Space to Grow

The Parks Department is evicting a beloved community composting site in June. However, advocates aren’t throwing away their efforts just yet.

By: Emma Kowalczyk

Under the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge on a cool Friday morning, Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” echoes of the tall brick pillars. Nearby, tarp-covered food scrap piles sit high, excited to soon become compost. One by one, people enter through the propped open metal gates, from environmental activists, to City Council members, to nearby residents. Those gathered wait eagerly for the event to start, pacing and singing along. “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?” they turn and repeat to each other though sarcastically knowing smiles.

However, the line that follows seems to stop them in their tracks. To the people gathered here, it isn’t a joke or even a metaphor — the city’s Parks Department is, from their point of view, quite literally paving paradise to put up a parking lot.

In early March, NYC-based zero waste non-profit Big Reuse learned that, after nearly a decade of creating compost at their Queensbridge composting facility, their contract with the city would not be renewed and they will be evicted from the space at the end of June. Instead, the city would be utilizing the space as a parking lot during their renovation of the adjacent Queensbridge Baby Park. “As a group, [our] coalition submitted over 50,000 letters to Parks, the Department of Sanitation, and the mayor asking for funding to be restored,” noted Justin Green, founder of Big Reuse.

This facility and its imminent closure are one of many city-funded entities being impacted by the latest round of budget cuts from City Hall. When the 2025 projected budget cuts left Mayor Eric Adams’ desk in November, it included the elimination of city funding for community composting programs, as well as the cancellation of the “build-out of temporary site for discontinued community composting operation,” or, the relocated facility originally promised to Big Reuse when they had faced eviction.

This comes just after an expansion of the city’s curbside composting program. After being implemented in Queens in October of 2022, the program, which provides a brown bin for residents to separately dispose of food scraps, grew to include Brooklyn in October of last year. Likewise, the city notes that the program will expand once more to include Manhattan, Staten Island, and the Bronx on October 6th of this year.

Green has been working tirelessly to contest these cuts as publicly as possible. After carving out a bit of time from his tight media schedule to hop on a zoom call, he relayed that, due to the budget cuts, they had to lay off seven of their staff by the end of last December. “We were able to cobble together some outside funding to pay three staff to keep on composting to make sure this whole program didn’t die,” Green explained. However, he worries “If we lay off all these expert composters, we lose all the knowledge that we’ve developed over the last decade of composting.”

However, the city seems to feel that their approach is more than adequate. “We have conducted and will continue to conduct extensive outreach in the weeks leading up to the launch of curbside composting in each borough, including visits to Community Boards and civic groups, mailers to residents, and door knocking,” explained DSNY Press Secretary Vincent Gragnani, who was more than happy to discuss the benefits of the curbside program. However, despite the department’s former ties to the community compost program and organizations such as Big Reuse, he declined to comment on the cuts.

According to community composters, the hands-on factor of participating in the current program is incredibly important, especially living in a city, where many lack a direct connection to nature and the environment. Marisa DeDominicis, co-founder of composting non-profit Earth Matter, stresses the importance of restoring the funding and keeping facilities like hers in business. “It’s one of the few places left standing where you can actually experience the magic of seeing your food scraps really turn into something that will nurture the soil that we all require in order for us to be alive,” she emphasizes. “[New Yorkers] don’t understand how important it is and how their actions make a difference — and that’s where we come in.” However, come July 1st, when these cuts are implemented, organizations like hers, as well as GrowNYC and the Lower East Side Ecology Center, will no longer be able to bridge that gap.

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On November 16th of last year, Mayor Eric Adams released the financial plan for fiscal years 2024–2027, also known as the “November Plan.” It outlined a nearly $10 billion in additional costs to the city, a large part of which is being attributed to the current “migrant crisis” happening in the city. Promising not to “stabilize the budget on the backs of New Yorkers,” the plan introduced a “Program to Eliminate the Gap,” which called for a series of five percent reductions in the budgets of all city agencies in the remaining months. For the Department of Sanitation, this meant the immediate elimination of their over three decade-long sponsorship of the community composting program.

Many of these cuts, especially those regarding healthcare and school funding, were rolled back over the next few months. However, when the 2025 balanced budget was released on April 24th of this year, the $111.6 billion plan still did not include community composting.

Many, including city officials, were not happy with this decision. In the New York City Council’s public response to the budget, they stress that “cleanliness and proper sanitation services are crucial to the public health, safety, and equitable quality of life of neighborhoods,” stressing its importance in the growing shadow of climate change. After all, an estimated one-third of all garbage produced in New York City is composed of food scraps.

The community composting program began in 1993 with the creation of the NYC Compost Project in conjunction with the New York City Department of Sanitation (DSNY). In “Noxious New York: The Racial Politics Of Urban Health And Environmental Justice,” author Julie Sze, notes that, in the 1980s and 1990s, in response to a a number of proposals to build or expand environmentally detrimental facilities (predominantly communities of color or low-income areas) a significant number of environmental justice campaigns emerged in New York City. This was one example of how this activism was actually put into action. Though its existence in regards to its relationship with the city has been effectively wiped from the internet in the past few months, this program has been the main form of compost collection in the city over the past 3+ decades. Not only do the organizations involved run sites which process food scraps into compost, they operate food waste dropoff sites, provide education, and even run a compost give back program.

In October of 2013, the City Council passed a law requiring DSNY to “establish a voluntary residential organic waste curbside collection pilot program and a school organic waste collection pilot program.” This was the introduction of the now-infamous brown bins. However, due to budget cuts during the pandemic, curbside pickup was halted and many community drop off points were shut down temporarily. However, on Earth Day of 2021, former Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that curbside composting would be resumed.

In 2023, Mayor Adams announced that the curbside composting program would be expanding to all five boroughs by the end of 2024. Adams’ “effective, cost-effective pilot plan,” first introduced in Queens boasts that, in the first three months, the curbside composting pilot program in Queens diverted over 12.7 million pounds of compostable material from the landfill.

According to Green, when the city began to ramp up curbside composting, Big Reuse was advised to scale back slightly. “We understood sanitation was going to cut the program by half over four years. That’s much different than eliminating 100% of the funding in a month and a half.” He continues, “you can have much more thoughtful, intelligent scaling and figuring out what parts of the program are most important to keep, and what can be most impactful on the city’s sustainability and climate change — or you can just cut everything immediately.”

This was a big blow to community composters, many of whom were initially supportive of the program. “We were the ones that basically got curbside composting to become law. It’s been hard work for 30 years to get the city to where it is now,” David Hurd, director of Zero Waste Programs at GrowNYC, passionately explains.

Grace McCreight, a Masters Student in Public Administration who is writing her thesis on compost logistics and policy in New York City, highlights that the city is ignoring the benefit of both programs working in tandem. “It’s disappointing that we’re not viewing these as complementary goods, maybe we’re capturing people who are more enthused about the program, but then we’re also giving those people the education necessary to go to their building, when it does get a brown bin and help their neighbors through the process and be a champion of that.” In 2018, McCreight participated in and became certified through the DSNY-funded Master Composter Program, a composting education course hosted through the NYC Compost Project, now defunct due to cuts.

“In testimony [Parks Commissioner Sue Donoghue’s] verbatim quote is ‘we stand on the shoulders of the community composters,’ but then in the next sentence she says ‘but we don’t need them anymore because we have curbside and smart bins’…smart bins can’t talk to people, smart bins can’t do street tree care. Smart bins can’t do compost give backs, which we all do. Smart bins can’t explain to the public why they should do this and why it’s an important mitigation action that they can take against climate change,” Hurd explains, pausing every so often, as if the whole situation still baffles him. If these cuts go into effect, not only will his program be completely eliminated, Hurd will also end up unemployed.

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For Big Reuse, these cuts hurt twofold. Not only would they have to lay off staff due to the budget cuts, they also would be losing their entire Queensbridge composting facility.

Big Reuse is a multi-faceted organization who, according to their website, “ fights climate change through community-based zero waste initiatives.” These include street tree care programs, composting outreach initiatives, and a flagship thrift store in Gowanus, Brooklyn, in addition to two large-scale composting sites.

The Queensbridge site, located directly under the Queensboro Bridge, is a little less than a half an acre, a size that makes you wonder how can this small chunk of land be so contested. To the north sits Queensbridge Baby Park, the space who’s renovation will lead to Big Reuse’s eviction, as the Parks Department insists it needs the space for storage and maintenance. Their website shows hypothetical reimaginations of the city’s plans. However, according to Green, these proposals have been largely ignored by Parks Commissioner Sue Donoghue, who has declined to comment on the cuts for this article as well.

Standing in front of one of these massive, tarp-covered piles of decomposing matter during a tour of the Queensbridge facility before the April 19th press conference, Gil Lopez, Compost Application Volunteer and Event Coordinator at Big Reuse, affectionately called the site a “crowned jewel of sustainability.” However, that statement isn’t entirely hyperbole. In 2020, the site won a national award for best small-scale compost manufacturer by the US Composting Council.

A press release regarding the eviction and the April 19th conference highlights that, since its inception, Big Reuse’s Queensbridge site has composted over three million pounds of organic matter. This is equal to 3,000 cubic yards, or, as Councilmember Julie Won for the 26th district in Western Queens (including the neighborhood of Long Island City, where the site is located) described it at the press conference, enough to “cover from my district to Councilman Krishnan’s district.” This “high quality, screened compost” was redistributed to over 150 different parks, schools, gardens, as well as being applied to the soil of 1,200 street trees across the city.

At the press conference, many City Council members expressed their distaste for the cuts, and their unwillingness to cooperate with the mayor. “If we need to start sleeping here, if we need to start camping here to protect it, we will,” Won insisted. During his speech, Shekar Krishnan, Council Member for the 25th District, punchily stated “my message to Parks…is: figure this out!”

This isn’t the first time the city has tried to push Big Reuse out for this same reason. The Parks Department originally planned to evict them back in 2020, but they ultimately ended up extending their licensing agreement. However, while they were originally promised relocation if this were to occur, the November budget cuts specifically canceled the creation of that alternate space. “It’s crazy that they’re so worried about the budget and the mayor and DSNY that they are trashing the value of the infrastructure that has been built there,” noted Caren Tedesco Cardoso, co-founder of composting non-profit Astoria Pug, who has long partnered with Big Reuse. If this site is shut down, Big Reuse’s “decade old critical community composting program” will effectively end.

Big Reuse is just one of many facilities who are effectively being replaced by curbside composting. However, some community composting groups, such as the Lower East Side Ecology Center, as well as environmental advocates, doubt that the city’s program will be able to hold a candle to their method. “I think the curbside program, or rather the participation of people in this program, really hinges on educating people about [it] and compelling people to participate, and that is something that we know how to do and we have delivered that momentum to even get to this point,” notes Christine Datz-Romero, co-founder and executive director of the Lower East Side Ecology Center.

“It’s an ongoing challenge,” she continues. “Just look at the recycling rates for our “traditional” things like metal glass, plastic, and newspaper. New Yorkers still don’t understand what to do and how to participate. Whenever I go downstairs in my building, I spend an extra 15 minutes just sorting what I see is not wrong in my bins. People mix up paper with bottles, they put Styrofoam in there, they put plastic bags in there, and I’m like oh my god!” According to DeDominicis at Earth Matter, when it comes to composting, most people have no idea where to start. “The infrastructure that’s required has to develop over time with support from a lot of people.”

To many, it’s the lack of sufficient supplementary education on what can be composted which will be the downfall of the program. “…You’re no longer going to have good quality compost. A lot of that material, if not all of it is going to start going to the digester. So, New York City is no longer going to be composting, we’ll eradicate that word and remove it from our dictionaries altogether,” Lou Reyes, co-founder of composting non-profit Astoria Pug, explained. “It feels very much like it’s by design, that inadequate outreach,” Caren Tedesco Cardoso, the other co-founder of composting non-profit Astoria Pug, added.

Additionally, to add to the confusion, the curbside program, while calling itself a compost program, does not always turn its scraps into compost. Many of the collected scraps are being taken to the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment in Greenpoint, where they are mixed with sewage to produce something called “bioslurry,” which is fed into large “digester eggs” that help to produce and capture methane.

This methane is then supposed to be fed into the National Grid, which is part of an interconnected utility system which provides a large portion of the population with gas and electricity. However, in practice, this hasn’t always been the case. “The interconnection has been really problematic and hasn’t worked well, so they haven’t even been able to feed a lot of that methane into the grid. They end up regularly burning it off in Greenpoint,” Green explained. “The work there is problematic because, personally, I do think we should be reducing fossil fuel infrastructure from a planning perspective, not building more.”

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The impact of these cuts is hard to predict. Between the flares from the treatment facility and the elimination of compost redistribution, the lack of research into the impacts that these changes will have on the city’s parks, communities, and surrounding neighborhoods is concerning to many. In the midst of rising sea levels due to climate change, many question why take power away from environmental groups?

“I think it’s a big mistake to not see community composting as part of the overall solution to waste in New York City,” notes Molly Kerker, the director of education programs at the Perfect Earth Project. “There are so many ways in which the compost that’s been produced from community composting is then fed back into the community in all these ways that have had widespread impacts on stormwater and flooding and the ability of our urban forests to sequester carbon…In the face of climate change, it has all these huge effects.”

While some groups (such as GrowNYC’s Zero Waste Program) are being forced to shut their doors entirely, others have been able to subsist temporarily through an amalgamation of corporate sponsorships, private donations, and other revenue streams. “We’re going into our stores and our reserves,” notes DeDominicis. “If July 1st happens, there’ll be layoffs. But we’re keeping that hope alive, we’re keeping that flame burning because we just hope that they get it.”

As activists, many members of these organizations refuse to give up. “Our gang doesn’t know how to stop,” DeDominicis explains. “I was like, we are going to run out of money, and they’re like, ‘okay, well, when that time comes, we’ll shut our doors. Until that time, we’re going to continue business as usual without the funding, because we believe in what we do.’ It’s not a good business model, Earth Matter, but that’s why we’re a grassroots organization. We’re do-gooders, we started as volunteers.”

Many hope, or even assume, that funding will eventually be restored in another round of rollbacks. “We’re hoping that the Department of Sanitation doesn’t continue to push back on something which should be their foundation. We’re the strongest, you guys are just using all the strength that we generated for you,” DeDominicis notes.

However, as of May 7th (which, ironically, falls in the middle of composting awareness week), this has yet to come to fruition. As we slowly creep towards that July 1st deadline, the future of community composting is becoming more bleak.

In the meantime, Big Reuse is still trying to raise awareness, and hopefully prevent their eviction before the June 30th deadline, the same day on which the 2025 fiscal budget will be voted on. “We had two or three huge rallies at City Hall, one rally at the mayor’s office — that showed how much people care. They were big rallies. It just was a big outpouring of support,” Green noted.

Broadly, community composters are still going as strong as ever. “Recycling and composting are not luxury items that should just be caught each time the budget gets tight,” explains Datz-Romero. “There’s also a question of what our values are and what we feel is important in this city. That’s why I think we just need to press on and get the program back into the budget.”