Help Save the Planet By Dropping Off Your Food Waste at Our Free Composting Bins

You don’t need a record-breaking 65-degree December day to tell you this, but as this weekend’s weather reminded us — climate change is real, and it’s here. And while coordinated global government action is crucial to mitigating rising sea levels and temperatures, individual action matters, too. Recycling, transitioning to solar power, and taking public transit or carpooling are all ways to cut down on your own carbon footprint. Another great way to help the planet? Composting.

To help Downtown New Yorkers up their compost game, the Downtown Alliance has teamed up with the NYC Department of Sanitation, environmental technology company emz and Brookfield Properties to launch a new public composting pilot program that’ll make depositing your food scraps accessible and easy.  

There are 10 compost bins located south of Chambers Street — meaning that 90% of the neighborhood can find a bin within a five-minute walk. The bins are accessible through the mobile app eGate Digi, which allows users to unlock specific receptacles through a Bluetooth connection. You can access these bins 24-hours a day, seven days a week.

So if you’ve got old food, dirty containers, a dying houseplant that you just can’t revive no matter how many humidifiers you’ve set up in your apartment — you just take it on a little stroll with you to one of the bins, use your phone to unlock it and deposit your waste. Later, DSNY will pick it up and bring it to local and regional composting facilities, where it’ll either be composted and brought back to use in NYC parks and gardens, or made into renewable energy through anaerobic digestion.

It’s an exciting new program and we hope you’ll help make it a success, one that inspires other neighborhoods, cities and municipalities to their composting game, too. The planet needs a little boost. Let’s show our home we’re here for it.