The garbage police are back!<\/p>\n
The Mamdani administration has quietly resumed slapping New Yorkers with hefty fines for tossing food scraps in the trash instead of the compost, The Post has learned.<\/p>\n
The Sanitation Department has issued 516 summonses so far this year \u2013 ending a temporary enforcement pause on the composting mandate that former Mayor Eric Adams implemented last spring<\/a>.<\/p>\n Fines have quietly resumed this year for New Yorkers who fail to comply with the compost mandate. Christopher Sadowski<\/p>\n It also means the city made at least $12,900 off those unwilling to follow the compost mandate<\/a>, which went into effect last April. <\/p>\n Summons range from $25 for first offenders who own small homes \u2014 but could rise to as much as $300 for repeat offenders who own buildings with more than eight units.\u00a0<\/p>\n The 516 tickets are more than 13 times the amount that were doled out from May to December in 2025, when Adams decided to only penalize properties that repeatedly failed to separate their food scraps from their regular trash, records show.<\/p>\n DSNY issued a whopping 42,844 compost-related warnings from April through December, compared to just four so far this year, records show.<\/p>\n Mayor Mamdani reinstated the compost mandate that was temporarily suspended by Mayor Adams. Andrew Schwartz \/ SplashNews.com<\/p>\n Enforcement is expected to beef up as the weather warms and the mandate approaches its first birthday,<\/a> but some say New Yorkers still aren\u2019t ready to fully convert to composting rules.<\/p>\n Staten Island councilmembers David Carr, Frank Morano and Kamila Hanks penned a letter to the Department of Transportation this week saying that while they support the program, they believe fines should still be a long way off.<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cThe current enforcement approach risks penalizing residents who have not yet received adequate notice, education or guidance about how the program works,\u201d the bipartisan trio wrote.<\/p>\n Record amounts of food scraps was collected and transformed into compost when the mandate first went into effect last year. Michael McWeeney<\/p>\n The politicians asked for city to instead ramp up education outreach, including confirmation that the trash separation would be well worth the headache. <\/p>\n The DSNY started enforcement with a bang last April, issuing\u00a04,339 fines that month before Adams \u2013 who was then flirting with a re-election bid \u2013 opted to temporarily roll back enforcement\u00a0following widespread anger and confusion over the guidelines. <\/p>\n Landlords and property managers decried the mandate as unsustainable, arguing that it would force their staff to dumpster-dive to separate the food scraps that their tenants \u2014 benefiting from the anonymity granted by trash chutes \u2014 declined to sort.<\/p>\n