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New York City no longer has an operating landfill. Staten Island’s Fresh Kills, which had opened in 1947, closed six years ago. And so the Department of Sanitation, charged with the costly responsibility of exporting the City’s waste, has promoted small-scale composting for both individuals and businesses for the past two decades.
New York, for all its sophistication and innovation, is not exactly a hub of the compost arts. Most New Yorkers don’t have a garbage disposal let alone knowledge of composting, or the controlled decomposition of biodegradable materials, performed by aerobic bacteria, aided by ants and worms.

In order to educate the public, the Department of Sanitation partnered with the City’s four botanical gardens to create the NYC Compost Project in 1993. Programs were developed to convince apartment dwellers that inviting bugs into their homes could be a good thing.
Composting occurs in enclosed bins or backyards. Queens, with more green space than most of the other boroughs, lends itself to the practice.

Queens resident Renata Jelito, who spent the first 10 years of her life on a farm, managed to create enthusiasm for gardening and composting among her Kew Gardens neighbors.

“I petitioned my Board of Directors to approve and encourage an ongoing effort to have a positive impact on our environment, after all it’s now sexy to be green,” Jelito said. “Not only have we improved our grounds and eliminated the need for carting away truckloads of leaves, next year we should have enough compost for our grounds without having to buy it at the local garden center.”
Her ability to sway her Board and neighbors was honed while participating in the Queens Botanical Garden Master Composter Program, part of the wider NYC Compost Project.
Gardeners from across the borough apply for this eight-week course, also offered at the three other botanical gardens and in Manhattan through the Lower East Side Ecology Center. In addition, students must complete 30 hours of community service before qualifying for certification.

“I talk about what happens to waste that could be decomposed, the amount of waste we produce, how nothing happens in landfills and how easy and natural composting is,” project instructor Julia Corwin said.

The Garden’s new Visitors and Administration Center, the City’s greenest building, renders the Queens Botanical Garden particularly well-suited for the course.
“The green building has composting toilets and that’s a good educational tool,” Corwin said. “It makes it a really great setting for talking about composting – it can be a funny topic.”