguez, a devoted supporter of community gardens and head of the environmental program at Brotherhood Sister Sol (BroSis). A Harlem-based non-profit focused on empowering Black and Latinx youth, BroSis proved last fall that they’re also serious about environmental justice when they started backing the 1K Composting Systems campaign.

Dreamed up by Rodriguez, the campaign aims to bring 1,000 sites for processing compost to every borough. Composting is the act of recycling organic material like food scraps and reusing it as fertilizer for soil and plants. 

The practice of recycling waste can help the city on its ambitious quest to send zero waste to landfills by 2030. Carbon dioxide released from food waste that is dumped in landfills represents 20 percent of New York City’s overall greenhouse gas emissions, making it the third largest contributor behind buildings (35 percent) and transportation (21 percent).

So why not make composting a part of daily life in every borough?

Environmental activists have been asking themselves that question since the 1990s, when small-scale composting first took off in New York City, Rodriguez says. Community-run groups which have been at the heart of driving the Big Apple’s composting movement forward.

But unfortunately, these community composting groups rely mostly on government funding that hasn’t always been available. Last November, Mayor Eric Adams’ administration cut funding for the city’s community composting programs, propelling small-scale composters to rally for the cause. 

At the time, the city was grappling with insufficient funding, an issue that Adams claimed was due in part to the rising costs of providing shelter to a new influx of migrants entering the city. After he directed all agencies to cut 5 percent of their budgets to save costs, the Department of Sanitation (DSNY) made the decision to take away funds for community composting. 

The administration has instead focused on rolling out curbside composting to all five boroughs—in which households can dispose of food scraps in brown bins set out for DSNY pickup—and through neighborhood “smart bins.” But much of the organic waste collected this ways ends up being used for fuel instead of composting.

But thanks to efforts spearheaded by City Councilmember Shaun Abreu, community composters secured over $6.2 million in the last city budget from a pot of money administered by the Council. 

BroSis and other groups like GrowNYC will have enough funding to keep composting until June, when the current fiscal year ends. So far, BroSis has secured 12 composting sites for its 1K Composting Systems campaign and is building 25 more in the next six months.

To allow New Yorkers to see the positive results that community composting can yield, BroSis partnered with the City University of New York (CUNY) to generate data on their progress. Together they will create an interactive map that shows where the composting sites are located, how many community members they have engaged or employed and how much organic waste is being diverted from landfills thanks to the initiative.

Rodriguez spoke to City Limits about the project and why keeping composting within the community can help neighborhoods thrive.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Why does community composting matter?

We pay for trucks to come in and take away food from restaurants. And we pay for landfills in different states because we don’t have enough of them [in New York].

So when I think about all of the different things we pay for to divert waste and it’s still not enough to get rid of all the food waste from New York City, it gets me thinking: we can’t just rely on this system. It has to be more. 

Composting can help divert that food [waste] away from landfills, it can create green jobs. So when you talk about the value of gardens, you need to talk about the value of them in our communities.

So where does the community aspect come into all this?

It is important to do community composting because it gives back the power to the community to continue to support environmental justice and environmental resilience. So when you have food waste being put into the smart bins and the brown bins that the city takes away, they’re taking it out of our community. We have nothing. We can’t do anything with that. 

But if you have community composting, where community members are dropping off their food waste to a community garden, then [members of the community] are processing the food waste. They’re creating resources for our environment and the community has the power to be like: okay, this tree needs fertilizer, let me use some of the compost we created.

Instead of waiting for an agency or the city to help the environment, it gives the power back to the community to do that task.

When something is needed, and we don’t have the resources to fix it, we leave it to the city to do it. So what happens then? The city gets complaints. That generates a negative community reaction. But if we have the resources to do something for ourselves, then there’s a positive community reaction.

So having local community compost, to me, is empowering our community.

What is BroSis’s 1K Composting Systems NYC campaign?

The campaign is to bring 1,000 composting systems to every borough in New York City.

The idea of this is that if there’s 1,000 composting systems in every borough, most likely people can go two or three blocks and find a location in their community where they’re processing food waste. 

It’s not creating drop off sites because the issue with the drop off sites is that it takes the [waste] out of that community, and leaves the responsibility with [government] agencies. This project, this campaign, is about keeping those resources in the community to allow the community to utilize these resources so it can benefit their environment.

So basically it would create sites within the community for processing the waste. It’s 1,000 processing sites in every borough, which will make 5,000 processing sites. 

The first immediate goal is to create resources in those communities to make them more resilient. That means it will help their trees have more fertilizer, it will keep green spaces thriving so they can soak up more water when a storm hits. It will allow people to grow food. And it will take food waste away from landfills.

Is the goal doable?

It’s super doable. There are a lot of organizations and a lot of community gardens spread throughout the city. So the location part of this is easy. The locations are definitely our community gardens, our churches, our schools. You know, grassroots organizations that have the space already. And composting can even be done on rooftops, you can do composting on concrete. You can do composting on grass or dirt. So it’s possible to add [these composting sites]. You don’t really need a lot for it. 

Now, funding wise, instead of spending millions of dollars to have trucks take our garbage to another state, all of that money could be diverted to creating community compost sites. 

And what that would create is jobs. Many people are talking about how there aren’t enough jobs in the city, why not have environmental jobs? Community composting would give you opportunities to have jobs, all these organizations, schools, churches, should be getting funding from foundations and support from city agencies to create jobs.

And so how close are you to achieving that goal? And do you have enough funding as of now?

Definitely don’t have enough funding, and we just started. So last year, I was able to install about 12 to 13 composting sites. So it’s moving at a slow pace, but that’s okay. Right now, with the budget that [the City Council] was able to find to save our compost for the year we were able to get some funding to use to build 25 more sites in this coming six months. We’re also going for grants.

And we’re choosing for these 25 processing sites to not only be in one location, but to be spread out in all five boroughs. It’s almost like we’re spreading the word. We want to spread this campaign through these systems, having them out there with labels about the campaign, we hope that it could encourage more people to ask about it, to think about joining it, and to ask their local councilman or their local organization for funding or maybe corporate groups that they know to be a part of the campaign. That way we can build more in those communities.

To reach the reporter behind this story, contact Mariana@citylimits.org. To reach the editor, contact Jeanmarie@citylimits.org

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