Event composting in NYC: rules and a planning guide
What to decide, and in what order, from the day you book the caterers.
Event composting fails for one reason far more often than any other, and it is not the guests. It is what the guests are holding. Everything below is ordered by when the decision gets made, which means serviceware comes first.
Weeks ahead: serviceware
Compostable cups, plates and cutlery must be BPI or CMA certified, and the item has to say so. “Eco”, “plant-based” and “biodegradable” are not certifications: a cup sold as plant-based is very often paper with a thin plastic lining, which cannot be composted. Once the wrong cups are ordered, no amount of sorting on the day recovers it.
Send whoever is ordering the one-page sheet, and ask for certification numbers rather than descriptions.
Which rules apply
- Catering establishments hosting events over 100 attendees are covered by the city's commercial organics rules.
- Temporary public events over 500 attendees are covered.
- Arenas and stadiums seating 15,000 or more are covered in their own right.
- Rules change and enforcement is the city's. A hauler can tell you what the rule says and what it would collect, and nothing more.
Two to three weeks ahead: booking
Three weeks for anything with staffed stations, two for bins only. An event is off route by definition, so it is a van taken off its normal day, which is the part that needs lead time rather than the bins.
Planning the bins
Put a bin where the food is, not where the trash is. A bin next to the dish return or beside each vendor gets used; a bin by the exit gets guessed at. Plan for a lidded 5-gallon bucket per vendor station as a starting point, and more where a single vendor is doing volume.
On the day: a person at the bin
An attended station sorts clean and an unattended one does not. At a 500-person event that difference decides whether the material is usable at all, because one plastic fork in a bin means the batch cannot go to a garden.
Load-out: weighing
Every container on a hanging scale at load-out, so the number on the report is a measurement rather than an estimate of volume. That is the figure worth sending to a sponsor or a board, and the only kind worth putting in a press release.
This describes what the rules say, as best we understand them, and it is not legal advice. Enforcement is the city’s and the state’s, not ours, and nothing we produce certifies anyone’s compliance. Check with DSNY or DEC for anything that turns on a threshold.