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New York City’s food recycling failures exacerbate climate crisis

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Wasted Potential: New York City’s food recycling failures exacerbate climate crisis

The unkept promise amounts to Mayor Bill de Blasio’s most profound failure to improve the city’s dismal recycling rate and thereby reduce the amount of trash New Yorkers send to landfills around the region. Food and yard rubbish make up one-third of the residential waste stream and, left to rot in landfills, emit methane — a greenhouse gas considered far more potent than carbon dioxide.

“If we can divert those organics, it completely changes the dynamics of how waste management works in the Northeast, not just New York City,” Ron Gonen, former deputy commissioner for sanitation, recycling and sustainability under Bloomberg, said in an interview.

As a candidate in 2013, de Blasio got on board, vowing in his campaign literature to "create a mandatory city-wide municipal composting system within five years."

Instead, the city’s sanitation department — which called organics recycling “the biggest new opportunity not yet tapped” — collected just 13,000 tons of organic waste that residents left in brown curbside bins in 2017, about 1.2 percent of more than 1 million tons of that type of refuse tossed out that year. An analysis conducted by the agency concluded that “there is still a steep learning curve for residents who have never been asked to separate and store food scraps for recycling.”

I 💚 S-SOW 🐷. It saves on landfill space, provides fertilizer to make things grow better, avoids lost of important nutrients on the land, reduces methane emissions from landfills and makes incinerators burn better.

The consequences of New York City’s recycling failure

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Wasted Potential: The consequences of New York City’s recycling failure

And they will seek to explain why progress on recycling remains lower than many other premier American cities, even as de Blasio and Bloomberg vowed to tackle climate change during their presidential bids. Seattle and San Francisco, for instance, boast rates that are triple New York's.

“New York City has one of the lowest big-city recycling rates in the country,” said Judith Enck, the former Region 2 administrator for the federal Environmental Protection Agency, in an interview. “You would think, with that massive amount of money and carbon pollution from moving so much solid waste out of the city, that there would be like an epic campaign to reduce, recycle and compost. But oddly, there’s not.

Against Recycling

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Against Recycling

Earlier this month, the New York Times posted a video op-ed correctly debunking “The Great Recycling Con.” According to the Times, the plastics industry has sold generations of consumers a lie about just how much of the waste they produce could be recycled in order to create the false possibility of eco-friendly, guilt-free consumption.

It comes painfully close, but misses the full story. The true “Great Recycling Con” runs far deeper than lies about which products can and cannot be recycled; it is an ongoing political battle waged by waste-generating corporations against the public to evade regulation, shift responsibility for environmental destruction onto consumers, and protect the ecocidal and highly profitable business model that lies at the heart of industrial capitalism.

Recycling of Polypropylene (PP)

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Recycling of Polypropylene (PP)

While PP is easily among the most popular plastic packaging materials in the world, only around 1% is recycled, which means most PP is headed for the landfill. These decompose slowly over 20-30 years. This raises severe environmental issues, quite apart from toxic additives in PP such as lead and cadmium. Incineration may release dioxins and vinyl chloride, both of which are poisonous.

To determine how recyclable polypropylene is, companies have undertaken ‘life cycle’ studies that look at the plastic from the raw material production to the final stages of waste management to assess the sustainability of the product. The general consensus from these studies is that PP has considerable potential as a sustainable product.