TESTIMONY
Anita from Earth Matter New York on Enhancing Community Composting and Organic Waste Management
2:06:19
·
125 sec
Anita, a lifelong New York City resident and board member of Earth Matter New York, shares her personal journey and emphasizes the critical role of community composting in organic waste management.
- Anita details her family's influence on her early waste management practices and her introduction to community composting.
- She discusses the negative effects of budget cuts on organic waste diversion, rat mitigation, and New York City's sustainability goals.
- Highlights the limitations of the brown and smart bin programs without proper compost education.
- Calls for additional funding for organizations like Earth Matter New York, Big Reuse, and Lower East Side Ecology Center to sustain their efforts.
- Advocates for prioritizing local composting over other methods of organic waste diversion to improve sustainability.
Anita
2:06:19
Hi.
2:06:20
Good afternoon, everyone.
2:06:21
My name is Anita, and I'm a lifelong New York city resident, a composter, earth matter, New York board member, and a member of 350 and YC waist knot.
2:06:30
I've cared about being responsible for my waist since I was a kid.
2:06:33
Because my family taught me not to litter and and to throw out trash in the right places.
2:06:38
And as a teenager, I was introduced to community composting through New York East New York Farms, a community organization composting at a local level.
2:06:47
As we discussed New York City's infrastructure for handling and processing organic waste, I want to emphasize that we cannot do so with that, including community composting.
2:06:56
The latest recent budget cuts cause a lot of green jobs to be caught, and it is a huge setback to organic waste diversion, improving street cleanliness, rat mitigation, and New York City process, progress towards sustainability goals.
2:07:12
Where I live, there are brown bins from the organic curbside collection program and orange bins from the smart bin program.
2:07:18
But they cannot replace the green bins at community food scrub drop off sites and all of the staff who engage and educate the public and encourage them to participate.
2:07:28
I do support having universal and diversified access to organic waste diversion, but the current state of the brown bins and the smart bins is a waste of money without robust compost education, much of which was conducted by the NLP funded New York City compost project.
2:07:44
But the host organizations, earth matter, big reuse, lower esaticology sector, and the botanical gardens remain resilient, but they do require additional funding to sustain and grow their positive impacts.
2:07:56
Growancy and numerous other nonprofits have also massively contributed and continued to do so.
2:08:01
Through community engagement, education, food scrap collection and local processing.
2:08:06
While it is true that the capacity of existing composting sites cannot handle all of the organic waste that is produced in the city, Turning organic matter into compost locally should be prioritized as a method of organic waste diversion above anaerobic digestion and certainly involve landfilling and incineration.
2:08:23
When he say thank you
