The Compost by My Couch: How (and Why) I Started an Odorless Bin at Home

New Yorkers have been through a lot over the last couple of months, but this felt personal: The city stopped picking up curbside compost this week and asked residents to instead discard their food scraps and yard waste with their trash.

The Sanitation Department cited budget cuts related to the pandemic, and a spokeswoman said the suspension was “not a change we take lightly.” Many environmentalists, though, said the decision was shortsighted and urged leaders to maintain the composting program. Their bottom line: The city shouldn’t reverse progress on the larger, longer-term crisis of climate change.

“We have too much at stake,” Anna Sacks, an activist who focuses on trash, recycling and compost, said at a town hall meeting on Tuesday.

The program, which involves the participation of an estimated 8 million New Yorkers, “isn’t like a sewage plant that you can turn on and off,” Ms. Sacks said. “If we stop that for 14 months, it’s not going to come back as it is now.”

I’ve been composting at home for seven years now. It helps the climate because it prevents food scraps from going to landfills where they release greenhouse gases. Organic material that ends up in landfills is broken down in an oxygen-starved process known as anaerobic decomposition, which releases methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas. Some of the largest methane emitters in the country are landfills, and, adding insult to injury, the anaerobic decomposition that happens in landfills also smells really bad.

Composting beds instead rely on naturally occurring aerobic microorganisms that live in the moisture surrounding the organic matter and break down food scraps into heat, water and carbon dioxide. The heat kills harmful bacteria and pathogens, and the carbon dioxide emitted is no more than what’s released in the natural cycle of plant life. Much of that carbon, moreover, is sequestered in the soil, which is rich in nutrients that can be used for community gardening or agriculture.