By CHARLES VIGLIOTTI
Long Island has a garbage crisis. Its 3 million residents generate about 7 pounds of solid waste per person per day – nearly twice the national average. Roughly a quarter of that is food waste. In total, the region produces about 1.4 million tons of food waste each year. Long Island’s last landfill in Brookhaven will close in 2025, and all that food waste will have to go somewhere.
We could continue to ship much of Long Island’s food waste out of state at a cost of about $180 million a year. We could continue to tolerate the green- house gas emissions generated from trucking it long distances and dumping it in landfills, where it will rot and emit methane. New York City has been doing that with most of its food waste for years.
But this is unsustainable and takes us in the opposite direction from our cli- mate goals. Methane is one of the most powerful greenhouse gases and in New York; it accounts for 9 percent of GHG emissions. This is the second largest culprit of the state’s climate footprint.
Solving the puzzle of what to do with our methane-generating food waste is one of the keys to solving climate change. Putting it in landfills is not accept- able, even if we had space, because organic wastes that rot and emit methane in landfills already account for 58% of New York’s methane emissions.
In 2019, the New York State Legislature passed a groundbreaking anti-food waste bill, championed by Sen. Todd Kaminsky and Assemblyman Steven Englebright. It requires getting excess food to those in need and diverting inedible food waste away from landfills to compost operations and anaerobic digesters. The digesters break down food waste and produce high-quality fertilizer and renewable biogas, which serves as an ultra-low carbon energy source. When used as a transportation fuel in gas-powered vehicles, it displaces fossil fuels and is net carbon-negative, meaning it reduces more GHG than it emits. Reducing and recycling food waste is the right approach for the climate and for our region’s waste management problems. The question is: How do we implement and scale it?
California did it in large part by passing a low-carbon fuel standard, which allowed food waste biogas production to compete with other transportation fuels.
New York needs its own clean fuel standard. Fuels that meet or exceed the standard would generate credits, while those below the standard would generate deficits. This system would help accelerate the development of an in-state market for clean fuels, thereby cutting emissions from the transportation sec- tor, which is the biggest GHG emitter in New York. It would also divert much more food waste from landfills to anaerobic digesters, capturing and using the biogas as a clean fuel (instead of letting the waste rot in landfills putting more climate-warming methane into the atmosphere).
Currently, without a New York clean fuel standard, there isn’t an in-state market for the fuel so it will get utilized in California, which gets the climate and economic benefits.
New York cannot afford to operate this way. We are calling on Kaminsky, Englebright, and other climate leaders in Albany to take the next step in getting our food waste stream and GHG emissions under control. It is imperative that New York pass a clean fuel standard for New York in this legislative session.
Charles Vigliotti is president and CEO of Long Island Compost Corp. and managing director of American Organic Energy.
Op-ed posted on https://libn.com/