NYC NOW - September 11, 2023: Midday News

Episode Date: September 11, 2023

Remembrances are underway to mark the 22 years since the 9/11 attacks. Also, as Hurricane Lee continues its steady swim across the Atlantic, meteorologists say they may not know Lee’s final destination until late in the week. Finally, as New York City rolls out its municipal composting program, community gardens have been leading this effort for years. Domingo Morales of Compost Power and waste activist Gil Lopez highlight the journey from food waste to fertile soil.

Welcome to NYC Now. Your source for local news in and around New York City from WNYC. It's Monday, September 11th. Here's the midday news from Michael Hill. Remembrances are underway to mark the 22 years since the 9-11 attacks. Paul Robert Ekna. Constantine Economos. Barbara G. Edwards.

Dennis Michael Edwards. The 9-11 Memorial Museum's annual conference. Commemoration includes the traditional reading of the names and moments of silence. Vice President Kamala Harris is attending the ceremony, along with Mayor Eric Adams and Governor Kathy Hokel. Starting at dusk, the museum won't light up the sky with two light beams as part of its annual tribute in light. Those lights will shine until dawn tomorrow. As Hurricane Lee continues its studies swim across the Atlantic, we may be wondering if or when our area might feel any impact. Meteorologists say they may not know, Lee's final destination until late in the week. National Hurricane Center, deputy director,

Jamie Rome, says tomorrow on Wednesday we'll help decide. That's when the major hurricane will start to encounter weaker steering currents or the atmospheric forces that are shoving it along. If you think like a leaf in a stream, that leaf is moving along and then it hits like an eddy or a weak spot in the stream and just kind of slows down and stops as it awaits the next thing to push it. Even if Lee ultimately stays hundreds of miles from the mainland, Rome expects the storm's massive size to still disturb the East Coast with dangerous rip currents, already hitting the southeast, and expected to move northward through the week.

80 with showers now are humid, floodwatch till midnight, because we're expecting some slow-moving showers and storms to dump quite a bit of rain on us, mostly cloudy today, and a high of 80. It's WNYC, I'm Michael Hill. We're in a Hattie Carth and Community Garden in Bedstuy this morning. Community gardens can be a great resource if you're looking to grow some delicious vegetables in the city, but many of them also provide an environmentally sound way for New Yorkers to deal with food waste. Composting diverts food waste from the landfill and turns it into soil instead.

And while the city is now rolling out a municipal program to make that happen, for many years that effort has been led locally by volunteers and nonprofits, and very often that takes place in community gardens. Domingo Morales is the founder of Compost Power, which builds compost sites around the city, especially in underserved communities. Gil Lopez is a compost educator with big reuse, which contracts with the city to provide composting services.

They join us now here at the Hattie Carthing Community Garden, once again, in Bedstead. Good morning. It's a pleasure to be here with you. First, would you talk about the scale of food waste in the city and why this matters, Domingo? Well, I think it's safe to say we're looking at about 30% of the waste

that goes to landfill that is actually food waste. And if you take a deeper dive into those numbers, you'll find that in restaurants, it's more like 50% of what goes into the waste. Same thing with supermarkets. So a large percentage of the New York City waste that we use resources to truck, to transfer stations and landfills,

can actually be recital. or upcycled into finished compost that can rebuild New York City soil. How about you, Gil? Yeah, food waste is a huge thing in New York City. We have lots of it. When we send it to the landfill, it's not some magical place that's away. It actually ends the effectiveness of our nutrient cycles, which is the cycle of life. But when we compost it effectively, then we turn it back into soil and it becomes the foundational building block of all carbon-based life forms.

on this planet. Domingo, you've helped a lot of local level efforts to increase composting, building out systems and community gardens and working a set of infrastructure at New York City Housing Authority properties. Would you tell us about some of those efforts? Yeah, I think, you know, one of my philosophies is that you need infrastructure and education in order to change behavior. And in public housing, the infrastructure to do sustainable things like community gardening, recycling off food waste is not really there. They haven't been invested in and no one's pouring money into it. So I actually build compost sites in these public housing communities

that just don't have access to this kind of education. And then we hire the young adults that come from public housing to actually manage these systems. So we give them a sense of ownership and we show them that it's residents that bring this power back to the community. That's why we use the name compost power. Do you have good participation? I have great participation.

There's some sites where participation is a little sparse and we're trying to kick up participation by trying things like open mics or picnics and barbecues. But there are some spaces where it just clicked. Like our East Harlem site, we have to actually rebuild it this full because it's already surpassed its capacity. So we're going to expand that bin system and we're also going to take the abandoned garden next to our site and renovate that as well. We like to not only build compost sites, but make the curb appeal of the whole community even better. And Gil, you've done a lot of work with collecting food scraps and neighborhoods around the city. With the city beginning curbside collection, now in Queens, soon in Brooklyn, and next year and the rest of the city, what happens to these community-led efforts and collection points?

Well, that's a huge question in the minds of everyone that's been doing this work right now. I mean, obviously the community gardeners that do composting in the city are going to keep right on composting their food scraps and their neighbor's food scraps, there's not really a question about that. It's where the people who are getting funding to do this work, there's a few sites in the city that operate at a community scale, but they're a bit larger than what can happen at a community garden. So at these larger community scale sites that are primarily New York City Compost Project sites funded by Department of Sanitation and operated by various nonprofit organizations, they process a lot more food scraps and they they collect and aggregate food scraps coming from farmers markets,

commuter stops, community gardens that don't have the capacity that are collecting food scraps, but don't have the capacity to process all of them on site. And they're a huge resource to everyone who drops off their food scraps, but we're not sure as the city rolls out the brown bin program and invests a lot of money in this Department of Sanitation program, whether these sites will continue to be funded or operational. What do you think of that? I think it's devastating. I think that community activists and composters have worked really hard for decades to build this program.

Domingo, what would you have the city do? I'd have the city move in the direction we have been moving in before the pandemic, which is build as many community-scale composting sites as possible. Community gardens, urban farms, use those places in the community to compost their scraps, and then use the network of the DSMI Brown Bin program as sort of like a combined system overflow, right? If a community garden gets overwhelmed with food scraps, hey, DSMY, can you make a pickup and take these scraps off of our hand?

Then it becomes we're not dependent on one system, right? We're not just dependent on community gardens and small-scale composting. We're not just dependent on the centralized industrial realm of organics recycling in New York City. but we have this broad network that can take different levels of waste in all different parts of the city. It keeps our education here. It keeps the humans interacted, but it also gives us that processing capacity that we might need by partnering up with the DSMI program. How about you, Gil? I think the city should implement the brown bin program, and since we don't have the capacity to process all of the food scraps in the city, They should move forward with the co-digestion, and then we should rapidly begin to build more community-scale composting sites within the city.

I think every single community district needs to have a community-scale composting project so that people within their neighborhood can see what happens to organic food waste and not send it to other communities, send it away, and they can participate in the processing of their food waste and understand how recycling of organics creates Earth. because honestly, that just makes us more human when we're involved with that process. And as the city does that, they should also help other sites like community gardens and farmers markets that are collecting food waste in order to pick those up and process them at these larger city-funded community skillsites. Domingo Morales is the founder of Compost Power, and Gil Lopez is a compost edictors. Educator with Big Reuse. Thank you both for joining us this morning.

Thank you so much for having us. The City Sanitation Department did not return a request for comment to WNYC. Thanks for listening. This is NYC now from WNYC. Be sure to catch us every weekday, three times a day, for your top news headlines and occasional deep dives. And subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be back this evening.