In 2025, we made great strides in supporting and facilitating community composting throughout the city! We've loved being able to provide community compost opportunities, educational materials, food scrap drop-off site, and aluminum compost bin installation. We're grateful to City Council for making community composting possible. Here are some highlights:
- Worked to re-open the Salt Lot, a mid-scale Gowanus community composting facility, in partnership with DSNY, which reopened early 2026 and now offers volunteer events, site tours, and a public food scrap drop off.
- Supported and collected from over +20 food scrap drop-off sites in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Roosevelt Island
- 157,270 lbs of food scraps were collected & processed locally in partnership with Earth Matter and DSNY
- Installed aluminum rat-proof compost cubes in 40+ community gardens and parks across the city, collectively capable of processing almost 500,000 lbs of material annually across all 5 boroughs to improve & scale the compost making process
- Delivered 400 bags of compost to 60 schools. Through a partnership with PS 456, Big Reuse provided four hands-on compost education days connecting first-grade students to soil health and local green spaces
- Provided 121 composting workshops & tabling events
- Engaged 24,901community members in composting with partners
- Supported compost use across parks and gardens through 55 volunteer events
- Total of 5,608 lbs browns distributed
- Total of 4,875 lbs compost distributed
- Trained Master Composters in Brooklyn
- Hosted 185 curbside outreach events across NYC:
- 8,440 community interactions
- Distributed 5,754 kitchen containers & 271 leaf bags
- Partnered with Gowanus Canal Conservancy to expand local composting and education
Join us in thanking City Council for supporting these programs, and ask them to continue their support past June 30, 2026! You can also provide written testimony (sample here) ahead of City Council's budget hearing on Sanitation and Solid Waste Management on Monday, March 16, 2026.