STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Mayor Michael Bloomberg plans to begin collecting food scraps for composting across the city after voluntary pilot programs -- including one in Westerleigh -- proved successful.
In May, 3,500 single-family households in Westerleigh received kits that included brown organic bins, kitchen containers and compost liners from the city Department of Sanitation so they could separate foods and used plates and napkins.
Forty-three percent of those households followed the plan, according to a report in the New York Times. At a Manhattan building, where bins were kept in the trash rooms on each floor, 125 pounds of compostable material was collected daily.
Based on those results, Bloomberg "plans to announce shortly that his administration is hiring a composting plant to handle 10,000 tons of food scraps a year," the Times reported.
The 10,000 tons would represent 10 percent of the city's food waste.
The administration will also seek proposals within the next year for a company to build a plant in the New York area to process residential food waste into biogas, which generate electricity, the Times said.
"This is going to be really transformative," Deputy Mayor Caswell Halloway IV, told the Times. "You want to get on a trajectory where you're not sending anything to landfills."
It will be voluntary at first, but officials predict it could become mandatory within the next few years, the Times reported.
New Yorkers who do not separate their food scraps could be subject to fines, as they currently are if they don't recycle plastic, paper or metal.
The existing program in Westerleigh works like this: Residents place leaf and yard waste in separate paper lawn and leaf bags.
All food types are placed in the brown bins, including vegetables and fruit, baked goods, coffee grounds and filters, teach bags and loose tea, cereal, flour, grains, pasta and rice, nuts, meat, fish and bones.
After collection, the materials were transported to the Staten Island Compost Facility with the end product ultimately made available to city agencies and nonprofits for use in gardening, soil mitigation and habitat improvements.