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After forcing New Yorkers to spend billions of dollars for the privilege of sorting their garbage into recycling bins, municipal officials have found an even costlier — and grubbier — way for residents to spend their time in the kitchen.
They must now separate food waste into compost bins or face the wrath of the city’s garbage police, who will be digging through trash looking for verboten coffee grounds and onion peels.
The inspectors handed out thousands of summonses this month, prompting so much public anger that the city has temporarily ceased issuing fines — but the edict remains in effect, and the fines are due to resume next year.
Composting is the most nonsensical form of municipal recycling: It delivers little, if any, environmental benefit at the highest cost.
In addition to wasting people’s time, it attracts rats to compost facilities, puts more fuel-burning trucks on the road and diverts tax dollars from what was once a core priority of the Department of Sanitation — keeping the streets clean.
Whatever its appeal to suburbanites with yards and gardens, composting is absurdly impractical in a city — especially one facing a massive budget deficit.
Where are New York apartment dwellers supposed to find space in their tiny kitchens for yet another waste bin?
It’s bad enough that elderly residents must schlep their newspapers and bottles to basement recycling bins instead of simply using the trash chute — now they’re expected to haul bags of rotting food, too.
How are landlords and the superintendents of large buildings supposed to enforce the law?
Unlike the city’s inspectors, they never signed up to be trash detectives, much less dumpster divers.
Over three decades of chronicling the folly of recycling, I’ve described it as the sacramental ritual of a well-intentioned but misguided religious movement.
That’s no longer an adequate explanation.
Moral fervor may account for why some New Yorkers are willing to store their leftovers in a smelly bin for a week, but it doesn’t explain why a city too broke to maintain basic services would splurge on a policy so pointless and irritating to voters.
The composting mandate makes political sense only when you consider the motivations of the industries and progressive activists who lobbied for it: money and power.
When New York launched its curbside recycling program in the 1990s, city officials confidently predicted that the new pick-up regime would lower the cost of waste disposal.
The opposite happened. Recycling brought not only much higher costs but also dirtier streets: Budgetary pressures led the Department of Sanitation to slash the number of street cleaners.
In a 2020 report for the Manhattan Institute, Howard Husock estimated that eliminating the recycling program would save the city $340 million annually — more than half the entire Parks Department budget.
But expensive as recycling is, it’s a bargain compared to composting.
The city’s Independent Budget Office reported in 2021 that collecting and processing a ton of organic waste cost more than three times as much as handling a ton of recyclables.
And while recycling metals and paper products does at least reduce greenhouse emissions by saving energy, the greenhouse benefits from composting are too minuscule to justify it.
So why bother with compost bins? Why waste tax dollars to irritate voters while doing little or nothing for the environment?
Because it benefits progressive politicians seeking endorsements and campaign contributions from the special interests pushing an agenda called Zero Waste.
In 2015, Mayor Bill de Blasio embraced this agenda, pledging that New York City would stop sending any trash to landfills by 2030.
It’s a ridiculously unrealistic goal, but chasing it creates jobs and profits for professional activists, lobbyists, environmental groups, green-energy firms and the waste-management industry.
The recycling religion has matured into a lucrative arm of the environmental-industrial complex, sustained by vast corporate welfare.
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The federal Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 was budgeted by Congress to allot nearly $400 billion for green projects, including recycling.
But independent analysts calculate that in the next decade it will actually cost taxpayers at least double that amount, and possibly as much as $2 trillion.
The recycling industry also gets plenty of direct and indirect subsidies from state and local governments — like the tax dollars spent on the city’s recycling program, and the higher utility bills resulting from the state’s green mandates.
But it’s not just about the money: The composting mandate also appeals to progressive politicians and activists because it satisfies the same impulse we saw so vividly in blue states during the pandemic.
As HL Mencken put it, “The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.”
Forcing people to use compost bins makes no more sense than padlocking playgrounds or requiring masks outdoors during COVID — decrees that devout progressives eagerly enforced.
For them, petty tyranny is a feature, not a bug.
Never underestimate the satisfaction some people take in bossing everyone else around.
John Tierney is a contributing editor of City Journal, from which this column was adapted.