City Urges Residents to Report Compost Violations

With nearly 2,000 fines issued in the first week of composting enforcement, New Yorkers are being urged to report buildings that aren’t using their brown bins. Mandatory compost rules were introduced last October, and building owners were given a six-month grace period without penalties, which ended on April 1. In recent weeks, New York City’s Department of Sanitation (DSNY) ramped up communication efforts, sending mailers to every household urging residents to call 311, the city’s complaints hotline, if buildings aren’t complying with the rules.

Fines for failing to separate compostable material from trash now range from $25 to $100 for smaller buildings and from $100 to $300 for larger ones. The higher fines are for repeat offenses. “Sanitation supervisors are using 311 complaints and context clues to determine whether compostable material is in the trash,” says DSNY press secretary Vincent Gragnani. “This may involve opening bags if necessary,” he says, adding that this already takes place in enforcing metal, glass, plastic and paper recycling.

Of the 1,885 summonses in the first week of April, it’s unclear how many fines were issued to rental buildings versus owner-occupied co-ops and condos. “Many people are worried about fines being a money grab, but the Department of Sanitation has been clear that they aren’t looking to hurt buildings making a good faith effort,” says A.J. Rexhepi, CEO of Century Management Services. DSNY issued 30,000 warnings to property owners during the six months before enforcement began.

However, for some buildings the volume of compostable material generated by residents has come as a surprise. Data suggests enforcement resulted in a 240% increase in the amount of compostable material kept out of landfill during the first week of April. “We found ourselves in situations where we were scrambling to order more bins,” says Evangelos Fantakos, managing member at Highrise Property Management. DSNY offered one brown bin per building when the program got underway, but any bin under 55 gallons with a secure lid and correct labeling is permitted. A 21-gallon brown bin costs $43.47 online.

For co-op and condo boards, strategies for composting success include ongoing communication about how the program works and where the bins are stored. “Even with all the information you give, there’s still a lot of questions,” says Fantakos. For Daniel Wollman, CEO, at Gumley Haft Property Management, the challenge with composting is less about where the brown bins are placed and more about getting residents to use them in the first place. “We are not sorting through people's rubbish to determine whether they have composted,” he says, but points out it will take time for residents to become as conditioned to composting as they are to recycling.

While some people are still figuring out what goes in the compost, others want to toss the idea. Within 10 days of the program becoming mandatory, the seven members of the City Council's conservative Common Sense Caucus introduced a bill to turn the program back into a voluntary enterprise and ban fines. In the meantime, DSNY is bullish on the program, saying “normal enforcement actually gets results to get the rat food out of landfills and put to beneficial use.” In buildings where residents continue to be resistant to composting, boards may simply need to budget for penalties until the habit becomes as familiar as recycling. “This may be just another cost of doing business in New York,” Wollman says.