Community composting: Fighting city greenwashing, one scrap at a time
NYC budget cuts are a blow to the planet — and to a cornerstone of the Astoria community.
In the spring of 2020, Lou Reyes hauled a collection of food scraps — brown banana peels, crushed eggshells, and grainy coffee grounds — from his apartment to a community compost dropoff site in Astoria, just like he did every week. But before he could dump the blend of organic mush into the green plastic bin, he noticed a new sign: Compost dropoff had been suspended due to the pandemic. He stood there, unsure of what to do next.
“I was like, I’m not gonna put this in the garbage,” Reyes said. “I’m gonna figure out a way to compost it.”
While Reyes and his partner, Caren Tedesco Cardoso, tried to wrap their heads around the suspension in compost pickup services, their apartment slowly became a storage unit for bins of food waste. “We started hoarding food scraps,” Reyes said, “by putting them in our fridge, in the freezer, in the planters, in our fire escape.”
Reyes and Cardoso frantically searched online to see where they could get rid of their food scraps without having to give them up to a landfill, where the organic matter would slowly release harmful, potent methane gas into the atmosphere, instead of being recycled into nutrient-rich soil. The duo realized they probably weren’t alone.
“If we were having that environmental anxiety,” Reyes said, “[I was] sure that other people were going through the same anxiety.”
So in 2020, Reyes and his partner began collecting compost from Astoria residents on their own. For an entire summer, aided by a team of volunteers, they helped transport food scraps to local sites where they’d be composted. To get the word out to their neighborhood, they took over the Instagram of their beloved dog, Rocky (@astoriapug). Their operation kept community composting in Astoria afloat until the city began supporting composting initiatives again that September.
For years now, community composting groups throughout all five boroughs have helped divert food waste from landfills, all while fostering passionate community engagement. But three years after Reyes dropped everything to save composting in Astoria, composting across New York City is once again at risk. The culprit this time? Budget cuts from the Eric Adams administration.
Turning waste into wonder
Composting is a process where organic matter, such as food waste or yard scraps, is broken down and turned into nutrient-rich soil — compost — that can be used to grow plants. This process is fantastic for the environment because it diverts organic waste from landfills, where decomposing organic matter releases greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, and instead stores those gasses in the ground.
The New York City Compost Project (NYCCP), a city government–organized network of community organizations, had long been behind the effort to recycle organic waste into valuable compost by organizing dropoff sites and processing waste. After food scraps were collected from neighborhood bins and dropoff sites (including the ones in Astoria), members of NYCCP throughout the city — which included environmental groups Big Reuse, Grow NYC, LES Ecology Center, Earth Matter, and the city botanical gardens — composted the scraps into nutrient-rich soil for use in community or home gardens. These groups processed about 4,000 tons of waste into compost yearly.
But now, that entire system has been disrupted because of Mayor Eric Adams’s budget cuts, which slashed funding for libraries, parks, and community composting at the start of 2024. The cuts eliminated all FY 2025 funding for NYCCP, which as a result began shutting down its community composting initiatives in December 2023. According to Hell Gate, community composting’s $3 million annual budget made up just 0.04 percent of the city’s $7 billion deficit. According to late 2023 estimates, the budget cuts were on track to eliminating up to 115 composting jobs. (Nonprofit organization Grow NYC, as well as a few other programs, continued composting operations into the spring thanks to major philanthropic donations from private companies and anonymous individuals.)
In a November 2023 statement about the community compost funding cuts, the Department of Sanitation (DSNY) claimed that the city is “on track” to mainstream “the diversion of food waste and yard waste.” The city operates Smart Bins (the electronically controlled orange bins) in some areas around the city, and in 2023 rolled out curbside composting (the brown bins in front of residential homes) in Queens, but there’s one problem: Reyes and other activists don’t trust the city government to actually compost.
And they have good reason not to.
Curbside ‘composting’ — or greenwashing?
Reyes told 1110x that the city’s so-called composting effort constitutes “greenwashing,” or an attempt to misrepresent the environmental benefit of what is actually happening to the majority of food waste processed by the city.
DSNY does not publicly break down data on where food waste collected from smart bins and curbside composting ends up. But according to reporting from local outlets, a significant amount of the food scraps are not actually broken down into nutrient-rich compost — instead, they are turned into biogas, or synthetic natural gas. Food scraps are broken down into a slurry, “digested” at facilities like Brooklyn’s Newtown Creek wastewater treatment plant, and turned into a mostly-methane gas that can be used as energy.
The city’s efforts to generate this fuel have been unreliable — at Newtown Creek, instead of being used to heat homes, excess gas has recently been flared off, releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. (A Curbed investigation from April 2023 reported that about half the methane produced at Newtown Creek was being burned off, while the other half was being used to power the facility. About one third of leftover waste from this process was actually composted.)
If the city’s food waste wasn’t turned into biogas, it could very well rot at landfills, where it would release methane into the air and pollute waterways with nitrogen runoff. While the World Wildlife Foundation has said that producing biogas (what’s happening at facilities like Newtown Creek) is much preferable to sending organic matter to landfills, the actual process of burning biogas is similar to burning fossil fuels: It releases carbon dioxide and pollutants into the atmosphere.
Although DSNY’s efforts are important, Reyes thinks the agency’s messaging is misleading. “You can’t call biofuel compost, because those are two very different things,” he said.
Diverting food waste from landfills — which the city is doing — is an environmentally beneficial outcome. But what’s even better is turning that waste into compost, not biogas.
Return to a makeshift operation
Growing up in Pasadena, California, composting was commonplace in Reyes’s household. “I didn’t think much of it,” he said. “I just knew that all our food scraps went into that hole we [dug] in our backyard.”
When he moved to New York about 20 years ago, “one of the first things I did was look for a dropoff site,” Reyes said. “To my shock, the city didn’t really have a good infrastructure when it came to getting rid of food scraps.” So once a week, Reyes rode his bike for 45 minutes from Brooklyn to Union Square in Manhattan — all to drop off his food scraps.
In 2020, after the city stopped supporting food scrap pickup in Astoria due to the pandemic, Reyes and his partner took matters into their own hands. They purchased 27-gallon tough boxes from Costco, collected scraps from residents at different pickup spots around Astoria, and drove the boxes to local compost sites in vans they rented themselves.
The volunteer team they assembled quickly received an influx of donations and additional helpers. Demand increased along with it — rising from 700, to 1,000, to 1,300 pounds of food scraps per week. “[We cleared] a benchmark on a weekly basis,” Reyes said. “Every single week that summer was a learning experience.”
But, as he also said of the summer’s volunteer-led micro hauling effort, “it was a shitshow.” The team finally felt some relief that fall — in September 2020, the city restarted their support of community composting.
Now, the “shitshow” has returned, and composting in the post–budget cuts era is looking eerily similar to the early pandemic.
In February, Reyes told 1110x that Astoria Pug is “back to where we started in 2020, since we no longer have support from the NYCCP.” As a result of budget cuts, Astoria Pug is no longer partnering with the composting group Big Reuse. That means the Astoria volunteers’ responsibilities have ballooned from just outreach and staffing dropoff sites to collecting and transporting food scraps as well. Reyes said that he rents 15-foot-long box trucks to haul tons of scraps to places like Long Island Compost and Smiling Hogshead Ranch, the community garden in LIC.
Before the team can fill up an entire truck for a haul that takes place about monthly, they have to find a place to keep scraps in the interim — which means storing containers in the backyards of volunteers’ homes or having local businesses hold onto them. “This involves dragging 300-pound containers of food scraps around 8pm to a new place, which changes every three days,” Reyes explained. The team keeps track of the location of the containers in a spreadsheet.
In the wake of budget cuts, the team is staying afloat with crowdfunding. Astoria Pug also recently became a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and is looking toward grants and other funding sources to continue serving the neighborhood into the future.
“Like many community groups, we are in a precarious position,” Reyes said. While he wants to keep food waste out of landfills and away from unreliable biogas facilities, “the overwhelming challenge is figuring out how to do that in spite of having a DSNY commissioner who dismisses the merit of community composting.” But the group is proud that since April 2020, there have been no interruptions in composting services to the community. “We’ve been there for the community,” Reyes said.
Astoria’s favorite pug
When Reyes began his temporary pandemic composting operation, he got the word out to local residents through the Instagram account @astoriapug — which until that point, mostly featured photos of his pug, Rocky. Quickly, Rocky became the composting effort’s “spokespug.”
“We wanted to soften the message,” Reyes said. In the captions of each post, in Rocky’s “voice,” he explained composting, recruited volunteers, and listed dropoff locations. Reyes thinks that audiences can sometimes find environmental initiatives intimidating, and when communicating about them, organizers can risk coming across as abrasive or pushy. Reyes wanted to ensure as much participation as possible while maintaining the urgency of the message. “[The Instagram posts] took on this persona of being a little sarcastic, a little snarky,” Reyes said. “But it was still endearing, because it came from a pug.”
Reyes met Rocky in 2020. In January 2023, Rocky died of cancer. “It’s been a pretty tough year,” Reyes said.
Reyes was rarely seen without Rocky the pug by his side. “We had a very close relationship,” Reyes said. He and his dog went everywhere together. “If I couldn’t go to a restaurant without Rocky, I just wouldn’t go. Bowling night, Rocky would come. Wherever I went, Rocky came.”
Reyes, who loves animals, is also a vegetarian. After adopting Rocky, he started cooking meat to feed him. “I have an instant pot and I swore to never put meat in it,” Reyes said. “But I would put chicken in there for Rocky. I hate the smell of chicken, fish, and beef — but now I miss that smell because of him.”
Rocky was an icon online and in the streets of Astoria. Many residents learned about how to properly drop off food scraps through educational posts that featured Rocky, and his trademark grin where his floppy tongue hung out of his mouth. The environmental advocacy and education that has had an immense impact on the Astoria community wouldn’t have been possible without Rocky.
“Rocky was really like my sidekick,” Reyes said. “I feel at a loss without him.”
