The city is throwing these Brooklyn neighborhoods on the scrap heap!
The sanitation department is expanding its curbside compost collection service to Red Hook, Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, the Columbia Street Waterfront District, and the northern parts of Park Slope and Gowanus next month, and residents say they can’t wait to start gathering up their moldy pizza crusts and fish bones.
“I think it is a kind of neighborhood where people will take advantage this program,” said Cobble Hillian Gale Synnott. “There are many environmentally conscious people here.”
Trash officials will soon roll out brown bins to houses and apartment buildings with nine units or fewer in the anointed nabes, and will begin collecting their contents twice a week starting the week of Oct. 5 — except for the new parts of Park Slope and Gowanus, which will launch on the week of Oct, 26.
New York’s organic waste collection service is more liberal than many other municipal compost services, allowing participants to dump old eggs, dairy products, and meat alongside their apple cores and lawn cuttings.
But there is a downside to the permissive policy — those items can stink up a storm when left to fester between pickups, as Greenpointers found out in June when the compost bins arrived in their neighborhood followed shortly by the stench of rotting food.
The program is already up and running in large portions of Park Slope and Gowanus south of Union Street, in addition to Greenpoint, Greenwood Heights, Bay Ridge, Sunset Park, and Windsor Terrace.
The program is voluntary for now, but sanitation officials have said that participation might become mandatory in the future after it takes the scheme city-wide.
