Mayor Bill de Blasio must bring back the city’s dormant curbside food scraps pickup and composting programs, political candidates and environmentalists demanded in Red Hook Wednesday.
“Curbside organics is essential service, we cannot afford to go backwards, go slowly, or continue to perpetrate environmental injustice,” said mayoral candidate and former Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia at the Columbia Street Farm on April 21. “The current mayor’s decision to cut curbside organics recycling was a mistake that set us back at a critical moment and demonstrates a lack of long-term commitment to the fight against climate change — it must be reversed.”
De Blasio scrapped the organics program as part of $160 million cuts to the Department of Sanitation amid COVID-19 budget woes last May, and officials currently don’t plan to bring back the brown bins until June 30, 2022.
