Clare Miflin, a leading advocate for waste disposal design, doesn’t mince words when talking about New York City’s efforts toward zero waste. In a wide-ranging interview with City Newsroom, Miflin criticized the city’s policies under former Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch—now NYPD commissioner—evaluated new composting efforts, and laid out what it would take for New York to catch up to global leaders like Seoul and Toronto.
“It was pretty awful,” Miflin said of Tisch’s tenure at the Department of Sanitation, where she led the Adams administration’s push to containerize sidewalk waste. While the city touts the initiative as a step forward, aiming to get 70% of waste off the streets – Miflin says it was prioritized over the efforts required to reduce non-recyclable waste altogether.
“She hasn’t made any progress towards zero waste in her four years,” Miflin added, citing the lack of positive change in the amount of waste redirected from landfills to recycling and reuse.
Just a month ago, the Department of Sanitation started issuing fines to building owners who failed to comply with the citywide curbside composting mandate The program aims to expand the collection of food scraps, yard waste, and soiled paper – but Miflin is skeptical of relying on punitive measures like fines or the department’s “wall of shame,” to drive behavior change.
They can be good for buildings that outright “throw away the brown bins” to avoid compliance, she says. But for composting to succeed citywide, Miflin argues, “education and help” are also necessary.
Miflin acknowledged that the city has made progress in curbing rat infestations and moving from garbage bags to sealed containers. “To give them some credit,” she added, the city is investing in new trucks and lifts, providing long-term solutions, and “thinking big” about waste management. But that is only part of the problem. Waste needs to be tackled within buildings, making it easy for residents and their supers to manage recycling. “Look at all the NYCHA buildings,” she said, which have chutes for trash but separate bins, outside the buildings. “You need to make it equally convenient” for residents to recycle, she said, otherwise “the rate goes down.”
Miflin says the solution is straightforward: “If everything’s biodegradable,” it simplifies things upstream. She adds that single-use plastic and other materials that are hard to recycle need to be phased out.
In international comparisons with cities like Seoul, Taipei, and Toronto, Miflin says, “I haven’t found better community composting anywhere in the world.” She adds that with more effort from government officials, New York City has the potential to become a global gold standard for composting and zero waste. She believes that if the next mayoral administration made it a priority, the city’s zero waste goals would be possible in the next 10 years. “There hasn’t been a mayor that really cares enough to push it and to tell the agencies to do these things,” said Miflin.
But Miflin finds signs for hope in programs that make waste part of the solution. Community composting is one of them. Nonprofits as well as public housing participate in the program, which collects organic waste to be used in farms and community gardens. In the seven on-site NYCHA farms, for instance, residents can dispose of their food scraps, used for fertilization, in exchange for fresh produce.
“It’s so hands-on and tangible and hopeful”, she said, and it can work together with other sustainable practices, like repair and reuse, to ease waste collection. But, even there, what is “heartbreaking” is that, despite community composting’s long-standing presence, “they’re still fighting to keep the lease, or to keep the land” and “the funding goes up and down”. It’s “ridiculous”, she says, “that they’re doing such amazing work and they don’t have consistent funding.”
Madison Edward-Wright is an investigative journalist from Montreal. For City Newsroom, she covers local politics and takes particular interest in voting rights and government corruption.
Cate Zanardi is a local politics reporter for City Newsroom. Previously, they covered environmental risk, housing, and activism for radio and print. They hail from Bologna, Italy.
