By Scott Etkin
In late June 2023, 28 bright orange “Compost” Smart Bins designated for food scraps appeared on street corners throughout the Upper West Side.
The Bins, which can be unlocked through a free app and accept all types of food scraps and food-soiled paper, are part of the New York City Department of Sanitation’s citywide initiative to get food scraps out of plastic garbage bags – where they can become “rat buffets” – and out of landfills, where they decompose into methane, a harmful gas.
Now that the Bins have been deployed in the neighborhood for a full year, it begs the question: how much are they being used? And have they led to a measurable uptick in the amount of compostable material that’s collected on the UWS?
In Community Board District 7 (West 59th Street to West 110th Street), the Smart Bins were unlocked 154,225 times from July 2023 to June 2024, according to stats provided by DSNY to the Rag. That works out to 15 unlocks per Bin each day, on average. In the calendar year 2024 to date, there have been 95,457 unlocks in CB7.
How much material was put in the Smart Bins cannot be determined because the Bins are emptied on the same routes that sanitation workers use to pick up other compostable material from residences and schools. But NYC’s Open Data Portal, which records the amount of trash, recyclables, and organic material that DSNY collects throughout the city every day, gives a sense of these numbers in aggregate.
According to the Open Data Portal, the amount of compostable material collected on the UWS increased by 15% from July 2023 to June 2024 (with Smart Bins) compared to the prior year period (without Smart Bins).
Anecdotally, another sign that the Bins are being used is that, on occasion, a bag of food scraps is left on top of a full container, evidently put there by someone unwilling or unable to take it to the next closest available Bin. In June 2024, DSNY added one more Smart Bin to the neighborhood due to the high use of Bins in the surrounding area, bringing the total number to 29.
Read more: UWS Earth Month Explainer: How to ‘Compost’ Food Scraps and Why It Matters – HERE
Subscribe to West Side Rag’s FREE email newsletter here.
I LOVE these bins- I just wish there were more/bigger. I wish there was a way to track how often the app is used to unlock the bins — I would love to know my personal use and I think the city could create an incentive program to get more people to use them/compost based on most unlocks tracked in the app!
I love them too!
Easy to use and convenient.
Plus my garbage can is now odor free with no food waste
We have curbside pickup for compost bins which works well for our building. Usage has increased significantly over the past couple of years.
Aren’t we all moving to curbside composting in/by our apartment buildings this Fall? If so we might need a few of these bins for when people have ToGo food to get rid of but I doubt most of the bins will be anywhere near full. I love composting but wonder of this was the best use of the money allocated to buy these bins
I love that we have those bins. I just really wish they weren’t a bald-faced lie.
Material put in those orange bins doesn’t get composted. It gets sent to an anaerobic digester facility which breaks it down into methane. The methane was supposed to be sold into the gas grid. Except the city is trying to phase out the gas grid because burning methane produces CO2. That’s why new gas hookups are banned. But that’s moot because the facility doesn’t work properly and keeps breaking down, so it doesn’t actually put the methane into the grid. Some of it is burned to produce power for the facility itself, but the rest is just released, which is even worse than CO2. The small amount of material left that didn’t get turned into methane is nominally turned into fertilizer (not soil), but since the facility has mixed it with raw sewage, it’s considered contaminated and not suitable for most usage. Instead, it’s used for things like trying to regrow plants at an abandoned quarry.
Meanwhile, the city did have programs that actually composted raw plant scraps and such, turning them into usable soil that got distributed to community gardens. But Mayor Adams defunded them this year and kicked them out of the sites that were being used to do the composting.
UWS councilman Sean Abreu was named this year to chair the city council’s committee on solid waste, and he does fully support real composting, but in budget negotiations he was only able to restore partial funding to the compost programs. Not enough for them to resume collecting scraps at greenmarkets across the city. And he couldn’t restore their access to the composting sites that had been in use for years.
TRUTH… thank you.
Do you have a source for this information?
I wish there were compost drop-offs that did not require a smartphone.
As an aside, I ONLY use these bins. I completely stopped using the curbside containers when passersby continually put dog waste , empty beverage containers and miscellaneous garbage into them. Resulting in Sanitation not picking them up.
We use a few times a week! Many times, especially over the weekends they are full. A quick check of the app tells you which ones are full so you can plan accordingly BUT We need more! Should be on every corner or curbside pick up.
I would use them a lot more if they weren’t so frequently full when I want to use them. Additionally, once unlocked they remain unlocked for several seconds and I have often seen people putting their regular trash in there because they cannot be bothered to read what the bin is for.
I throw all my dogs poop in these bins. Before these bins I would just leave it on sidewalk.
Hope thispost is sarcastic.