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Help NYC's food businesses compost with local community sites!

Allow NYC's food businesses to give their scraps to community compost sites, that help build neighborhoods through support for locally grown food and other green projects. 

Please identify the name of your food business when you sign, so we can give you credit.

PETITION:

To the New York City Council, please untie our hands so we restaurants and other food businesses can prove our commitment to environmental stewardship, our neighborhoods, and our customers by giving some of our organics like food scraps to community compost sites rather than carting it all away -- let our communities keep the benefits in and for the community.

OVERVIEW:

Current NYC regulations create obstacles for restaurants and other food businesses to give at least a portion of their food scraps and other organics like coffee grounds to the community compost sites that help green neighborhoods.  By helping a community compost site, they can show their  commitment to environmental stewardship, their community, and their local customers.  It's good for business!  It doesn't make sense for New York City to stand in the way. 

The New York City Council should change regulations to support rather than thwart community composting. Community composting happens in a neighborhood or at a college or place of work, and recycles organic material as locally as possible, "closing the loop." Material like food scraps travel the shortest possible distance, from residents' and restaurants' kitchens to a compost site and then, as compost, to greening projects in the same community -- like a school food garden or urban farm or street trees or bioswales to reduce storm-water runoff.  This approach is what’s known as decentralized composting, and it is the most sustainable when taking into account the hidden costs of harm to the environment from other approaches. The contrast is centralized composting that involves city-wide curbside collection of residential or commercial organic material that is transported a distance.

 
Obviously in large urban settings community composting cannot recover all organics, for which municipal and commercial partners are important partners, but good policy dictates that NYC should help optimize community composting and reduce the number of big transport trucks for safer streets.  To decentralize is the best, even if we do have to centralize the rest. The approach to diverting organic material like food scraps from the waste stream will be multi-dimensional, including curbside pickup, but community compost must be optimized to best build community and protect the environment.  Let our communities keep the benefits of their food scraps and other organic material in and for the community!
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