Residents, advocates frustrated by lack of Islandwide system to compost food waste

When Rachel Goldstein and Eric Rowland moved to Westbury from Queens last fall, they had three tasks to officially set up their new home — install the internet, set up gas and electric providers, and find a place to donate food scraps.

They had been regular participants in the Queens Curbside Composting program, where residents’ yard waste and food scraps are collected weekly at curbside.

But when Goldstein went online to find out how to do the same from her rental house, she was surprised to learn that not only did the Town of North Hempstead have no food scrap collection programs, but the majority of Long Island, aside from one municipality, lacks a composting system.

"The opportunities were so abundant in Queens that I just kind of naively assumed," she said, noting the amount of farmland on Long Island. "It just seems like such a waste to just send so many food scraps into the landfill."

This discovery led Goldstein, 39, to find ShareWaste — an international app that connects people with home composters who accept food scraps for their own gardens. Each week, the couple fills the freezer shelf with food scraps, then drives to a ShareWaste host’s backyard or home and deposits them.

Goldstein and Rowland, 42, are part of a growing movement of Long Island residents who are prioritizing ways to compost food but are frustrated by the lack of an Islandwide system, experts say. At the same time, they said, the Island is missing out on a chance to divert waste in a more ecologically sound way.

Seeking alternatives for food scraps 

Beth Fiteni, president of the Long Island Organics Council, said that while more people are home composting, an app like ShareWaste helps to fill the gap on Long Island and gives the opportunity for renters to be eco-friendly. The app currently shows more than a dozen ShareWaste hosts throughout Long Island.

According to Will Flower, Winters Bros.' vice president of corporate and public affairs, Long Island’s 2.9 million residents produce more than 14 million pounds of municipal solid waste each day.

"That's a significant amount that really doesn't need to be going into the waste stream," Fiteni said. "We could be making our own soil for use here on our farms, for example."

Compared to other places, Long Island is behind when it comes to food scrap composting, Fiteni said.

While the Department of Environmental Conservation lists 161 food scrap drop-off locations and 32 food-scrap collection services in New York State, Long Island has only four locations accessible for residents — most on the East End.

The Town of Riverhead in 2022 launched Long Island’s first and only municipal-led residential food scrap collection program, which operates year-round. Others, like the Bellport Community Garden and East Hampton Compost's East Hampton and Sag Harbor farmers market locations, are volunteer-run and only accept food scraps for certain months during the year.

A different form of processing food waste is called anaerobic digestion, and while American Organic Energy broke ground on its digester in 2022, it has yet to open, a representative said.

Other countries have regular, unified food-scrap curbside pickups, Fiteni said. For example, South Korea banned landfilling food waste in 2005 and has operated a comprehensive composting program that recycles almost all of its discarded food into fertilizer, animal feed, or in the case of the Nanji Sewage Treatment Center, a type of fuel called biogas, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Even on a commercial level, Long Island is behind. The New York State Food Scrap Donation and Recycling law, which took effect in 2022, requires large institutions that generate an annual average of about two tons of food waste per week to donate excess edible food and recycle all remaining food scraps if they are within 25 miles of an organics recycler such as a composting facility or anaerobic digester. (The law does not apply to hospitals, nursing homes, adult care facilities and K-12 schools.) 

But there are no composting facilities on Long Island that accept food scraps and are taken off the Island, according to the DEC. And while there are more than 30 yard waste facilities on Long Island that are both town-run and privately run, none of them accept food scraps. 

Earlier this year, Suffolk County Executive Edward P. Romaine reached out to all of Suffolk’s 10 towns to be part of a future meeting to create a unified waste management system. But as of now, towns are responsible for their own composting programs, said Michael Martino, Suffolk County director of communications.

"We need all of these solutions to work," said Mark Haubner, president of the North Fork Environmental Council. "It can't be dumped all on the towns."

Pros, cons of composting

Fiteni said that in her experience, people don’t realize what can be composted, and municipalities or composting companies find that sorting the collected food scraps is too difficult.

Glenda Alvarado-Ostrow, founder of Grounds For A Peel, a commercial composting company in Wantagh, said she stopped accepting residential collections, for a fee, more than a year ago, after finding too many plastics mixed in with food scraps.

"The scraps become fermented, and at that point it’s difficult to compost things," she said.

But Sasha Pesci, professor of ecology at Hofstra University, said that despite the difficulties, composting is worth the trouble.

"The way the industrial food system is structured is very linear. A lot of food is wasted, it's thrown away to the landfill, and then it's not repurposed," she said. Too often, synthetic fertilizers are used in industrial agriculture, but utilizing food scraps for compost would eliminate that need, she said.

"When you compost, it creates more of a circle, because it becomes a resource that can be added to the soil," Pesci said.

When converted into compost, food scraps release carbon dioxide, providing nutrients and acting as a fertilizer. But when food scraps are mixed with other kinds of materials in a landfill, they break down anaerobically and don’t receive the oxygen needed to decompose organically. This process creates methane emissions.

"Methane is a greenhouse gas that contributes to the warming of the atmosphere, which is what contributes to global warming, and then that leads to climate change," Pesci said.

It’s estimated that food scraps make up about 20% of the waste in landfills, she said.

Most garbage collected from homes goes to one of four waste-to-energy plants where the garbage is burned, and electrical power is generated, according to a Winters Bros. 2023 report. A smaller portion of garbage is shipped to landfills outside of Long Island.

Pesci said Long Island is missing a huge opportunity to tap into utilizing food scraps, as it’s a cost effective resource and alternative to synthetic fertilizers, especially in farmland areas.

"Using compost actually contributes to healthier soils that are less likely to become eroded," she said. "It creates conditions also for other microorganisms to thrive, for different insects to live there. If you don't have that, it does contribute to less healthy soils over time."

Goldstein said she drops off her food scraps to a host in Hempstead, one of the places closest to her in Nassau County. 

Joseph Farhangian, 48, of Merrick, said he created a ShareWaste host profile about two years ago to collect food scraps to create compost for his backyard garden. He was inspired to live an eco-friendly lifestyle after seeing the effects of Superstorm Sandy in 2012 and wishes more people knew about the app.

"There’s so many things I want to explain about methane and nutrients," he said. "There's not an appetite for it around me, but I know there's other people that were interested in it as well. So that's why I went on it."

Goldstein said she and Rowland, who are expecting a baby in two weeks, plan to home compost when they eventually buy their own place. But until then, they’ll continue to drop off food scraps to whoever will take them. 

"I feel really grateful that these people are willing to take our food scraps," she said. "You're saying donate, but it feels like they're doing us a big favor."