Drop Off Your Food Scraps at the Bowling Green Greenmarket

If you’ve got extra food scraps lying around — whether from a DIY cooking project or a delicious takeout dinner from your favorite Lower Manhattan eatery — you could toss them. Or you could help them transform into a climate change-fighting superpower. The choice is yours, and thanks to the new food scrap drop-off site at the Bowling Green Greenmarket, it’s also pretty easy. 

On Tuesdays between 8a and 10a, you can bring your leftover scraps to the biweekly Greenmarket, located at Broadway and Whitehall streets. The site is a collaboration between GrowNYC and composting organization Earth Matter. The scraps you bring will be turned into compost, which benefits the environment in a number of ways: it closes the nutrient cycle, it helps create healthier soil, and it mitigates the harmful methane gases emitted by the breakdown of food waste in landfills.

Note that the drop off site will only accept certain scraps:

—Accepted Materials: fruit and vegetable scraps, non-greasy food scraps (rice, pasta, bread, grains, cereal), coffee grounds and filters, tea bags, egg shells and nuts, cut flowers and houseplants, soiled brown paper products, potting soil.

—Do Not Bring: meat, fish, bones, dairy, fat, oil, greasy food scraps, animal waste, charcoal, coconuts, insect-infested plants, plastics, twist ties, rubber bands or receipts.

Happy composting!