Waste Management

Reduce waste and support green sustainable alternatives to waste management that will not further degrade the environment or our health.

Problem 

There is too much waste, New Yorkers produce 2,500 truckloads of garbage each day. The current plans to address the waste are either burning it, which is a key contributor to degraded air quality in urban areas, or shipping it to landfills via barges, which is incredibly expensive. While composting is a less harmful way to manage waste, it can be inefficient due to the lack of accessible drop-off centers in boroughs outside of Manhattan and limited participation at the local level. Furthermore, there have not been enough campaigns or information about composting to make it a larger movement.

Our plan 

We want to promote sustainable and equitable waste reduction while creating efficient alternatives.

• Support companies in reusable spaces, and incentivize waste reduction.

  • Introduce a financial incentive to reduce waste in which garbage producers pay fees based on the volume of waste removed. 

  • Permit flexibility in the frequency of refuse collection, type of street waste collectors, recycling practices, and shift scheduling.

• Make composting food waste mandatory.

• Improve efficiency and availability of composting services.

  • Create more accessible drop-off centers, with flexible hours, and local processing sites.

  • Shift away from long-term contracts with large waste collection corporations and grow contracts with composting services.

• Strengthen waste management efforts at a local level.

  • Increase community involvement in Solid Waste Advisory Boards (SWAB).

  • Subsidize SWAB budgets in boroughs that have less funding to ensure equitable management. 

Why it Matters

Improper waste management threatens our air quality and contributes to our climate crisis. We need to lower our carbon footprint by holding corporations accountable, supporting composting initiatives, and overall reducing our dependence on unhealthy artificial chemical fertilizers. The future of the world and our health depends on it. A special thanks to Vandra Thorburn for sharing your composting expertise with us!