BY TEQUILA MINSKY
Before the COVID-19 break that stopped daily routines, many locals separated their plant-based kitchen waste into compost. Environmentally conscious New Yorkers kept their skins in the refrigerator or freezer, depositing them at a composting collection point.
Union Square and Washington Market were two of the 50 green markets that had accepted organic composting fabrics and in the village, Chelsea, East Village and Lower East Side, containers shipped according to a weekly schedule provided seven more convenient deposit sites, a Lower East Side Ecological Center (LES) program. On Tuesday morning, they brought eggshells, ground coffee, bark and shells to a collection container on 6th Avenue and Spring Street; COVID-19 interrupted all this activity.
Having no position to take their leftovers of completion and vegetables, hard bread, dried flowers and dead plants, many of those who so diligently brought them for composting, threw them away with wonderful anguish. For others, it is difficult to break a smart habit, as they have continued to spread and, so that it does not smell, does not freeze, buy their biological wastes.
On July 19, the ERP Ecological Center opened a Sunday-selling network with collection containers outside its E. 7th St. Community Garden, between Avenues B and C, from 8 a.m. to five p.m.
On this first day of collection, the citizens of E. 9th Street, musicians Ellen Mandel and Michael Lydon brought plastic bags and boxes containing a week of composting kitchen shells.
“For years, I stayed here,” says Mandel, who along with Lydon basically eats meatless foods at home, generating a lot of compost-ready materials.
Searching for a compost deposit site and, despite everything, the discovery of the opening of the E. 7th St. site for compost collection led Suzanna Bredenberg from Hell’s Kitchen to East Village on Sunday, July 26.
“This is the first time I’ve taken the subway,” he said, after doing exercise R and traveling east to the net garden. It’s time to empty the freezer. Previously, he deposited compost fabrics at Pier 84 on 44th Street.
Similarly, one Stuyvesant Town resident traveled by Citibike with her organics. “I was disappointed when in May, they discontinued our complex’s Brown Bin recycling program,” she said. (In early May, Department of Sanitation suspended its Brown Bin program, which collected kitchen scraps deposited in bins at homes and some large apartment complexes.)
In addition, the ERP Ecological Center’s East River Park, located on the East River along the service road south of the amphitheater, began accepting biological tissues on July 13.
Recently, the City Council reinstated $2.86 million for network composting programs, but this repairs all programs.
Ten others a day stopped at the Union Square Greenmarket data table to find out when the composting workshop would start. Fortunately, composting through GrowNYC’s Union Square Green Market will resume this Saturday, August 1.
The LES Ecological Center is in the process of implementing a slow reopening of food waste disposal sites, while striving to regain the scope of its program. He also continues to paint at Union Square Greenmarket, promoting compost, land and composting equipment.
Eat it. Drink it Do it. Face the city with our help.
Eat it. Drink it Do it. Face the city with our help.