How 3 organizations are rewriting the narrative around waste in NYC

WNYC News

Every day in New York City and the region, a whole lot of stuff finds its way into landfills, from leftovers of yesterday's meals to scraps of fabric in fashion designer studios, even vibrant flowers that remain unsold at the corner store. But various organizations are working to re-shape the city's relationship with waste. This Earth Day, WNYC's Community Partnerships Desk is introducing us to a few of them.

The transcript of this segment has been lightly edited for clarity

My name is Dior St. Hillaire, and I am one of the co-directors at BK Rot. BK Rot is a local micro hauling and composting business. It's a nonprofit. And what we do is we collect food scraps locally, fossil fuel-free. So, we use bikes in order to do it. And we process everything locally by hand at our sites and our different partner gardens that we have.

I always say that waste is like the thief in the night. Like you go to sleep, and you wake up. I mean, if sanitation picks it up, you go to sleep and then like, poof, it's gone. But nobody's thinking about the labor that goes into collecting that waste, where that waste is ending up, what other communities have to bear the brunt of that waste.

And so, the work that we do specifically around environmental justice is to say that where the organic waste is generated, it should be processed and also used locally.

I use hip-hop in order to teach compost. So, there's a line that I have that says compost means community so, move as one unit. We all have a part to play; interdependence is the movement. And we move it cause we don't want no stinky smell.

My name is Lauren Sweeney, co-founder and CEO at Deliver Zero. Most of us are used to walking into a coffee shop, getting a single-use coffee cup or ordering DoorDash and getting a single-use container, that's used once and then it's thrown away. And of course there's no such thing as away, it has to go somewhere, which in New York State, it's likely a landfill or an incinerator, even if the stuff is marketed as recyclable. Deliver Zero is a network of reusable takeout packaging that's easy to receive on delivery orders through platforms like DoorDash and Uber Eats, and it's also easy to return the packaging at any restaurant that participates in our network or by scheduling pickups at your door.

I was inspired to start this company by a problem I found in my own life, which was that I relied on single-use packaging as a busy working mom who worked long hours in startups. I'd order sushi to my office, or I'd order salad and started to feel really bad about all of the single-use packaging I was accumulating and thought there's a much bigger problem here to solve than just my frustration at not having a compost bin to put this compostable salad bowl in in my office.

My name is Caroline Gates Anderson and I'm the founder of BloomAgainBklyn. BloomAgainBklyn is an organization that takes the flowers that would ordinarily be trashed and go into the solid waste stream from retailers, event planners, florists, and others, and repurposes them into beautiful arrangements for the wellness of people in the community who would ordinarily not receive flowers, such as trauma survivors, people in hospitals, children at risk.

We've diverted about 1.9 million flowers from the solid waste stream. That's about a quarter of a million gallons of floral waste. Many of the flowers that come through and get delivered to America never get used at all. They would go straight to the floral waste stream. We also compost. Petals and stems that are not usable go into the composting bins.

We work with organizations that work with tie-dye, so there's all sorts of utilization for flowers and not putting them back into the solid waste stream.