Caption the Blaz and the Bin

 It's Caption Friday Crappynistas, looks like de Blasio is quite frustrated trying to get a word out of a compost bin in the middle of his recent daily briefing. Now he knows how it feels to deal with someone, or something, that has an aversion to transparency.

Composting program not progressing as planned

From the Queens Chronicle:

The city’s Department of Sanitation is delaying plans to expand curbside collections of compostable kitchen and yard waste beyond the program’s current footprint.

But DSNY officials say neighborhoods that already place their waste in brown bins for recycling will continue receiving the service while the city looks to adjust some aspects of the program.

“We believe that for the program to be successful over the long term, we must ensure New Yorkers are getting the very best service when curbside organics collection reaches their neighborhoods,” the DSNY said in a statement to the Chronicle. “To achieve this, the City is evaluating its current service with the goal of increasing efficiencies and streamlining the program and has temporarily placed the schedule for expanding the curbside organics program on hold.”

The agency expects to have a modified expansion schedule in the coming months.

The DSNY said it is expanding its outreach effort in communities that are slated to join the program soon after it restarts.

Dual-bin trucks create unforeseen problem

From Brooklyn Daily:

The city must rework how it collects large junk from Bay Ridge and Dyker Heights streets because the Department of Sanitation’s new garbage trucks have less space to cram in hulking waste, according to locals.

Mattresses, furniture, and other large items are piling up curbside because the area’s new trucks are split between trash and organics. Now an extra truck swings by occasionally to collect the leftovers, but workers miss items that are then left to fester for weeks. The new procedure is just one big mess, said a community leader.

The Department of Sanitation rolled out the so called “dual bin trucks” in October 2016, which are divided into two compartments — one for trash and the other for biodegradables — as part of the city’s organics collection program, where residents haul bins packed with food scraps and yard waste to the curb for pick up, according to a Sanitation spokeswoman.

But the trucks’ split trash compactor means the garbage side fills up faster and makes it more difficult to crunch what the city calls “bulk” items — anything bigger than four feet by three feet — and things get left behind, according to Beckmann. The result is a hodgepodge of junk littering the streets until a truck with the specific purpose of picking up bulk comes by. And that only happens if workers remember to fill out a form logging the rubbish and pass it along to a supervisor, according to an agency spokeswoman.

From October 2016 to March 2017, 311 logged nearly 300 complaints for missed bulk collection — compared to zero for the same period the year before, according to city data. But tossing a bookcase or a boudoir isn’t an everyday occurrence, so the city doesn’t think locals should be making such a stink, said an agency spokeswoman.

I'm sure this is also happening in Queens but no stories on it yet.

Bye, bye, brown bins?

From WNYC:

New York City's fledgling composting program has hit a major snag.

The nearly two-year-old pilot project takes food scraps from about a dozen neighborhoods and 400 schools as part of an effort to reduce waste. But the facility that processed most of that organic material was shut down last month, forcing the city to send the bulk of what's picked up to landfills.

The problem stems from the highly-contaminated nature of New York City's organic waste, known in the composting industry as "feedstock." Most composting companies are small operations that take feedstock that's relatively easy to break down, like rotting fruits and vegetables, leaves, and grass clippings.

But the Peninsula Composting Group's facility in Wilmington, Del., was more aggressive. It took that stuff and more, including discarded eggs and dead chicks from hatcheries, manure-filled animal bedding, and decaying meat and bones. The $20 million, 27-acre facility also took material that was highly contaminated with plain old garbage, using magnets to pull out metals and employees to pick out plastics and other non-organic stuff.

In October, Delaware's Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control refused to renew Peninsula's permit. That decision followed a public hearing that drew 200 people. Most in attendance testified against Peninsula, describing odors that were so awful they induced nausea and prevented children from playing outdoors.

Peninsula's closure is a big blow to New York City. The Department of Sanitation had relied upon Peninsula's leniency, because the city's composting waste stream right now is filled with a lot of contaminants, especially plastics. Deputy Sanitation Commissioner Bridget Anderson, who oversees the composting initiative, said the department allowed people to use plastic liners in the brown bins they set at their curbsides to get them to give the program a try.

"We're stuck right now in this place where we're trying to encourage the front end behavior and also figure out how to manage the processing side," she said. "So there's a little bit of a chicken-and-egg issue."

An idea that's literally full of crap

From the Daily News:

CCNYC is looking to start a composting program for dog poop. Modeled on similar pilot programs in upstate Ithaca and Cambridge, Mass., the group hopes to put small, anaerobic composting stations at several, high volume city dog runs.

The poop would be collected in biodegradable plastic bags then deposited into the composting stations where bacteria would break down the poop.

Though health regulations prohibit using dog waste generated fertilizer in a vegetable garden, Kostmayer said the product can be used to nourish grass on a baseball field, parks and even for landfills.

Using biodegradable bags would reduce plastic bags in city landfills, reducing the amount of waste in the city’s waste management system.

Cambridge’s pilot program used a $100,000 “anaerobic digester” which turns the gases given off by the decomposing poop into electricity.

Though he’s doubtful the city would be willing to commit that much cash to a pilot program, if successful, running all of the city’s dog waste through such a device could generate enough electricity to light 750 homes, Kostmayer said.