With a month until curbside composting starts, it’s important to reflect on the history of grassroots movements to keep uptown clean.
In the summer of 1969, a group of young people blocked traffic on 110th Street with piles of garbage to protest poor sanitation services. The “Garbage Offensive,” as it was called, was an action engaged by the Young Lords Party; it was their first campaign. Today, however, it seems that sanitation is yet again an issue knocking on the doors of northern Manhattan, and Harlem in particular.
Due to effective citywide campaigning and Councilmember Shaun Abreu’s advocacy, the New York City Council reinstated the Community Composting for the FY2025 budget, restoring $6.245 million to programs. While impressive, that is still very much a temporary solution. Community Composting should be a fixed program that is funded by the city for years to come.
As a land steward of a local nonprofit horticultural organization, I have seen the positive impact of community composting and the interpersonal connection with our community, even through the smallest exchange of words of someone dropping off their food scraps.
Community composting should be reinstated permanently because it helps our most vulnerable to combat climate change. Processing food waste on a micro level not only can build community, it tackles the most important issue of our time: climate change.
Due to the Urban Heat Island Effect, a phenomenon caused by the high presence of skyscrapers and the sweltering heat from asphalt across NYC, communities of color are unduly affected by climate change. According to the Columbia Climate School, Black city residents die from heat stress at double the rate of white residents. The demographics of communities in Northern Manhattan — communities primarily made up of Black and Latiné people of color — mean that we need to resolve issues that exacerbate the heat island effect, and Community Composting can do just this.
By improving our way of life when it comes to air quality and shade, composting will help care for and protect street trees. Compost — or “Black Gold,” as it’s called — can hold 20 times its weight in water, so adding just 1% organic matter to a garden can help the soil hold thousands of gallons of extra water, preventing future floods and soil compaction in the Harlem area.
Community Composting needs permanent funding because through it, our city can offer more green jobs. The Frank White Memorial Garden, a sanctuary for people of all ages, is doing it right and serving as a model for other organizations, such the LES Ecology Center, Big Reuse, BK Rot, Earth Matter, Riverside Conservatory, GreenFeen, East New York Farms, and many others. It is home to an Educational Learning Center for the enrichment of young people and a place to gain real on-the-job training in an array of sustainable practices, particularly hot-box composting.
Nando Rodriguez, a land steward of the garden and senior manager of the Environmental Program at Brotherhood Sister Sol (BroSis), has paved the way for young people to create a sense of community and prepared them for the workforce through his composting efforts. By advocating for the diversion and processing of food waste on a micro level, he helps funnel money to young people and refocuses more attention on how compost can be used more efficiently and sustainably.
Looking toward the future, Rodriguez has initiated a campaign to bring 1K Composting Systems to NYC. A collaboration with BroSis and Open Road NY, this campaign has the potential to bring more composting systems to more spaces in hopes of creating a more sustainable network that moves away from a massive industrial scale that is built on numbers. This campaign puts the effort back into the hands of the community.
In the next month, curbside composting will come uptown as a result of the Zero Waste Act being passed. Originally terminated last year on December 31, due to Mayor Adams’s budget cuts, it was revived and reinstated by community efforts.
Curbside composting needs to be a mainstay in our city budget. Today, 55 years after the Young Lords Party protest, Northern Manhattan is in need of permanent solutions if it is to remain clean. It is imperative that our city leaders follow Abreu’s lead and maintain funding for initiatives that keep our city clean.
In the words of Zoe Tagoe, a BroSis leader, community composting is “the environmental spin on ‘one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.’” It helps her “see the things I once called trash in another light,” she said. It is why she joins the age-old cry of “!Basta ya!” and demands that our city keep funding initiatives like Community Composting.
Gabriel-José Maldonado is the Environmental Program horticulturalist for Brotherhood Sister Sol and the lead land steward for the Frank White Memorial Garden. To teach young people how to garden, he curates workshops centered around composting, botany, and agriculture.