The City Council passed a bill on Thursday requiring New Yorkers to separate their food waste from regular trash, with mandatory composting coming to all five boroughs by next year.
The residential mandate will roll out borough by borough, starting with Brooklyn and Queens this October, followed by the Bronx and Staten Island in March 2024, and Manhattan that October.
The goal is to reduce the amount of organic waste the city sends to landfills, where it produces a particularly potent greenhouse gas called methane.****
More about the infrastructure for composting in NYC here. Food scraps and sewage sludge are digested in giant tanks to make methane, which is provided to the natural-gas utility; the solids can then be turned into soil.