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| DATE | 2025-04-20 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] Forcing the Middle Class out with sanitation
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nypost.com
NYC's compost edict is all about empowering our petty tyrants
John Tierney
6–7 minutes
After forcing New Yorkers to spend billions of dollars for the privilege
of sorting their garbage into recycling bins, municipal officials have
found an even costlier — and grubbier — way for residents to spend their
time in the kitchen.
They must now separate food waste into compost bins or face the wrath of
the city’s garbage police, who will be digging through trash looking for
verboten coffee grounds and onion peels.
Building super, Dominick Romeo, shows how the latch works on compost
bins. They can be tricky, and so he asks residents to keep bins
unlatched, January 9, 2025. Chelsea, NY.
The composting mandate satisfies the same impulse we saw so vividly in
blue states during the pandemic: the left’s urge to micromanage our
lives. Olga Ginzburg for NY Post
The inspectors handed out thousands of summonses this month, prompting
so much public anger that the city has temporarily ceased issuing fines
— but the edict remains in effect, and the fines are due to resume next
year.
Composting is the most nonsensical form of municipal recycling: It
delivers little, if any, environmental benefit at the highest cost.
NYC's new compost rules:
In addition to wasting people’s time, it attracts rats to compost
facilities, puts more fuel-burning trucks on the road and diverts tax
dollars from what was once a core priority of the Department of
Sanitation — keeping the streets clean.
Whatever its appeal to suburbanites with yards and gardens, composting
is absurdly impractical in a city — especially one facing a massive
budget deficit.
Where are New York apartment dwellers supposed to find space in their
tiny kitchens for yet another waste bin?
It’s bad enough that elderly residents must schlep their newspapers and
bottles to basement recycling bins instead of simply using the trash
chute — now they’re expected to haul bags of rotting food, too.
How are landlords and the superintendents of large buildings supposed to
enforce the law?
Unlike the city’s inspectors, they never signed up to be trash
detectives, much less dumpster divers.
Over three decades of chronicling the folly of recycling, I’ve described
it as the sacramental ritual of a well-intentioned but misguided
religious movement.
That’s no longer an adequate explanation.
Moral fervor may account for why some New Yorkers are willing to store
their leftovers in a smelly bin for a week, but it doesn’t explain why a
city too broke to maintain basic services would splurge on a policy so
pointless and irritating to voters.
The composting mandate makes political sense only when you consider the
motivations of the industries and progressive activists who lobbied for
it: money and power.
When New York launched its curbside recycling program in the 1990s, city
officials confidently predicted that the new pick-up regime would lower
the cost of waste disposal.
The opposite happened. Recycling brought not only much higher costs but
also dirtier streets: Budgetary pressures led the Department of
Sanitation to slash the number of street cleaners.
In a 2020 report for the Manhattan Institute, Howard Husock estimated
that eliminating the recycling program would save the city $340 million
annually — more than half the entire Parks Department budget.
But expensive as recycling is, it’s a bargain compared to composting.
The city’s Independent Budget Office reported in 2021 that collecting
and processing a ton of organic waste cost more than three times as much
as handling a ton of recyclables.
And while recycling metals and paper products does at least reduce
greenhouse emissions by saving energy, the greenhouse benefits from
composting are too minuscule to justify it.
So why bother with compost bins? Why waste tax dollars to irritate
voters while doing little or nothing for the environment?
Because it benefits progressive politicians seeking endorsements and
campaign contributions from the special interests pushing an agenda
called Zero Waste.
In 2015, Mayor Bill de Blasio embraced this agenda, pledging that New
York City would stop sending any trash to landfills by 2030.
It’s a ridiculously unrealistic goal, but chasing it creates jobs and
profits for professional activists, lobbyists, environmental groups,
green-energy firms and the waste-management industry.
The recycling religion has matured into a lucrative arm of the
environmental-industrial complex, sustained by vast corporate welfare.
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The federal Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 was budgeted by Congress to
allot nearly $400 billion for green projects, including recycling.
But independent analysts calculate that in the next decade it will
actually cost taxpayers at least double that amount, and possibly as
much as $2 trillion.
The recycling industry also gets plenty of direct and indirect
subsidies from state and local governments — like the tax dollars spent
on the city’s recycling program, and the higher utility bills resulting
from the state’s green mandates.
But it’s not just about the money: The composting mandate also appeals
to progressive politicians and activists because it satisfies the same
impulse we saw so vividly in blue states during the pandemic.
As HL Mencken put it, “The urge to save humanity is almost always only a
false-face for the urge to rule it.”
Forcing people to use compost bins makes no more sense than padlocking
playgrounds or requiring masks outdoors during COVID — decrees that
devout progressives eagerly enforced.
For them, petty tyranny is a feature, not a bug.
Never underestimate the satisfaction some people take in bossing
everyone else around.
John Tierney is a contributing editor of City Journal, from which this
column was adapted.
--
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town
that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
http://www.mrbrklyn.com
DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Being so tracked is for FARM ANIMALS and extermination camps,
but incompatible with living as a free human being. -RI Safir 2013
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