Justin Green (Big Reuse) on expanding composting infrastructure citywide
Justin Green of Big Reuse supports expanding composting capacity, citing potential sites at NYCHA, parks, community gardens, and brownfield sites. He argues against relying on anaerobic digestion due to contaminated biosolids and advocates for compost as green infrastructure that improves water absorption and plant growth.
On now on hi I'm Justin green I'm the executive director of big Reeves thanks for having us all here to testify when a second pretty much everything Domingo said
both of us have been composting in New York City for a while now and we can see the capacity that's available in the city to grow green infrastructure to increase composting
capacity throughout the city.
So at NYCHA Lake Domingos piloted and run for years.
In parks, we're working with Central Parks to set up a site, or we have a site operating in Central Park now to compost all their landscaping waste.
We can expand that to other parks.
We all work, both of us work in community gardens and helping them maximize their composting.
And there's large-scale brownfield sites in northern Astoria, in East Williamsburg, that are huge brownfield sites that could be
not great for building residential because of the brownfield nature, but could be used for green infrastructure projects like this.
And there are examples of these kind of large-scale capacity systems being installed in buildings, enclosed, so there's no odor issues going to the outside community.
So it's possible.
If we can dream big, we can make this happen in the city, reduce our impact on other communities from
exporting our waste, reduce our reliance on anaerobic digestion, which as a lot of speakers have talked about, reduces
unusable biosolids at this point, and not the compost we had all fought to have be produced through all of our work.
The biosolids are contaminated with everything that goes down into the sewer, PFAS, microplastics, anything else everyone pours down the drain in the city ends up in our biosolids at the sewage treatment plant.
So it's not particularly usable.
But compost is, and with growing resiliency needs in the city,
And compost provides sort of greater water absorption, greater plant growth, and other green infrastructure improvements.
And I think we could do it.
Thanks.
No better way to end our hearing today than with...