I wanted to write this article as someone who has become deeply involved in New York’s community gardens, specifically community composting, over the past two years.

Very often, funding for these types of programs is thought of as a “nice to have,” instead of as something that’s essential infrastructure.

Today I want to make that investing in community composting should be ramped and stable because it’s just a good investment, however you look at it.

To see its value, we must start by understanding what the status quo is costing us.

My examples will be specific to New York, but they apply anywhere.

What is “Community Composting?”

It’s a good question worth pausing to define.

Community composting is hyper-local. If local means “New York City,” then hyper-local means a specific neighborhood. If you’ve heard of the concept of “food miles,” which measures how far food travels from farm to plate, think of “food scrap miles” too, the distance your banana peels and coffee grounds travel to become compost.

It’s led by people who live there, which is where the “community” part comes in. And it’s open to the public, like a community garden, meaning anybody can drop off their food scraps.

Rather than hauling organic waste across the city or borough, residents bring scraps to sites within walking distance, often integrated into existing community gardens where the compost enriches local soil and grows food for the same neighbors who contributed to it.

We Are Paying to Throw Value in the Trash

I don’t even love the term “trash” because what most New Yorkers consider trash, I consider valuable.

Right now, as a country as we are paying billions to throw away stuff that could be transformed into soil and built into a more resilient city.

According to the New York Department of Sanitation’s own budget, in 2024 the city spent over $500 million just to export waste.

That covers city trucks picking up the waste to bring to waste transfer stations like Waste Management that have contracts with the city, and paying freight train companies to haul it to the landfill.

About one-third of that is food waste, stuff that could be composted, enriched into soil, and used right here in our neighborhoods.

So in New York City alone, we’re spending over $150 million per year just to move around food scraps on route to a landfill. Not locally composting costs us a lot of money.

Yes, composting can cost money. But not composting costs a lot of money too.

The Hidden Costs of the Waste We Export

I’ve spent the past couple years looking under the hood of New York City’s waste system. I’ve stood outside waste transfer stations, seen where the trucks go, and even watched the freight trains come and go. I’ve managed a community compost operation, which imagines an alternative for all of this.

At every single step, there are economic and quality-of-life costs. And we pay for all of them.

So let’s walk through the actual journey of a New York City trash bag, remembering that roughly one-third of what’s in that bag is compostable.

Step 1: The trash sits on the curb, and we pay for the consequences

The black bag from your building starts out on the sidewalk, where it sits for hours. It’s wet, heavy, and usually full of food scraps. That means:

• Rats get fed. Good for the rats, bad for our health.
• The smell lingers. Remember, it’s the presence of food scraps that smells.
• The aesthetics and perception of disorder worsen. This is hard to quantify, but anyone who’s lived in NYC knows exactly what it feels like. Frankly, it’s embarrassing.

Meanwhile, the city is infamous for its numerous operations (and failures) to address these problems, from containerized trash (which I fully support) to numerous operations against the rats that always fail.

Every one of these costs decreases if food scraps aren’t in the trash. It means less volume, much less weight, and none of the items that smell terrible and attract rats.

The city spends money to address these problems, money it wouldn’t need to spend if less organic waste sat on the curb in the first place.

As just one weird example of the costs of rampant food waste lying in the trash page, in 2017 Mayor de Blasio announced a $32 million plan to curb rat infestations in public housing, $16 million of this was for “rat pads.”

I’m not saying this wasn’t a good idea, or that we shouldn’t invest in stopping rats or containerizing trash. My point is that with food waste in our trash, it makes all of these challenges more expensive and harder to solve.

Step 2: A DSNY truck picks it up

Next, a DSNY garbage truck comes down your block. That truck and its crew are paid for with taxpayer dollars. Organic waste makes this step more expensive because:

• Food waste is heavy, which means trucks fill faster and require more trips.
• More frequent pickups.
• More wear-and-tear on equipment from hauling heavy, wet waste.
• Higher injury risk for sanitation workers from repeatedly lifting heavier bags.

All of these have dollar signs attached to them: fuel, labor, maintenance, workers comp, overtime.

This is not a critique of DSNY workers. I sincerely appreciate them and I think they’re the most overlooked public workers.

I suspect they, too, would prefer to have jobs that involve less scrambling around the city collecting trash, which is one of the most dangerous city jobs.

Step 3: The trash arrives at a waste transfer station, often on public land

Most New Yorkers never see a transfer station, but these are the beating heart (or perhaps the clogged artery) of our waste system. Your bag is taken to one of these sites, where trash is compacted and prepared for long-distance export.

Where I live in the South Bronx, we talk about this because the Harlem River Yards Waste Management facility sits on publicly-owned waterfront land. (And a local non-profit, South Bronx Unite, has an alternate plan for the waterfront.)

That’s land that should provide recreation, flood protection, and park space that instead attracts thousands of diesel trucks.

These communities, whether the South Bronx or North Brooklyn, absorb the truck traffic, the exhaust, the noise, and the asthma rates.

Even if you don’t care about people’s health, that pollution has direct economic costs. Emergency room visits, missed school days, missed work days, all cost us all, but they fall disproportionately on the communities burdened with these sites and other industry.

Widespread composting means a third of the trucks are not necessary.

And it could be processed in the same neighborhood, with far fewer emissions, creating soil instead of sickness.

Step 4: The trash gets loaded onto a diesel freight train and sent far away

After your trash is compacted, it’s loaded onto a diesel freight train at the same facilities.

• More emissions. Diesel freight is cheaper than trucking and not as bad, but still polluting, and again, emissions concentrate in the same areas.
• Transport costs tied to distance and fuel prices. New York City has no local landfill, so waste travels hundreds of miles to landfills in other states.

Every additional ton of wet, heavy organics makes this leg of the journey more expensive.

Step 5: The trash arrives at an out-of-state landfill, where we pay again

Once the trash reaches its destination, the city pays to bury waste in a landfill. These fees have been rising nationwide as landfills reach capacity and environmental regulations tighten.

And there’s a cruel irony here:

We pay to bury organic material that could have become compost, and then we pay again to buy soil amendments for our parks, street trees, and gardens.

Cities with strong composting systems produce their own soil. We don’t — so we import it.

Step 6: The buried organics generate methane, the most expensive gas of all

Organic waste doesn’t just disappear in a landfill. It decomposes anaerobically, releasing methane, a greenhouse gas roughly 28 times more potent than CO₂ over the short term, according to the EPA. That methane contributes to heating the planet, causing more heat waves and flooding.

This isn’t the place to make the economic case that destroying our environment that we depend on to live is a bad idea. But of course, I think it is.

This Entire Journey Is One Long, Expensive Mistake

Community composting, by contrast, shortens the journey from miles to footsteps. It keeps the value local. It creates soil instead of methane. It reduces truck traffic instead of concentrating it. And it keeps dollars circulating in the neighborhoods that need them most.

Composting Is Labor-Rich; Landfilling Is Capital-Rich

Now let’s consider the alternative.

A report from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) found that composting operations employ roughly 4 full-time equivalent (FTE) jobs per 10,000 tons of organics processed, compared to 2 FTE jobs per 10,000 tons at landfills.

To put this in simple terms for a thought exercise, let’s say the cost of composting a ton of food scraps is the same as landfilling it. For the landfill, you’d hire two people and spend the rest of the money paying for the trucking equipment, waste transfer service, transportation to the landfill, and the landfill itself. For the compost, you’d just hire four people. (This isn’t a real situation. It’s just for the sake of explanation.)

Composting can create more jobs while saving money overall, because it has lower capital costs.

An Alternate Vision

Now, I know what you may be thinking: having everyone drop off their food scraps somewhere in their neighborhood is just not realistic.

Yes, I understand the reality. Most people don’t care to or don’t know how to compost, and even those who do are put off by perfectly reasonable challenges such as the smells, the flies, or the time it takes, let alone walking out of their house with the scraps.

For a moment, I would like you to step into an alternate vision with me, a vision that is already reality in little pockets of New York City, at and around its community gardens.

I’ll speak more about my experience, this is my reality, and the reality for dozens of people I know.

Right now, probably thousands of New Yorkers bring their food scraps to a nearby drop-off site. It’s just not as crazy as people think.

Here’s what we need to make this the norm.

(And yet, I know it won’t come to fruition in either one year or five, but I believe in thinking radically and acting incrementally.)

Thousands of 24/7 Compost Drop-Off Sites

There are about 700 community gardens in New York City, and in many neighborhoods from the South Bronx to the Lower East Side to Bushwick, there are so many that most people live within a few blocks of a garden.

I imagine a world where the gates of every community garden has a 24/7 drop-off site.

This could be like the SMART bin (the orange ones) or something else very low tech like we have at our community garden.

Now imagine that we had double or triple the amount of community gardens, and you can start to imagine a city where everybody lives within a few blocks of a compost drop-off site.

It starts by giving resources to the current gardens, with compost liaisons that can work with several gardens in the same neighborhood. These workers can manage it, doing everything necessary to process soil quickly and eliminate the smells that people worry about.

Then, we need to identify even small vacant lots that are big enough to host a hyperlocal community compost.

This is logistically possible. In fact, today it’s reality at dozens of gardens across the city, so it’s just about replicating what we already know works.

Composting Made the Cultural Norm

Everybody has objections to composting at first. In my experience helping dozens of neighbors compost, you get used to it. People get used to it. You know that you have to take it out once it week, or maybe you do what others do and keep your food scraps in the freezer so avoid the smells and do it once a month.

If you don’t want to rinse out a bin, you can put all the food scraps in a paper bag and throw the whole bag in the compost. This is not the place to discuss these details, but the point is that so many people already compost as the norm, so it’s about education and expansion.

It’s easier said than done, but it’s possible.

A Green Jobs Ecosystem Built Around Circular Value

Right now, community composting in New York largely runs on the backs of volunteers and underfunded nonprofits (Thank you Big Reuse, Bronx Green-Up, and the LES Ecology Center!)

But it doesn’t have to. We could have paid compost managers that oversee sites. We could have interns and students learn about soil science, urban ecology, or material recovery.

Businesses could be centered on compost, whether it’s soil or bin installations.

All the money and benefits stay in the neighborhood.

The ultimate vision is simple: treat composting like a basic civic function.

Not only will it help us (literally) rebuild the earth, I suspect it would save money in the long-term.

We should stop paying to bury value hundreds of miles away, and start investing in the systems that grow value right here.