Building utopia with tomorrow’s trash: formal and informal infrastructures for organics recycling in New York City

Abstract

In this dissertation, I describe the interactions between informal infrastructures for community composting and micro-hauling, and the formal organics recycling system implemented by the City. I do this through a detailed consideration of three systems: citywide organics collection, community compost, and the not-for-profit hauling service, BK ROT. In answering my central question—how do informal infrastructures create changes in formal systems?—I also describe the way that the field of organics recycling in New York City has reflected broader trends in neoliberal waste management, and how these kinds of shifts both limit the possibilities of waste management and create opportunities for alternative systems. Responding to authors and policy-makers who suggest that these small local systems often fail to make material differences in waste systems, I pay close attention to the role of affect and embodied experience of community compost, and suggest that community compost projects cultivate feelings of hope and even utopia, and that these experiences have a role in changing waste systems.

In 2013, then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg proclaimed that the New York City Department of Sanitation was taking on “recycling’s final frontier” as it began to implement a curbside organics recycling program, collecting from 33,000 households in Staten Island, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. New York City has also—for some time—been home to a wide array of community composting projects that have allowed residents to compost food scraps within city limits while also creating public space, community activities, and healthy soil for gardens and street trees. As composting has entered the mainstream as a waste management strategy, a variety of entrepreneurs and activists have even started paid micro-hauling services for organic waste, which often function at the edges of legality. The changes taking place in the waste system of New York City aren’t unique: since 1995, hundreds of cities in the U.S. have implemented municipal composting programs.