Queens waste committee lays out plan for zero waste future
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A team of volunteers released a report detailing Queens’ waste habits. Photo via NYC.gov
By Rachel Vick
After a year of conducting interviews and collecting data, a group of volunteers from across Queens have released a report examining the shortcomings and successes of the borough’s trash habits.
The State of Waste in Queens, issued by the Queens Solid Waste Advisory Board Organizing Committee, made over a dozen recommendations to help the borough meet city goals of sending zero waste to landfills by 2030 and support the foundations for the next generation’s ability to reduce, reuse and recycle.
"The State of Waste in Queens report provides a detailed overview of how waste is currently managed in Queens and shows the borough can do much better in terms of diverting recyclable and compostable waste," Borough President Donovan Richards said in a statement to the Eagle. "My office looks forward to using [the report] as a resource as we work with QSWAB to develop innovative strategies to help our borough achieve a zero-waste future."
QSWAB was formalized by Richards in January , and will take on the task of working with community boards and organizations to implement the suggestions from the earlier iteration and tackling projects of their own.
Queens sent approximately 2,600 tons to landfills per day last year, according to the report. Despite tripling the reach of curbside compost collection from 2016 to 2018, Queens only saw a one percent increase in diversion to 16 percent.
Rockaway’s District 14 consistently reported among the lowest diversion rates, while Eastern Queens District 11 had the highest – doubling the rate seen in the Rockaways.
“What is becoming apparent is the [the need to make the] environmental justice case, the way we send garbage to landfills in communities of color like Newark or rural communities around the country,” said Wylie Goodman, co-founder of the organizing committee. “The actions we take in Queens affect communities in other places including communities of color and low income — this is an environmental justice issue”
Goodman said that community efforts to pick up slack during pandemic budget cuts — including community composting, gardening and cleanups — were impressive, but the scale at which Queens needs to improve diversion will require direct, concentrated efforts.
Goodman said that highest on the list of priorities is addressing Queens’ waste habits from a justice perspective and holding the biggest offenders of unsorted trash accountable. She described the lapses in landfill diversion from large buildings as a “missed opportunity.”
Also on the lists is the task of diverting food waste from restaurants to pantries and similar groups to ensure Queens residents have access to food while businesses, including the Department of Education, cut back on how much viable food they send to the dumps.
New York City public schools generate more than 40,000 tons of waste annually, according to the report. Specific data per school or type of waste is not readily available because school collections are picked up alongside residential garbage, but 148 schools across the city participated in organics collection form the Department of Sanitation.
Earlier this month, City Council passed a bill sponsored by Councilmember Jimmy Van Bramer mandating the DOE to develop and implement a plan to prevent food waste by Oct. 1.
In addition to the equitable return of composting programs and additional public school programming, the SWAB hopes to support the creation of shop programs in high schools to give students the ability to repair phones, giving them job skills and agency to divert chemical leaching e-waste.
“We included ourselves in the solution, we gave ourselves homework,” said Goodman, who will soon be stepping down from her recently appointed position on the board. “We know we can't take on everything long term, and people on the active board will have to look through the report and make priorities.”
“The process of writing it was an incredibly powerful story about an all volunteer research paper that was very democratic,” she added. “Trusting Queen residents to go out and do the research is in and of itself laudatory...it’s a real testament of the efforts over the past three years.”
The committee is holding their second live streamed meeting on May 26 at 6:30 p.m.
