New York City now mandates composting. Next comes the hard part.

In October, New York City rolled out a curbside organic waste collection program for all five boroughs, expanding the service that already existed in Brooklyn and Queens. Residents and property managers have until spring to order and begin using dedicated composting bins, or building owners will face fines of $25 to $300.

The Big Apple joins a growing number of cities, counties, and states that are implementing organic waste collection policies as part of the fight against climate change.

Garbage is a potent but overlooked source of climate pollution. When organic waste — everything from food scraps to grass clippings — decays in landfills, it emits methane, a greenhouse gas that can warm the planet as much as 80 times more than carbon dioxide within a 20-year period. Landfills are the third-largest source of methane emissions both in the U.S. and globally.

But like other municipalities around the country, New York is now confronting the reality that translating composting policy into actual emissions reductions from landfills is a long and difficult process.

The city first has to get composting bins to all its residents, an especially difficult task in crowded neighborhoods with large apartment buildings. And, although the city recently expanded a major composting facility on Staten Island, it doesn’t have enough infrastructure to compost the new organic waste. Already, most of the waste from curbside compost bins is being sent to a wastewater treatment plant in Brooklyn where it’s turned into biogas, which critics have argued is neither cost-effective nor the best solution for the climate.

Once green collection bins are in place, the city’s sanitation staff will still have to get 8 million people speaking hundreds of different languages on board with actually using them.

“It’s a huge lift to change the behavior of millions of people,” said Justin Green, executive director of Big Reuse, a community-based environmental organization that has been composting in New York City since 2011.

“There is still a lot of education that we need to do to get everyone aware and on board,” said Hillary Bosch, the outreach coordinator for the NYC Department of Sanitation, in a webinar recorded last year. ​“We are trying to get [information] in front of as many eyes as possible, but we know that it is a really, really tough task. We can’t be everywhere at once.”

California’s struggles and successes

New York has only to look to California for a primer on just how much effort it takes to get effective municipal compost programs up and running.

In 2016, California passed a comprehensive compost law calling for a 75 percent reduction in 2014 levels of organic waste at landfills by 2025. Now, as that deadline arrives, the latest available data suggests that California is falling far short of that goal. A study released in June by CalRecycle, the state agency overseeing implementation of SB 1383, found that from 2014 to 2021, the annual amount of organic waste sent to landfills fell by only two million tons, from 21 million to 19 million. An updated study with data through 2024 will be released later in 2025.

In San Francisco, where curbside organic waste has been collected since 1996, residents throw away about half as much trash per capita as the rest of the state. But about a third of what’s being thrown in the garbage is still food waste, according to data provided by city officials.

SB 1383 required nearly all city and county governments to add organic waste collections to their existing trash and recycling services by 2022, with narrow exemptions for jurisdictions with low populations and those at high elevation where the food waste attracts bears. But outside California’s large cities and suburbs, many communities are still struggling to comply with this initial step.

“We have rural areas that don’t even have trash service,” said Jared Carter, deputy public works director for Madera County, which stretches from north of the city of Fresno into the Sierra Nevada, encompassing a section of Yosemite National Park.

In 2022, more than 120 municipal or county governments in California asked for an extension of the deadline requiring them to add green bins to their waste-hauling services, according to a report from the Little Hoover Commission, a nonpartisan, legislature-appointed government oversight board. 

Despite the challenges, California has had some notable successes implementing statewide composting, and through trial and error, its programs have improved. Lawmakers have also updated regulations to make the system work better for different locations.

In 2024, several new laws were added to the books with that goal in mind. One of them was AB 2902, which extends the exemptions from compost collection for areas with low populations until 2037, and allows them to continue applying for five-year extensions.

“We’re trying to build in more flexibility on the regulations,” said John Kennedy, policy advocate for Rural County Representatives of California.

Other legislation signed in 2024 will streamline the permitting requirements for new small and midsized composting facilities and expand the types of composted material that cities and counties can buy in order to meet requirements in SB 1383 that compost be purchased for landscaping and community gardens. This helps make the programs economically viable by ensuring that there are buyers for what the facilities produce.

These efforts have started to pay off.

Almost 80 percent of state and county jurisdictions now have curbside organic waste collection in place. For Nick Lapis, director of advocacy for the nonprofit Californians Against Waste, that’s a big win, especially considering that the pandemic struck just as many communities were launching their programs.

In San Francisco, the city’s waste management contractor, Recology, picks up more than 500 tons of organic material per day — outpacing the collection of recycled materials — and has produced over 2.7 million tons of compost since the program’s inception, according to the company’s data.

“We’re at the fun part,” Lapis said, where the focus can shift from setting up programs to public education and outreach.

Lapis feels optimistic that California will start seeing more organic waste diverted from landfills, and he urges cities not to talk about their green bins as a matter of complying with a statewide requirement but to instead ​“talk about the soil and how we’re using it to grow food, which then kind of explains to people why they need to keep plastic out of the bin.”

As New York City rolls out its program, city staff are also turning their attention to public education and marketing to reach as many New Yorkers as possible before this spring, when fines will be issued for residences that do not comply.

That outreach campaign includes digital, print, and radio ads, posters in the subway and other public places, as well as doorknocking, contacting landlords and tenant groups, and hosting public events.

“The city just needs to keep doing outreach for a couple years, pretty intensively, alongside with enforcing the rules, until there’s actual behavior change,” Green said.

Alongside the municipal program, Green also sees a role for community-led groups such as Big Reuse that get people excited about the benefits of composting. Over the past decade, he’s watched how small-scale efforts at farmers markets and community gardens helped build the grassroots support that made citywide composting possible.

“A lot of environmental change starts to happen at the community level,” he said.