Landlords Cry Foul As NYC Issues Over $115K In Composting Fines

New York City began penalizing apartment owners 10 months ago for failing to compost. In that time, it has issued more than $117K in fines.

For the average multifamily owner, the fines are tiny, at just $100 a pop. But they are also exceedingly common — the Department of Sanitation issued 1,173 summonses related to food waste disposal in less than a year, a Bisnow analysis of data from the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings found.

Despite the minimal expense, real estate groups and even some composting advocates say the city's push to increase composting is too focused on dishing out fines and not enough on outreach and education to ensure landlords and tenants comply with the law.

“I am personally against enforcement at this time,” said Samantha MacBride, an adjunct professor of public affairs at Baruch College who researches urban composting.

Composting has existed in various forms for more than 30 years in NYC, but it became mandatory citywide in October 2024 when the city began requiring residents to separate organic waste from trash.

The DSNY started issuing fines in April but stopped enforcing the rule less than a month in for buildings with 30 or fewer apartments. It resumed enforcement at such properties in January.

While landlord groups, tenants, academics and superintendents who spoke to Bisnow for this story agreed that increasing composting is an important goal, they disagree with the way it is being enforced. The city should be providing more guidance to ensure participation, the Real Estate Board of New York said in a statement.

“Enforcement is resuming at a time when property owners — particularly small landlords — are facing rising operating costs and significant financial pressure,” REBNY Director of Policy Daniel Avery said. “Because participation ultimately depends on tenant behavior, we believe the City should continue prioritizing education and outreach.”

The city determines which buildings aren’t composting in the same way it figures out who isn’t recycling. In both cases, summonses come from the city finding materials that should be separated — whether that is a broken-down cardboard box, banana peels or egg shells — in the regular trash.

“Not having a brown bin out on composting day is something that might trigger an investigation,” Joshua Goodman, the DSNY’s deputy commissioner for public affairs, said in an email. “Of course that alone is not enough to get a fine, since a property may not have produced any compostable material that week.”

But to make sure there aren’t chicken bones in the trash, landlords have to confront bias and logistical hurdles.

Some superintendents are resistant because they believe composting will make their buildings smell or because finding space in their buildings’ trash areas or sidewalks can be challenging, said Martin Robertson, a Downtown Brooklyn superintendent who works on composting education with 32BJ SEIU. 

Another part of the problem comes back to the city, Martin said.

“When the program was rolled out, there weren't sufficient bins provided to larger buildings,” he said. “They gave apartment buildings like mine, that have 300 families, two bins. The math doesn't add up.”

The Durst Organization, which owns and manages 4,000 apartments in Manhattan and Queens, hasn’t had the same difficulties as some owners. But that might be because it started its own composting program in 2013, beginning at the 597-unit Helena 57 West in Hell’s Kitchen.

The landlord trains its building staff on how to handle composting and created a streamlined process for residents to participate, said John Mongello, Durst's senior vice president of building services. Tenants get in-apartment brown composting bins that they can empty into a 21-gallon bin in their corridors.

In 2024, Durst sent 258 tons of organic waste from its own composting programs to an upstate New York organic farm that it runs in partnership with the McEnroe farming family. Durst then uses the compost to create green rooftops and setbacks in its NYC buildings, Mongello said.

But now that the city is running its own composting program, Durst's residential buildings' organic waste gets sent to the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant. There, most of the food scraps collected by the city become biogas through a process known as anaerobic digestion, and that biogas is then used to power buildings.

The scraps that don't become biogas are composted, but anaerobic digestion takes fewer square feet in a space-constrained city, Goodman said.

“Every time a home is heated by anaerobic digestion, that is one less home that is heated with fracked gas,” he said. “Advocates should remember that BOTH of these forms of end use help the environment, and that the alternative — sending this material to landfill — does not.”

But for one Midtown landlord whose building has received multiple fines this year, compliance boils down to the cost of doing business. 

“If we get tickets, then we ignore it,” the landlord said on the condition of anonymity due to fears that the building would be targeted and receive more fines.

He said that whether the building is fined also comes down to whether tenants separate their food scraps.

“It's very difficult to tell every single tenant to do these things. How can you enforce it?” the landlord said. “For them, it's the easiest thing to throw it into the garbage and go.”

Dominick Romeo, a Chelsea building superintendent who has composted his personal food waste for years, also said enforcing tenant compliance is a significant issue.

“How do you prove that it was that tenant who was the one who actually violated a sanitation rule?” he said. “Supers don’t have cameras in their courtyards.”

Some tenants, in turn, say their landlords aren't doing enough.

One Ridgewood resident, who asked to remain anonymous over fears of retribution, told Bisnow that their landlord put a brown composting bin in the building lobby last June but instructed tenants not to use it just two weeks after installing it.

“They have never mentioned composting one time after that,” the tenant said, adding that they have taken to bringing their compost to the city’s street-level public bins for dropping off food scraps. “It would certainly be nice if I could use it at the apartment.”

Between landlords who say the fines pale in comparison to the cost of creating composting infrastructure in their buildings and the difficulties getting tenants to separate old broccoli heads from packaging plastic, the city might keep collecting more fines than it wants to.

Even superintendents need persuading that composting won't create more work, stink up the building and attract vermin.

“They're not invested in this, and nor do we want to put our hands in their garbage,” Romeo said.