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This story first appeared on Civil Eats.
A few days a week, a colorfully painted box truck can be spotted weaving through the narrow streets of Lower Manhattan to pick up food scraps and bring them to a compost yard in East River Park. When they arrive at the yard, Kellan Stanner goes through the freshly collected scraps half of a scooped-out watermelon, warped vegetable stems, lopsided apple cores looking for anything that can t be composted.
After Stanner, who manages the compost operation at the Lower East Side Ecology Center (LESEC), decontaminates the pile, he ll mix the fresh scraps with wood chips to create just the right balance of carbon and nitrogen in order to replicate the natural process of decomposition, he says.
Jan 15, 2021
After roughly a decade of service in New York City, the last two community composting sites will not have their leases renewed. These sites are situated on land belonging to the city’s Parks Department: the Lower East Side Ecology Center is at Corlears Hook Park in Lower Manhattan, and Big Reuse is located under the Queensboro Bridge in Long Island City. Both are run by non-profits.
The Parks Department cites case law from 2014 as the primary reason for the removal of the sites, but “composting advocates argue that the case doesn t apply, because it involved a massive 20-acre ‘industrial’ composting site.”
How manufacturers make it impossible to repair your electronics By Irina Ivanova The right to repair movement
Electronics makers this week are unveiling a slew of consumer gadgets designed to make life cleaner, safer, more comfortable, more entertaining and even more eco-friendly. But there s a downside, say consumer advocates: Most of the products are challenging, if not impossible, for most people to fix, and are likely to last just a few years before becoming e-waste. When you see a project demoed, you don t think about its lifecycle you don t think about what happens when the software updates stop coming, said Nathan Proctor, director of the Right to Repair Campaign for U.S. PIRG, a public-interest research group.
NYC’s Ambitious Composting Initiative Has Decomposed
arrow The Big Reuse site under the Queensboro Bridge will be forced to move over the next few months. Audrey Carleton / Gothamist
One of the last community composting sites in New York City can be found under the Queensboro Bridge in Long Island City. Mounds of mulch piled five feet high sit next to stacks of green bins and construction materials. The piles of organic matter are divided into phases by their decomposition stage. Some are composed of banana peels, orange rinds, and egg shells, while others resemble something closer to soil. These mounds are tended to by volunteers for Big Reuse, a non-profit composting site responsible for converting over one million pounds of food scraps to nutrient-rich soil each year.