By Scott Etkin
At the start of this year, the NYC Department of Sanitation (DSNY) resumed issuing fines to all buildings that fail to participate in the citywide Curbside Composting program.
Fines for composting violations were last in effect in April 2025. After less than three weeks of enforcement, however, former Mayor Eric Adams paused fines on most city buildings, claiming a need to give more time to adapt to the mandatory program. Ten months later, DSNY is back to issuing tickets to buildings that fail to properly separate their organics (food scraps and yard waste) from their trash.
“Since Jan. 1, we have been enforcing across the board, not just the high-density repeat offenders that we had been enforcing for much of 2025,” DSNY Press Secretary Vincent Gragnani wrote in a message to West Side Rag.
So far this year, through February 10th, DSNY has issued 414 summonses to buildings for failure to separate food and yard waste from other trash. Enforcement likely would have yielded more citations if the weather were milder, Gragnani noted, since the recent snowstorm and freezing weather have forced DSNY to pull double-duty on snow removal and trash collection.
Fines to buildings that fail to set out compost bins range from $50 for a first offense to up to $200 for the third and subsequent offenses. Fines for failing to separate compost (e.g., putting trash in the compost bin) are lower for smaller buildings compared to larger ones (with nine units or more). Details on enforcement fines are available – HERE.
Brown bins for food scraps and yard waste have become ubiquitous on the Upper West Side and across the city, but despite some bright spots, data show that participation in the program has been lackluster so far.
In fall 2024, shortly after the program started, the city’s capture rate of compost was less than 5%, according to research by Baruch College Associate Professor Samantha MacBride. “Capture rate” is a calculation showing the portion of organic waste that is set out for separate collection in composting bins, compared to the total amount of organic waste produced by residents. (For example, if 50 pounds of compost were set out by residents out of a possible 100 pounds that they generated, the capture rate would be 50%.)
While DSNY’s first enforcement effort last spring was brief, MacBride’s analysis shows that it made a significant difference in the amount of compost that was collected, doubling the city’s capture rate to approximately 10%.
DSNY issued more than 4,000 violations in April 2025, according to MacBride’s paper, which concluded that the awareness of enforcement, rather than the fines themselves, had led to an improvement. “An important, and counterintuitive, finding was that rate of ticketing did not correlate with improvements in the capture rate,” she wrote.
MacBride also found that the level of participation in curbside composting varies by neighborhood. While Manhattan lags all other boroughs in capture rate, the Upper West Side is a standout performer, with a 13.5% capture rate as of spring 2025.
More recent data on the neighborhood’s capture rate isn’t available, but the overall tonnage of compost collected is on an upward trajectory, according to statistics from DSNY on NYC’s Open Data portal. In the month of October 2024, when the residential program started, the UWS set out 129 tons of compost. In the month of December 2025, that number had increased to more than 318 tons.
On a call with the Rag, MacBride said that in addition to enforcement, more targeted outreach to communities is needed to increase the capture rate. She suggested using insights from the sanitation workers who are out in the field.
“Every community district is a sanitation district, and it has its own garage. Those workers at the garage know the district intimately, right? Because they’re out there every day,” said MacBride, who used to work at DSNY for nearly 20 years.
DSNY spokesperson Gragnani described several ways in which the agency is continuing to do outreach, including “social media, conversations and presentations to building supers, and the issuing of warnings and summonses.”
“We know that increasing participation takes time, and we continue working to remind New Yorkers that composting is required, and incredibly simple,” he wrote. “Just set out food and yard waste in a container on your recycling day.”
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