Cool or Not Cool: Curbside Composting

Photo credit: NATALIE MUSUMECI/NEW YORK DAILY NEWSSo if you’re anything like me, you trudged home from work last week and found a little leaflet from The City in the mailbox. And, if you’re also like me, you tossed it on a pile of other mail, poured yourself a finger or two of something brown and checked out what Danaerys and her dragons have been up to. If you later took a sly glance at the leaflet before sticking it in the recycling, you may have experienced a frisson of delight at noting that New York’s compost collecting pilot program is being rolled out in Park Slope! This on the face of it would seem unequivocally cool, because hoarding rotting trash in your kitchen for a week, hauling it to the farmer’s market every Saturday regardless of the weather and heaving the wet steaming lump into a bin has gotten pretty old (those heroes who stir the glistening and frozen bricks of shit in those bins with a shovel and a smile deserve a fucking medal).

As we mentioned in January, the Brooklyn pilot includes the neighborhoods of Park Slope, Gowanus, Sunset Park, Greenwood Heights and Bay Ridge, slated to start in a couple of weeks. We’re each getting a classy brown wheelie-bin as part of our starter kit, and the eye-opening fact for me was that you can apparently compost meat, bones and ‘small amounts of grease, fat or oils’ (makes me wonder what kind of ghoulish flower beds these bins are destined for).

So let me play devil’s advocate here:  Like many of you, I am excited for the program to start. Reflexively, it seems good for the city, good for residents, and good for the environment. That said, do we need another smelly bin cluttering up our stoops and sidewalks? Is this a waste of city money when there are already so many ways for people to voluntarily compost? Are we, as conspicuously conscientious Brooklynites, being robbed of the smug satisfaction of taking a sticky bin of greeny-brown muck to the market each week? Why are we getting compost collection before Citi Bikes? Is this coming to Park Slope because it will be an overwhelming success and a feather in the new mayor’s cap? As if there were any doubt, an article in the Daily News even has the headline image of a woman in earth tones, holding a bucket of fucking fennel tops in the Coop’s produce aisle for christ’s sake. How do you feel about the composting program, good or bad? What questions do you have?

VIA THE DAILY NEWS