Sanchez questions DSNY and DEP on anaerobic digestion capacity and processing facilities

Can the department provide an estimate for, not the daily, what is the city's current capacity to process residential and commercial organic waste by anaerobic digestion?

And how might this capacity improve in the next 10 years?

Yeah, so I'll let Jen start and then maybe we'll pass it over to Jane at DP.

The department has a number of transfer stations and processing facilities that we send the collected curbside organics to.

There's actually eight distinct locations.

Many of them are transfer stations, so from there they move the material to either a composting facility or an anaerobic digestion facility, maybe in city, maybe out of city, as the commissioner mentioned.

We are part of a regional network of managing resources, including organics.

So some of the capacity that ultimately processes the material that we collect is outside of the city.

Of the two anaerobic digestion facilities that are being used today for the material that's collected, one is in New Jersey and the other is the Department of Environmental Protection's Newtown Creek facility in Brooklyn.

And Jane from DEP is here to speak to us and can share how much material that facility is processing on an average basis.

So at the Newtown Creek facility, we can currently process about 250 tons a day of material, so 500,000 pounds a day.

And that's from both Department of Sanitation, but also from the commercial sector.

And it's typically two-thirds from sanitation, about a third from the commercial sector, but that can vary seasonally or other schools are in session, things like that.