Compost collection (photo: New York City Department of Sanitation)
Last week was Food Waste Action Week in the United Kingdom and across Canada.
The focus? Reducing and preventing food waste, with a variety of programs supporting smarter purchasing and cooking, with the goal of attacking what nearly every household generates too much of.
By the (Canadian) numbers: 63% of the food households throw away is considered avoidable, meaning it could have been eaten.
In the United States, that amounts to millions of tons and billions of dollars wasted, with huge greenhouse gas emission and water-wasting impacts.
In New York City, the debate over managing our mountains of food waste is focused on how to put it in special containers, collect it in trucks, drive it for miles and process it into compost (which is the product, not the raw material), and deal with the inevitable contamination.
But the debate largely overlooks food waste prevention or reduction and recovery of edible food; after all, food’s intended purpose is feeding people, giving us the energy to do great things.
Since the early 1990s, the city has struggled with asking New Yorkers to separate their food scraps for weekly collection in a truck, or to take it to a drop-off site. While these efforts have their advocates and some success, the numbers don’t lie: these voluntary programs have failed to achieve critical mass in a city of 8.8 million people. Both the number of households and actual tons diverted from disposal are so far low.
The unfortunate consequence? Truck-based collection becomes super-expensive per ton carried – a big truck with little payload, making little impact on our waste management costs or the environmental impact.
As a consequence, Mayor Adams’ first budget plan proposes to suspend expansion of the restarted curbside collection effort beyond the current seven community districts. Other community-based and low-cost approaches – drop-off sites at green markets, for example – will continue to be funded so that options for dedicated residents will be available.
This ‘time out’ for course-correction has its precedents; even the city’s now-standard recycling system went through similar start-stop-start cycles during its first two decades, confusing the public and delaying the benefits of the complete, citywide program.
Now the question is what will be done during this time out to build back better, to borrow a phrase. Have we learned any lessons?
Some suggest the answer is to mandate separate collection and management of food scraps – adding a fourth container alongside those for paper and cardboard; metal, glass and plastic containers; and non-recyclable trash.
Most agree that the city needs a thoughtful comprehensive plan for dealing with all types of organics – food scraps, yard waste, Christmas trees, and even biosolids from wastewater resource plants. All options should be on the table, including promoting donation of edible food, more composting, and anaerobic digestion.
But the first step can be done even sooner: Mayor Adams and City Council leaders could launch this year a citywide campaign focused on preventing and reducing food waste from all sectors — households, schools, and commercial businesses alike. This campaign would raise awareness about the importance of preventing and reducing food waste and raise a shared sense of purpose and participation.
Fortunately, great models are in action – in London and Vancouver, among other places. Philadelphia is about to launch “Eat Away at Food Waste.” The results are astonishing – reducing avoidable food waste by as much as 20% in a diverse array of communities.
Everyone can help. Prevention programs also attract partners in ways that trucks don’t – food markets, food pantries, and other food-related businesses all share an interest in promoting prevention. All neighborhoods can participate and businesses, too, without worrying about truck routes, inclement weather, and other variables.
And it’s healthier – for the planet, for our pocketbooks, and our personal health. Making less food waste is a great way to save money, save water, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, among other benefits.
Even better: reducing and preventing food waste takes edible food away from rats.
Putting the reduction and prevention of wasted food at the top of the city’s efforts would be the best possible use of this ‘time out.’
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Brendan Sexton is a former Commissioner of the New York City Department of Sanitation and former Chair of the Manhattan Solid Waste Advisory Board. Jacquelyn Ottman is a former Chair of the Manhattan Solid Waste Advisory Board.
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Housing in the Bronx (photo: Edwin J. Torres/Mayoral Photography Office)
When the New York City Council’s Committee on Housing and Buildings hosts its first preliminary budget hearing on Monday morning, it will be held against the backdrop of severe economic uncertainty for many New Yorkers. Inflation rose nearly 8% last month, driven by soaring food and energy costs, putting immense pressure on low- and middle-income families even as the job market remains robust for workers. Rents are also on the rise, in some cases increasing as much as 33% between January 2021 and 2022.
In New York, this uncertainty is also driven by a familiar cause: a rapidly worsening affordable housing crisis that has left households strapped for cash for decades. The statistics are familiar, but that does not make them any less harrowing or in need of attention.
About half of New York renters spend a third of their income on rent, leaving them especially vulnerable to inflation and economic shock. Rent-burdened very-low-income households have just $560 in residual monthly income remaining after rent, on average. These are the families most acutely feeling the squeeze at the supermarket. Many still have unpaid rent arrears accumulated due to lost work or wages during the pandemic, placing them in a financial chokehold: New York’s Emergency Rental Assistance Program needs $1.6 billion to aid renters. It is a brewing eviction crisis beneath the economic crisis.
Put simply, we have no hope of a real recovery that works for everyone without first addressing the city’s housing emergency. The City Council will have a big role to play – and it should lead by example as we await the details of Mayor Adams’ first comprehensive, long-term housing plan. Fortunately, there is a clear plan of action.
First, City Council members should apply pressure on Mayor Adams to live up to his campaign promises. On the campaign trail, Mayor Adams told the United for Housing coalition that he would double city spending on housing to $4 billion. He knew it was a smart, fiscally responsible way to improve lives and create jobs. In his preliminary budget, however, he did not add capital to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) at all – it was unchanged from Mayor de Blasio’s final budget.
This is disappointing, but it is not the final word. Pressure from the Council would go a long way toward making this vision a reality and providing relief to constituents who badly need more housing opportunities, better living conditions, and rental assistance to make ends meet. It would also help improve conditions at the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). That pressure campaign should begin tomorrow.
Second, the Council should ensure that the agencies in charge of housing policy are staffed and resourced in such a way that will allow them to be efficient and maximally productive. Recent New York Housing Conference analysis shows that the city is badly missing the mark in this area, and it is every day New Yorkers who are paying the price due to the inefficiencies this causes.
Consider that the Human Resource Administration (HRA) is more than 1,600 workers short of its budget appropriation, HPD is more than 300 short, and the Department of Homeless Services is more than 100 short. Making matters worse: many of those vacancies are in critical areas. Staffing shortages are delaying much-needed services from reaching New Yorkers and preventing much-needed affordable housing projects from coming online. If staff vacancies continue to go unfilled, we will see a decrease in affordable housing production at a time when it is needed more than ever.
The Council should push the administration for a plan to quickly staff up the agencies, which may mean offering flexibility for provisional hires; increasing the autonomy of agencies to get staff on board without redundant reviews from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and being more competitive with private-sector salaries by allowing managers to offer salaries within a pay scale not just the bottom rung of it. In this tight labor market, the government cannot compete without changing hiring rules.
The shortages make it harder to be efficient, too. The Citizens Housing and Planning Council (CHPC), for example, found that it takes on average 430 days from when residents begin applying to an affordable housing lottery for all the units to be filled. The Supportive Housing Network of New York (SHNNY) estimates there are 2,500 supportive apartments vacant while 8,000 eligible applicants in need are waiting. Addressing these shortages – as well as other bureaucratic inefficiencies – will help get New Yorkers in homes faster.
This is only a small sampling of what is needed to address the housing emergency. More must be done to combat homelessness and to fix the embarrassing conditions at NYCHA. But by fighting for these two common-sense solutions, the City Council can step up and support New York’s renters and lay the groundwork for a better, more equitable city overall.
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Rachel Fee is Executive Director of the New York Housing Conference. On Twitter @RachelFee4NY & @TheNYHC.
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FDNY on the scene in the Bronx (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)
Walking up four floors in a friend’s apartment building the other day I noticed something you might not: on almost every floor, the door to the stairwell was open. Someone had just casually propped them open, maybe to make going in and out easier because the doors are so heavy. I also notice some of the apartment doors that are just simply open, not propped up, when they should be self-closing based on a recent law passed by the City Council mandated that building owners across the New York City ensure all apartment doors are self-closing if they provide access to stairwells.
Noticing something as seemingly innocuous as this is a funny habit I picked up because of my work, and it’s especially relevant these days because open doors like these contributed to a recent tragedy: the fire at the Twin Parks housing complex in the Bronx earlier this year that left 19 dead and stunned the city. Yes, the innocent act of propping open a stairwell or apartment door can be deadly, as can malfunctioning doors. While the main cause of the fire appeared to be an electric space heater, open doors allowed and encouraged smoke to spread upward. It’s a tragic but valuable lesson and we must ensure that all apartment and stairwell doors work as required and that they aren’t left propped open.
Fire doors and self-closing apartment doors are designed to help contain smoke, since the main cause of fire death is often smoke inhalation and not the actual flames. That’s what happened at Twin Parks – in addition to the apartment door where the fire originated, at least one stairwell fire door was propped open, and smoke billowed throughout the building. Properly functioning fire doors can minimize or eliminate devastating tragedies like this, and residents of New York City need to be educated about them and the seemingly mundane but absolutely crucial purpose they serve.
But that’s not all. Education campaigns only go so far – fire doors will malfunction if they are not assembled properly or maintained. They need to be inspected by trained personnel; inspections that should be mandatory and enforced by the city.
There’s the rub beyond city law.
The National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) has more than 300 standards to minimize the impacts of a fire. NFPA Federal Code 80 states that “fire door assemblies shall be inspected and tested not less than annually and a written record of the installation shall be signed and kept for inspection by the authority having jurisdiction.”
The problem -- not just in New York City, but in most jurisdictions -- is that this code is not strictly enforced. In other words, thousands of buildings around New York City most likely have not had their fire doors inspected, not annually nor even in the last five years. We have no way of knowing whether fire doors have working smoke seals or correct latching to ensure they automatically close in case of a fire. The fire department certainly doesn’t have the capacity to inspect them; firefighters have more than enough on their hands responding to emergencies.
This is why New York City needs an Office of Fire Door Assembly, Safety and Protection within city government. There is precedent for this.
You have probably noticed that elevators in New York City have the date and signature of the inspector who last inspected the elevator visible to the riders. Property owners are already responsible for regular elevator inspections by licensed technicians. These policies were put in place and strengthened to make elevators safer after a series of tragic incidents. Something similar noting when fire doors were last inspected should be clearly visible close to the main entrance of New York City buildings.
This doesn’t have to be a heavy lift. Denver, Colorado, which experienced significant population growth in recent years, strictly enforces fire door inspections in all of its new high-rises. The State of California requires fire door inspections in its public schools. They are certified by the California State Fire Marshal.
Only health care facilities in New York City now receive such inspections, which are federally mandated, and rightfully so.
We need a three-pronged approach.
Educate building operators, landlords, and tenants on why a fire door is there in the first place, and that it must always be closed when someone is not passing through it.
Ensure that fire doors are inspected by trained personnel.
Require compliance.
To do all this, we need a dedicated office within city government and a revenue stream to meet the standards of NFPA 80. Otherwise, our city is not taking all the necessary precautions to ensure that the tragedy of Twin Parks is never repeated.
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Jacob Wexler, FDAI, is an accredited consultant in the door and hardware industry specializing in fire door assemblies and acoustical door assemblies.
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