Property owners and landlords in New York City can now be fined $25 or more if residents are found throwing a banana peel in the trash. As of April 1, all New Yorkers must separate organic waste from the rest of their trash, similar to how metal, glass, paper, and plastic is set aside for recycling.

This is how the city is encouraging participation in its curbside composting program, where food waste is collected weekly by the sanitation department, same as the trash and recycling.

Getting New Yorkers onboard with composting will take time — and effort. When it comes to diverting food waste from landfills by composting it instead, New York lags far behind other large U.S. cities. The city recovered less than 5 percent of eligible households’ organic waste in the 2024 fiscal year. The fines announced this month are designed to boost compliance; in the first week of April, the New York City Department of Sanitation, or DSNY, issued nearly 2,000 tickets for allegedly failing to separate organics.

https://archive.ph/iLpO5

What do y'all do to winterize your gardens? This is going to be my approach to the potato patch as winter approaches.

As municipalities contract with large waste haulers to comply with a California composting law, local composters say they're being driven out of business.

Getting ready for winter, though it is pretty mild where I live, and thinking about composting in place. Anybody done it? Would it work where you are?

what's up, everyone? i'm Andy, a new moderator of c/composting. i figure i can at least post a heaptalk thread for us to talk about our composting efforts. where are you, geographically, and what challenges do you face? what kind of composting setup do you have?

Hi all:

I got this message from an old colleague. TL:DR - they are looking to set up a good sized pile, but are looking for PDFs that show how to do this and how to start.

I don't have any experience with setting up piles themselves, so any insight is appreciated.

I am wondering if you know of or have a user’s guide for setting up and operating a medium size compost pile on the ground? There are lots of user’s manuals for backyard composting in bins, but that is too small. I want to set up a medium sized compost pile on the ground so that mixing can be done with mechanical equipment or many people with shovels. Covered with a tarp to keep moisture in. Know of any PDFs? There are websites that describe this, but I need to have a paper copy.

https://piped.video/watch?v=rpmzUPhVBG8

Hi everyone!

First time posting here and so happy that there's a community about composting!

I was having a look at the different posts and saw some about critter IDs. I just wanted to let you guys know that iNaturalist lets you create projects and I follow this one https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/home-compost-exploration, which turned out to be useful sometimes.

It's great that you can contribute uploading pictures of whatever you find in your compost, and pretty fun (if you're curious) to see what other piles attract all over the world. You can also filter by location, of course, and see what you might find in neighbouring piles.

My city collects waste food for composting. There is /no seeds/ rule, likely because whoever uses the compost wants to control what they grow.

I make veg. broth by boiling veg. scraps for ~30—60 min., some of which are loaded with seeds. I’m wondering if the boiling kills the seed, in which case I wouldn’t likely cause problems by tossing the boiled scraps into the city’s compost.

I've been working on composting using another method besides trench composting for about two months now. I've enjoyed it so far, and been honestly trying to compost anything that is possible to compost. One thing I noticed though, as a moved from my brief time using a bucket (there were some holes), to a pile, is that I didn't see worms anymore. So I come to you composting experts to ask how can I bring more worms to my shady compost pile on clay soil.

Earlier today I posted to the farming community to ask about a photobash of a village I'm working on. One of the suggestions I'd received in my last search for inputs was a centralized composting solution, which I think makes sense for a solarpunk community. Everybody contributes organic waste and everyone benefits.

I started doing some reading about options from a random state website so I guess you can assume that's the absolute upper limit of my understanding of composting at this time. I just want to represent it well and if there's any good talking points that could go into the picture's text write up to drive discussion, I'd love to include them.

One thing I saw was that with aeration, you can do negative pressure systems which suck air from the compost windrow to pull in fresh air - if you did that, could you divert the compost offgassing (which should be a decent amount of CO2 right?) into the greenhouses to boost the plant growth without burning fuel?

Thanks for any input

Piped video

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/2967556

I know I can send soil samples to my local university extension office for testing, but how do I test soil for glyphosate-based herbicides, lead, arsenic, and other contaminates?

As a citizen scientist I'm about to get into composting more on my property and would like to know more.

Welcome to The Composter, a podcast for farmers and composters. I'm your host and fellow composter, Jayne Merner Senecal. Join me in practical conversation between industry professionals and farmers with a passion for producing high-quality compost. We are going to dig deep into the science, technology, and art of compost production so that we as composters can help enliven the world's soils.

Season Two begins August 15th!