Habitat Magazine New York City
Former Mayor Eric Adams dreamed of bringing about a “trash revolution” in New York City — getting mountains of black garbage bags off the streets, putting garbage in sealable bins, and launching an ambitious citywide curbside organics recycling program.
To enforce this last initiative, in April 2025 Adams ordered inspectors to issue a blizzard of tickets — more than 200 a day — to landlords and co-op and condo boards who mixed regular garbage with organics or failed to set up the mandatory brown organics bins.
Organics recylcling tripled — until a few weeks later, when then-Deputy First Mayor Randy Mastro ordered an end to the ticketing blitz. After Mastro’s order, compost collection fell 43% through the end of 2025, according to a new study by the city’s Independent Budget Office, Gothamist reports. Just 2.4% of residential waste that could be turned into compost was actually being diverted from landfills in 2025. Meanwhile, the city is wasting money on labor and special composting trucks to run routes that make relatively few pickups.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani reinstated those fines when he took office in January, but the level of enforcement hasn’t matched the ferocity of Adams’ initial blitz. Inspectors have issued just 610 tickets for failure to compost since the beginning of the year.
What’s the answer? Education, education, education.
“Obviously, our first priority is to educate folks on how to do it,” says Sanitation Commissioner Gregory Anderson. “The campaign that we’re running right now is really focused on people who live in apartment buildings. Enforcement is always a part of these programs.”
The sanitation department is relaunching a public awareness campaign launched under Adams, which features Scrappy, an anthropomorphized brown compost bin. The ads from the campaign can be seen on city buses, outside bodegas and on the city’s ferries.
The recycling program is designed to reduce the amount of organic waste going into landfills — fruit and vegetable scraps, coffee grounds, egg shells, tea bags and fresh garden clippings — because landfills generate methane, an ozone-depleting gas that is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere. The collected organic matter is sent to composting facilities or turned into biogas. The compost is returned to the city to nourish parks, gardens and tree pits.
In New York City, which emits one million pounds of greenhouse gas annually from its municipal landfills, roughly one-third of the residential waste collected is actually compostable.