By Shi En Kim for Sierra.
Broadcast version by Suzanne Potter for California News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration
Plastics are a problem that knows no boundaries. These intractable incarnations of fossil fuels have found their way into the atmosphere, our kitchen produce, and even the deepest part of the ocean. They choke wildlife to death and sully the world’s natural landscapes. In microscopic form, plastics are arguably even more pernicious—micro- and nanoplastics have infiltrated into reproductive organs, lodged themselves in the brain, wreaked havoc on cardiovascular health, and contaminated mammary glands.
In early December, representatives from around the world gathered to devise the first-ever global treaty to slow the tide of plastics pollution. But they blew it. After two years of recurring talks, an agreement failed to materialize between members of the United Nations. Many of the representatives wanted to phase out or curtail the production of plastic, but they were stymied by a small group of leaders from oil-producing countries. “The outcome of those treaty talks is disappointing,” Melissa Valliant, the communications director of the advocacy network Beyond Plastics told Sierra.
An ambitious antiplastic coalition, mainly small island nations and those from the Global South, said regulations on plastics after they become waste didn’t go far enough. Plastics had to be regulated before they hit the shelves.
Historically, recycling has never made a significant dent in waste. Only 9 percent of the world’s plastic is recycled to date. In the US, the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that the 2018 national recycling rate was a paltry 8.7 percent (most of it goes into landfills). But even this figure is a lowball, experts say. Recycling numbers only account for plastic collected for recycling, not the fraction that’s actually recycled. In some places, such as Boise, Idaho, and Salt Lake City, Utah, plastic waste that’s collected for recycling is burned. Now, recycling rates are set to decrease in the coming years as plastic production ratchets up and recycler countries like China, which once was the dumping ground of the United States’ plastic waste, close their ports to American trash exports.
The other trouble with recycling is that plastics simply aren’t cut out for it. Polymer products contain a variety of additives, up to 16,000 different chemicals, and they complicate the sorting process for each category to be recycled effectively. A content labeling mandate on plastic products or simplifying the formula would help, but the chemical makeup for plastics is often proprietary.
Processing waste is also riddled with social injustices. Landfills, recycling centers, and incineration facilities, not to mention petrochemical plants, are often located in minority or low-income neighborhoods. A 2016 report found that people of color are twice as likely as white residents to live within a mile of industrial facilities in the Houston area. Residents in these polluted areas face about a 25 percent higher respiratory hazard and cancer risk than the rest of Houston’s households. This pattern of fenceline communities disproportionately paying the price repeats across the US and the rest of the world.
While waste regulation is indispensable, it won’t address the other upstream environmental impacts of plastics incurred long before these products enter our bins. Production is an energy-intensive and leaky process, and it accounts for 5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, a footprint that’s three times as large as that of aviation's. That may sound puny, but the plastics industry is actually the fastest-growing source of emissions—it’s poised to reach 19 percent of the world’s entire carbon budget by 2040.
“We're on course for an exponential increase of plastic production because the petrochemical sector is scaling up massively,” Sirine Rached, the global plastics policy coordinator at the advocacy group GAIA, said. As the world increasingly electrifies transportation and power generation, petrochemical companies are making up for lost sales by doubling down on plastics.
Environmentalists say that plastics regulation needs to kick in at the production level to nip the problem in the bud. This includes product bans, reducing plastics production, or setting caps. Without these measures, our plastic traffic is set to balloon by 70 percent in 2040 compared with 2020 levels.
“The only way to reduce waste disposal is to reduce material production because every single pound or ton of material that we bring into the world will become waste eventually,” Roland Geyer, an industrial ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said. “There’s no way around it.”
What cap level is appropriate? Anything helps, given the soaring trend of plastic production. A recent study in Sciencecalculated that curbing annual virgin plastic synthesis at 2020 levels alone can reduce waste by 40 percent and emissions by 18 percent. Another report suggested that freezing at projected 2025 levels eliminates 5.1 billion tons of waste, shrinking the world’s trash heaps by a third. These are still generous allowances, and even these limits can wrench the plastic growth curve downward if not flatten it.
Even though the UN negotiations ended without a treaty, the fight for a global treaty isn’t over—further talks will be held sometime next year to continue working toward a global agreement. However, experts have expressed doubt about whether the outcome will be any different. Unfortunately, for-profit companies can’t be counted on either. Earlier this year, Coca-Cola, named the world’s top plastic producer for six years in a row, walked back on its commitment to make all of its packaging 50 percent recycled plastic by 2030, whittling that goal to at most 40 percent by 2035.
Instead of relying on companies and international treaties, local government policy is needed to make a substantial difference, Valliant said. For starters, bans or fees on single-use plastics can bring material change. After the District of Columbia mandated food businesses charge customers five cents per disposable bag in 2009, plastic bag use dropped 75 percent in six months, and the number of wayward bags contaminating local waterways fell by 72 percent. Another study found that banning single-use plastic bags eliminates nearly 300 bags per person from entering circulation per year. As of January 2024, 12 American states have instituted such a ban.
In the US, anti-plastics legislation takes effect in a patchwork across states and cities. Elsewhere, other countries have enacted tighter stances. The UK and the European Union have levied a plastic tax on non-recycled waste. Another shining beacon is Rwanda, which has prohibited all businesses from dealing with plastic bags and bottles since 2008. Since 2019, the African nation has imposed a complete ban on all single-use plastics.
The US has scant federal laws concerning plastics. Just last September, a bipartisan recycling bill came into fruition, and it aims to standardize the 9,000 or so recycling jurisdictions across the US. It also mandates a 30 percent minimum of recycled content in packaging. A few more proposed bills are also plodding through Congress. The Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act of 2021, perhaps the US’s most ambitious framework yet, proposes phasing out a variety of single-use products and making businesses responsible for managing the waste that arises from their products. Most of these bills, however, don’t address the plastics problem at the source, only at the post-consumer stage.
“This is not rocket science. We know the solutions,” Valiant said. “It's all about the government putting in the necessary effort to prioritize people and the planet over industry profits so that society can move toward a world with less unnecessary plastic.”
Shi En Kim wrote this article for Sierra.
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By Doug Bierend for Civil Eats.
Broadcast version by Edwin J. Viera for New York News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration
On an unseasonably sunny day in March, at a community garden in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick, Dan Gross and Shaq Benn moved piles of wood chips and hosed down shoulder-high windrows of compost. Tucked underneath elevated train tracks, Know Waste Lands is the home base of the compost-hauling nonprofit BK Rot.
Its quarter-acre lot houses custom-built tool sheds and water pumps, solar panels for charging phones and e-bikes, and a motorized sifter designed by Gross. As the pair worked, a steady trickle of locals stopped at the entrance to drop off kitchen scraps—not trash, but the makings of “black gold.” Thanks to careful management, even on this balmy day the steaming heaps of rotting vegetables didn’t give off an offensive odor. “I actually like the smell,” Gross said during a break from work.
BK Rot is part of a diverse ecology of community compost organizations throughout New York City. For decades, with crucial support via the city’s NYC Compost Project, community composters have taken a small but significant part of the roughly 4,000 tons of organic waste generated by New Yorkers every day and converted it into a valuable resource.
Food scraps and landscaping debris, rather than going “out of sight” to landfills, where they emit significant greenhouse gases, are transformed into material that sustains local gardens, fortifies the city’s heat-mitigating tree population, and remediates contaminated soils. Meanwhile, local residents are educated and empowered to manage their own waste, less pollution goes into transporting and processing food scraps, and community bonds are deepened.
Community composting is a cherished part of many neighborhoods throughout New York. But its future is unclear. In November of last year, under Mayor Eric Adams and his sanitation department’s new commissioner, Jessica Tisch, the NYC Compost Project was cut entirely from the city budget. So was a contract with the nonprofit GrowNYC, which operated dozens of food-scrap drop-off locations throughout the city, processing millions of pounds of scraps each year.
The cuts decimated community compost operations, costing dozens of jobs, closing down numerous processing locations, and curtailing educational programming. All to save around $7 million, a mere 0.006 percent of the city’s budget, or “less than a rounding error,” Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine said at a recent rally in front of New York City Hall.
After an immense pressure campaign by activists, members of the city council, and other elected representatives, funding was restored at the end of June. With the vote, the budget for community compost was placed under the New York City council instead of the city’s sanitation department.
“I’m hoping that this will be less up for negotiation each budget season,” says Anna Sacks, legislative chair for the Manhattan Solid Waste Advisory Board and co-founder of NYC’s SaveOurCompost coalition. “There’s so much more that we could do, and it ends up by necessity concentrating our efforts onto preserving what’s in existence, versus imagining a more expansive alternative future.”
Saved From the Trash
The NYC Department of Sanitation began supporting community composting in the early 1990s. It launched the NYC Compost Project, establishing and supporting compost operations at four of the city’s botanical gardens, along with satellite facilities at various parks and community gardens. The project also supported the beloved, now discontinued Master Composter program, to which many community composters in New York trace their roots.
As community composting evolved, the city also advanced its own curbside collection programs, which rely on contractors for transport and off-site processing. The city generates its own compost at a massive, recently expanded facility in Staten Island, though community composters note that the inconsistent separation of waste going in results in lower quality compost. In 2016, the city’s anaerobic biogas digester in Newtown Creek began accepting food scraps. Developed in partnership with the National Grid energy company, the giant “digester eggs” receive a mixture of organic waste streams, including sewage.
Rather than creating compost, though, the process produces methane that is burned for energy (and profit), along with an organic sludge that is landfilled. Besides not building soil, critics point out, the system entrenches reliance on fossil fuel infrastructure. Often, the methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, is simply flared into the atmosphere.
Biogas and centralized organic waste collection are the other side of the community compost coin. They represent what Guy Schaffer, author of Composting Utopia: Experimental Infrastructures for Organics Recycling in New York City, calls “neoliberal waste management.”
“There’s this pattern that happens in a lot of places, where people try to fix waste problems by creating new markets for waste,” said Schaffer, who is also a board member of BK Rot. In his analysis, such market “solutions” tend to perpetuate social inequities. “We can see the setting of a price on waste so that people have to pay for it, but that often creates a situation where waste winds up getting recuperated by the most marginalized people.”
BK Rot is a somewhat unique example among the city’s community composters. Although it is largely funded by grants, including as part of a crop of new additions to the restored NYC Compost Project, it operates like a business: In exchange for a fee, the nonprofit collects organic scraps from residences and small businesses, hiring local Black and brown youth who haul the material away by cargo bike to be windrowed. The resulting compost can be bought directly onsite, or at local food co-ops, where it is sold in smartly branded pouches resembling bags of designer coffee.
The upshot of BK Rot’s work is that, along with creating a valuable resource and reducing landfill—they claim to have diverted 1.5 million pounds of organic waste to date—it provides work opportunities within a community where gentrification has made such opportunities increasingly scarce. Meanwhile, fewer food scraps fill trash bags on the street corner to attract rats, or fill up trucks and landfills that typically operate near marginalized neighborhoods.
“Bushwick is such a fascinating focal point for thinking about waste inequity and intersectional inequities as they relate to environmental justice,” Nora Tjossem, co-director of BK Rot, said. “[BK Rot] really is an answer to say, ‘Well, what if we can dream up a different system? What if we can address all of these problems at once, or at least a great number of them?’ . . . We can create a system that can actually create green jobs for young people, that can serve as a fossil-fuel-free waste alternative—and even reframe what waste is.”
Grab a Pitchfork
Each instance of community compost takes a slightly different approach, responding to local conditions and needs. They are what Schaffer calls experimental infrastructures, alternatives to the status quo established in its midst. To address the income inequities of the neighborhood where it operates, BK Rot takes a labor-centric view, making its priority one of engaging and employing local youth. Other composters may rely more on volunteer labor and try to leverage the value of the material itself, using markets to foster different relationships between communities and waste.
“These interventions are not idealistic escapes from reality,” Schaffer writes in Composting Utopia. “They remake the systems they inhabit. Community composters aren’t trying to figure out if community compost will or won’t work as a solution to New York City’s waste problems, they’re building worlds in which community compost does work, and inviting people to stop by and grab a pitchfork.”
Despite the struggles for funding, community composters remain supportive of the city’s various efforts to divert organic waste. In April 2023, Mayor Adams unveiled an initiative called PlaNYC: Getting Sustainability Done. Among its promises were an expansion of tree canopies, curbside rain gardens, and green jobs, along with a reduction in emissions. All these aims are helped by community compost, which makes the recent struggles over funding and access to land particularly vexing to community composters, who see their efforts as complementary, while noting that the city has ample funds for projects like a quarter-billion-dollar police training facility.
The Struggle Continues
The city’s restoration of the NYC Compost Project in June means that community compost can continue developing, though the form that will take is undetermined. A number of small operations will receive restored funding. “GrowNYC is no longer operating the food-scrap drop-off sites in the green market,” Sacks said. “As a result, there was money that we could reallocate to other groups. Something we as a coalition have wanted to see for a long time is not just the established community composting groups being funded by the city, but new ones that are doing great work also being funded.”
But the cuts have had lasting consequences. The nonprofit Big Reuse lost access to its Brooklyn Salt Lot site in January as result of rezoning. Since 2011, it had operated a state-of-the-art composting facility underneath the 59th Street Bridge in Queens, composting over 3 million pounds of Parks Department leaves and wood chips. Just last year, it generated 700 cubic yards of compost that went to 154 different parks, schools, community gardens, and various greening projects. The cuts to the Community Compost Project also forced Big Reuse to reduce its staff, and coincided with the loss of access to its Queensbridge site. The city’s Parks Department claimed it needed the site for a parking lot, despite owning an empty lot next door.
All of this underscores the crucial role of land, and of a positive relationship with the city, in enabling community composting. The Queensbridge site closed despite immense public outcry, expressed through representatives, petitions, letters, and public testimony at various hearings, press conferences and rallies. “It’s literally paving paradise to put up a parking lot,” said Eric Goldstein, a lawyer with the National Resources Defense Council who works to protect community composting. Other community composting operations have been disrupted at least in part, including the Lower East Side Ecology Center, Earth Matter, and all four botanical gardens.
Still, many of the city’s leaders do see the value of community compost. Twenty-nine out of 51 city council members, and four of the five borough presidents, signed letters to the mayor and New York Department of Sanitation supporting this summer’s restoration of funding to community composters. More than 49,000 New Yorkers also signed a petition demanding the same, in an effort organized by the SaveOurCompost coalition.
In parallel with the city’s expanding curbside program, community composters will again have the means to develop experimental infrastructures, while also filling the gaps within the city’s waste operations. With proper support, the diverse network of community compost operations can offer a meaningful alternative and complement to centralized, carbon-intensive systems, which in New York currently capture only about 5 percent of organics in the waste stream. The hope among community composters is that the value of what they do is now clear to the city and the public alike, and that New Yorkers will treat food scraps not as trash but an opportunity to improve life in the city.
“I hope that all this drama results in a broader public understanding of what composting is and what is required as a land-based movement,” said Gil Lopez, an activist for community compost and a member of the Queen Solid Waste Advisory Board Board. “Invisibilization of waste is what I believe the mayor and [the department of sanitation] want to make happen. This allows [and] demands the public not think about it once it leaves their home. Community composting humanizes ‘waste’ and transforms it into a local resource and tool for raising ecological literacy, civic engagement, physical activity, and local responsibility for reducing our own impact in environmental injustice.”
Doug Bierend wrote this article for Civil Eats.
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