U.S. News

Property owners and landlords in New York City can now be fined $25 or more if residents are found throwing a banana peel in the trash. As of April 1, all New Yorkers must separate organic waste — that includes food scraps, food-soiled paper (like empty pizza boxes), and leaf and yard waste — from the rest of their trash, similar to how metal, glass, paper, and plastic is set aside for recycling.

This is how the city is encouraging — or indeed, mandating — participation in its curbside composting program, where food waste is collected weekly by the sanitation department, same as the trash and recycling. Mandatory curbside composting is still relatively new in New York City; the program only rolled out in all five boroughs late last year.

The best use of food, of course, is to feed people. When it can’t do that, composting is one tool to help reduce emissions from organic waste — the methane released as food decays in landfills is a major driver of global warming. As a whole, the United States wastes as much food as it did nearly 10 years ago, despite setting an ambitious goal to cut food waste in half.