The Compost in the Machine
Why Randy Mastro's "Pause" Is Emblematic of The City's Lose-Lose Anti-Democratic Politics
Last Friday, New York’s new Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro announced that the city would stop collecting fines for residents who disobeyed the citywide composting mandate. The fine collection had begun two weeks earlier, on April 1st. The Department of Sanitation reported that in both weeks, they had collected more than three million pounds of compost a week, up from less than a million pounds this time last year, and breaking the previous record that was set in November, when autumnal yard waste collection usually boosts compost volume far above normal levels. The city issued 1,855 fines in the first week, and 1,758 in the second week, a clear sign that the first round of fines were bringing people into compliance. At that rate, by June, the city would have broken 4 million pounds a week, and would have issued fewer than a thousand fines. This would have become the new normal. Instead, as Mastro decreed, the city will not collect any fines for the rest of the year, making this a live issue for the next mayor.
Composting has a PR problem. People are put off by the image of smelly bags of food waste, which they imagine having to carry long distances to massive, horrifying compost heaps. (Under the city’s new laws, the mandated ubiquity of bins will actually make this process much easier and less smelly than ordinary old-fashioned trash collection.) Some, like John Tierney in the conservative City Journal, see composting as an inevitable extension of the city’s flawed plastic recycling program, which appeals to waste-conscious liberals but doesn’t always stand up to cost-benefit analysis. Tierney’s analysis is idiotic, but it exploits the popular imagining of compost as an absurd fixation of tree-hugging liberal environmentalists with too much time on their hands, something nice for them to do in their garden to signal affinity for the natural world, which they might nag you for not doing, even though it has no tangible impact.
In reality, composting can be hugely impactful--perhaps the single easiest way for an ordinary citizen to contribute meaningfully to climate change mitigation. Briefly: unsorted, organic waste will sit in a landfill in a giant heap for months or years. Most organic (carbon-based) material will decompose into carbon dioxide (CO2), but that requires two oxygen molecules for every one carbon. Deep in that giant landfill heap, most of the organic material will not get much oxygen, so it will decompose into methane gas (CH4) instead. Methane is 86 times as potent as carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere for the first twenty years after its emitted. By separating out the organic material and then stirring it frequently, composting keeps the methane emissions as low as possible. Methane makes up 11% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and because of its potency, any reduction has a disproportionately large effect. Project Drawdown, a nonprofit climate action guide, ranks the top ninety three climate solutions by potential impact, and regularly updates their rankings as new research emerges. “Reducing Food Waste Emissions” is currently number one on that list.
New York City generates more than a billion pounds of organic waste a year, about a third of our total waste. A 2021 NYC Independent Budget Office report calculated that the net averted emissions from composting that waste would add up the equivalent of 657,000 tons of carbon emissions (valued at a social cost of $28 million), even after adjusting for the emissions from collecting and transporting that compost, emissions which will go to zero as the city electrifies its garbage truck fleet.
It gets better. When you compost in your backyard, the organic matter just decomposes into carbon dioxide gas (which, remember, is great, because that means it’s not methane). But when you do it at the scale of a large city, the process generates biogas, a renewable energy source that can be burned for fuel as an alternative to natural gas. This fuel powers the processing plant, but the plant creates more biogas than it needs, and the excess goes to the grid, where at full-scale it will be able to heat more than 5,000 homes (it’s already heating almost 3,000), which will save the grid more than $20 million, and avert another 100,000 tons of emissions. The rest of the compost (the dirt part) is also valuable, and can be donated to parks, or sold in bulk to landscapers, which will bring in millions more.
Finally, this process removes a million tons a year, or 33%, of the city’s total waste, where it costs the sanitation department more than $125 a ton to ship to a landfill. The composting process isn’t cheap either, and it currently costs much more per ton to process compost than regular trash in NYC, mostly because it’s inefficient to send trucks to collect compost from bins across the city when there isn’t much compost to collect. The solution is simple: Make sure everyone is actually composting. The 2021 report estimates if the city diverts only half of all organic waste (or 15% of all waste), then it will be able to use that scale to reach the efficiency per ton of San Francisco’s composting program, at which point it will save the city money. From the report: “There is a point where large-scale organics collection could be not just environmentally beneficial but also cost effective. But to get there, the city government (likely across several administrations) and the public would have to make it a priority.”
In sum, universal composting in NYC would avert tons of tons of ultra-harmful methane emissions, generate tons of valuable compost and renewable biogas worth tens of millions of dollars while averting even more emissions, and would eventually just straight up save the city money on its sanitation budget. It is a win-win-win.
In the City Journal article I mentioned before, Tierney quibbles with the last point. His (lazy, unsourced, full of logical holes) opinion is that the collection will never become more efficient than landfill garbage per ton, and that it will always be an expensive boondoggle. This is a dubious claim, because many cities have already achieved necessary efficiency for per-ton cost-savings, because the path to efficiency is obvious (it costs the same amount for a truck to drive down a street with fifty full bins as it does a street with only one, so the price per ton will quickly drop as more people compost), and because he offers no concrete evidence besides some snarky complaints about plastic recycling, a completely different problem.
But if you are going to criticize the city’s composting initiative, or advocate for a different policy, this is at least the correct point of criticism. Composting is good in part because it will eventually save the city money. It doesn’t save us money yet though, and it costs a lot upfront to build out the infrastructure, so if it will never save us any money, perhaps we should never have spent all this money (tens of millions of dollars in physical infrastructure, research, planning, bin distribution, educational resources) to set it up.
However, we’ve already spent that money, the system is in place, the path to efficiency is clear, and so there’s no cost-benefit rationale for stopping now. And Deputy Mayor Mastro did not claim there was one during his announcement, instead tweeting on Mayor Eric Adams’s account that “Composting REMAINS mandatory, but we also heard from New Yorkers, and we are extending the grace period for composting fines at smaller buildings to give residents more time to better learn how to get rid of their waste.”
This, to use a relevant metaphor, is garbage. Universal compost collection began last October, and the city gave building owners a six-month grace period to set up their bins. In that time, the Department of Sanitation distributed tens of thousands of bins, handed out resources, set up a fancy new website, held weekly information sessions, and offered tours of the composting facility. And all this a full year after the bill to mandate universal composting was passed by City Council in July 2023. Landlords have had two years to learn about this, and six months to adjust to it. They are not confused, they are not being ambushed, they simply don’t feel like complying, and would prefer not to pay fines. No sane government would take this to be a legitimate concern.
To be clear, I am not someone who believes that every decision should be made based on the cost-benefit analyses of economists (though many of my Bloomberg-loving, Kathryn Garcia-voting, Cuomo-curious readers are). If an idea is good, you should have to go out and convince people that it’s good, and you should figure out how to win enough support to get it through the messy, expensive development process and into a fully-scaled, self-sustaining entity.
This is exactly what the city did. After some small pilots, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a democratically elected, widely popular mayor, announced his intention to make composting mandatory citywide IN 2013!!! His successor, Bill de Blasio, was supportive, gradually expanding the curbside program to serve 3.5 million of New York’s 8 million residents, before shutting it down because of the coronavirus lockdowns. The program remained in limbo for more than a year, but after the aforementioned Independent Budget Office report showed that it could be cost-effective, Brooklyn city councilmember Shahanna Hanif (who represents my district), took up the cause and eventually shepherded the expanded mandate through City Council, where it passed with a supermajority of votes in June 2023. Over and over, for twelve years, the people of this city have voted for mayors and city councilors who support this initiative. There is nothing democratic about ignoring them, and instead obeying the whims of a tiny, but politically connected, minority of (by definition) wealthy landlords who would adjust to the program within months and benefit from the savings just like everyone else.
Indeed, stopping fines, even temporarily, imperils the whole project, because it guarantees that the program will have low compliance, and therefore, continue to not be cost effective. “What's going to happen is, the diversion rates are going to get really low, and then [the City] is going to say, 'Well, it's too expensive,'” predicted Clare Miflin of the Center for Zero Waste Design, a local nonprofit advocacy group. In a time of imminent federal budget cuts, appearing “too expensive” even briefly could prove fatal for new programs like this one.
Even if it doesn’t, and the fines start up in six months, as they miraculously did (for now) with congestion pricing, it’s just incredibly dumb governing. It’s horribly embarrassing that this project, which Seattle and San Francisco got up and running in the mid-aughts, has taken us twelve years and counting. There are too many bottlenecks in the governing processes of American cities. Some, like research, community input periods, and environmental impact reviews, exist for a reason, even though they need to be streamlined. But arbitrary vetoes and pauses from cowardly and corrupt leaders in the executive branch have no purpose whatsoever.
A word on the cowardly and corrupt leader in question. Randy Mastro, our Deputy Mayor as of March 20th, for all intents and purposes runs New York City for the next nine months, while his boss is off futilely running for re-election and posting uncannily horny tweets about the weather. He got his start in the Rudy Guiliani administration, first serving as his chief-of-staff, then graduating to Deputy Mayor for Operations. In that time, in addition to working on all the other atrocities of the Giuliani Administration, Mastro oversaw the Parks Department, which was later sued by the federal government for widespread racial discrimination in its hiring and employment practices during his tenure. Mastro then went into private practice, where he represented an eclectic mix of causes, including then-city councilmember Bill de Blasio’s failed suit to stop Bloomberg’s term-limit extension. Later, Mastro led a review of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s Bridgegate scandal which putatively exonerated Christie, and which a federal judge criticized for its obfuscatory sloppiness. Most recently, Mastro found work in the Garden State again, representing Governor Phil Murphy’s pathetic and hopeless litigation against the city’s congestion pricing initiative, which he repeatedly lost and then billed the taxpayers of New Jersey more than a million dollars for the privilege.
Why, a reasonable person might ask, is a Guiliani aide with a long history of conservative advocacy (and a familiar mix of incompetence and corruption) de facto running a city that voted with a D+40 margin last November? Indeed, the City Council emphatically rejected Mastro when he was nominated for the city’s corporate counsel, a much lower-profile position, last fall. The answer is because as Eric Adams inches ever closer to becoming a MAGA Republican, there’s no one else willing to do the job. Maria Torres-Springer, the widely beloved “adult in the room” who competently ran the city while Adams fought his federal indictment, quit after Adams embraced Trump to get his charges dismissed.
Mastro’s off to a hot start–in addition to pausing the composting fines, he ordered the city DOC to help ICE set up an office on Rikers Island (they’re stopped, for now, by a Federal judge, but if you wanted to disappear New Yorkers to El Salvador quickly and at scale, this is how you would do it), and he’s paused the plan to build senior housing on the site of Elizabeth Street Garden, the world’s dumbest NIMBY fight which the city thought they had finally won last fall. Despite pushback from government watchdogs, Mastro has retained his private clients, including his work for Madison Square Garden owner James Dolan, while in public office.
This is what an Andrew Cuomo mayoralty would look like if you want a preview. New Yorkers know what it’s like to have a leader who runs as a Democrat but then hands all the power to Republicans once he’s in office, who cuts corrupt deals with the real estate industry and views the opinions of outer-borough landlords, who make up a tiny share of the city’s voting population, as the only ones that matter, who relishes flaunting good governance rules and has no problem employing aides with flagrant conflicts of interest, and who supports using executive power to arbitrarily pause win-win initiatives that the people voted for and desperately need.
A lot of commentary about the candidates in this election focuses on the left-right axis. But the more important axis to judge candidates is: Are you ever willing to pursue slam-dunk, obvious, win-win policies, and ignore the complaints of a small, but politically connected group of outer-borough landlords who will resist any change, from constructing new housing, to building more bike lanes and pedestrian-friendly infrastructure, to modernizing trash collection? Put another way, would you have suspended the fine collection for composting violations? Kathryn Garcia, the former sanitation commissioner who came inches away from becoming mayor in 2021, was a loud advocate for universal composting, and would not have done so if she were mayor today. Andrew Cuomo definitely would have. Let’s find a mayor who won’t.
Wow! I learned so much reading this and will share it with others. Thank you.
Super informative.
Also, I propose we refer to composting opponents as Landfill Huggers.