{"id":143846,"date":"2025-09-14T18:22:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-14T18:22:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/143846\/"},"modified":"2025-09-14T18:22:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-14T18:22:10","slug":"how-new-york-turns-millions-of-pounds-of-food-waste-into-black-gold","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/143846\/","title":{"rendered":"How New York turns millions of pounds of food waste into ‘black gold"},"content":{"rendered":"

The city sells some to landscapers and distributes the rest free of charge to residents, schools, and community gardens.<\/p>\n

“We’ve given out, we think, almost 6 million pounds of compost to the residents of New York City this year,” McDonnell said. The compost helps improve soil health, manage stormwater, and keep city greenspaces thriving.<\/p>\n

\"NEW-YORK-FOOD-WASTE-COMPOST\/REUTERS\/Christine<\/p>\n

\nStaten Island Compost Facility turns New York City food and yard waste into “black gold.” New York, N.Y., September 9, 2025. (REUTERS\/Christine Kiernan<\/p>\n

Nationwide, food scraps and yard waste are the largest share of household trash<\/a>, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. When sent to landfills, they generate methane, a potent greenhouse gas.<\/p>\n

“If we want to take a bite out of the climate crisis, we’ve got to get our food scraps out of landfills and into composting,” said Eric Goldstein, New York City Environment Director at the council.<\/p>\n

The city’s organics collection program requires all residents to separate food scraps, food-soiled paper, and yard waste from trash. While enforcement was paused earlier this year, it is expected to resume in 2026.<\/p>\n

(Reporting by Christine Kiernan, Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)<\/p>\n

Thumbnail courtesy of REUTERS\/Christine Kiernan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The city sells some to landscapers and distributes the rest free of charge to residents, schools, and community…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":143847,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[49,48,2848,6093,295,2998,74332,77035,66],"class_list":["post-143846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-climate","tag-climate-change","tag-environment","tag-food","tag-ghg","tag-recycle","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143846","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143846"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143846\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/143847"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}