The Dirt on Big Apple Composting: 2025 NYC Survey

Piles of compost sit at the East River Compost Yard in New York City

New York City is now home to the nation’s largest residential curbside composting program, but how many New Yorkers are ready to participate?

With organic trash separation now mandatory in NYC, LawnStarter surveyed over 650 NYC residents to see where they stand on composting in the Big Apple.

Explore the results below, including demographic insights such as age, education, and income. Then, take a look at the results of our national composting survey.

NYC Composting Survey Results
Key Insights
2025 U.S. Composting Survey Outlook
Behind the Survey
Final Thoughts: Urban Composting

NYC Composting Survey Results

Key Insights

While NYC is implementing mandatory composting partly as a strategy against the War on Rats, about 2% of non-composting city residents note their fear of attracting bugs and rats prevents them from composting.

Age

Younger New Yorkers (18 to 24) are 2X more likely to say they compost than elderly residents (65 and up). Younger residents who compost are also over 3X more likely to use a community garden or composting site.

Young denizens of NYC are busy chasing their dreams, which explains why over 4X of the city’s urban composters ages 18 to 24 say time constraints are keeping them from composting more often, compared to those 65 and up. Of the non-composting group, younger New Yorkers are over 5X more likely to use time constraints as an excuse for not composting at all.

Younger NYC residents (18 to 24) are 3.5X more likely to be inspired to compost by monetary incentives than elderly Big Apple dwellers.

Income

Wealthy New Yorkers making over $150,000 are 2.5X more likely to say they would be encouraged to compost by receiving monetary incentives from the local government, than city residents making less than $20,000.

High-income New Yorkers with salaries above $150,000 are over 2X more likely to say time constraints and lack of knowledge are keeping them from composting than residents making less than $20,000.

Education

City folk with advanced degrees are over 3X more likely to dispose of their compost in NYC than respondents with no schooling completed.

Non-composting NYC residents with no schooling completed are 3.5X more likely to blame limited time for their lack of composting efforts than folks with advanced degrees.

New Yorkers with no schooling are over 3X more likely to say they are unaware of the mandatory composting law being rolled out than those with advanced degrees.

Gender

Women in NYC who don’t compost are 2X more likely than men to say that nothing will make them compost.

2025 U.S. Composting Survey Outlook

Infographic image for 2025 Composting Survey Outlook — Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4

Behind the Survey

LawnStarter collected survey responses from a random sample of 652 NYC residents aged 18 or older via Alchemer and Cint on November 8, 2024.

The first 2 questions include responses from all 652 New Yorkers, while questions 3 to 7 reflect data from 292 respondents who compost, and questions 8 and 9 reflect data from the remaining 360 residents who do not compost.

Each response was anonymized using a unique user ID generated and assigned by Cint.

Notes:

This survey data does not stem from a probability sample, therefore no margin of error can be calculated.
If comparing NYC data with our national survey results, note that some questions from the NYC survey allowed respondents to select multiple options (“select all that apply”), while within the U.S. survey respondents had to choose one option for the same questions.

Final Thoughts: Urban Composting

1.2 billion pounds of food was thrown away in NYC in 2022 and o v er 1/3 of the city’s waste could be composted instead of sent to landfills.

New York is making it easier for residents to reduce their food waste with curbside composting, hundreds of tech-savvy Smart Bins, and food scrap drop-off sites. Residential property owners who don’t comply with the citywide composting mandate will see fines of up to $200 beginning Spring 2025.

NYC parks will soon be home to more community composting sites, with a goal to establish composting in 5 parks per borough by July 2028 — compost piles are already established in Manhattan’s Riverside Park.

While it’s not advised to put dairy, meat, cooked food, or greasy, food-soiled paper in your home compost bin, the city will accept these items in their composting system because their industrial composting facilities can properly break down these materials — making it less complicated for residents to sort their waste.

Join the city’s composting community with help from our guides below.

Make plans this holiday season to celebrate Mulchfest — a citywide initiative for chipping and mulching Christmas trees. Last year, this program composted over 46,000 trees.

Hire a local LawnStarter crew to handle your fall leaf cleanup and to take care of all your yard trimmings.

Main Photo Credit: Nick Doty / Flickr / CC BY 2.0