Composting in New York City - Notes From All Over - The New Yorker
5 Video Views·Sep 8, 2026
The organic composting process in New York involves workers receiving food waste, mixing it with sawdust to ensure aeration, periodically turning the pile, and finally screening the finished product. This work helps reduce landfill waste, regenerate soil, and promote a sustainable lifestyle.
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Video Summary
AI GeneratedCristina Daz Romero, co-founder of the Lower East Side Ecology Center, discusses the critical role of urban composting in New York City. By utilizing red wiggler worms and a structured layering process, the center transforms massive amounts of kitchen scraps into nutrient-rich soil, highlighting the need for better city-wide infrastructure to scale these efforts.
New Yorkers generate about three pounds of kitchen scraps per week.
With 8.5 million people living here, it adds up to just mountains of materials
that we can't even, I think, visualize what that means.
My name is Cristina Daz Romero, and I'm the co-founder of the Lower East Side Ecology Center.
It's a 26-year-old community-based organization that offers recycling programs.
Everything that you see growing and thriving here is really powered, so to speak,
by the food waste that people dropped off.
So I think that's really very much a direct connection,
and just really shows how powerful composting here in an urban setting really is.
So these are the red wigglers.
They are the worms that you want to use when you do composting.
So Leroy is one of our compost warriors.
He works down here to manage the compost yard.
The first step is to empty out the bins.
There's about 1,000 pounds of materials that goes into one of those bins.
And we layer the food scraps with sawdust,
and then we poke some holes in it to really make sure the aeration is good.
And then we just cover it up, and then it just really sits there for a week.
And within that week, the volume of the bin will reduce.
And then we empty the bin into curing piles, which we call wind rows.
Once a week, we go in there and we just aerate it
to make sure that the materials break down on a consistent basis
and that there's enough oxygen in there.
Once the compost gets to this stage, we just screen the materials out.
It's wonderful that composting finally gets sort of the public discussion
and attention that it deserves.
Unfortunately, the city really doesn't have enough of this infrastructure
to handle, let's say, a rollout of something like this on a bigger scale.
So I think we need to do both.
We need to run pilots, but we also need to really do the work
of planning for the future and siting facilities
that can serve the program once it really gets rolled out.