The trash collection agency says it will begin on July 31 to issue penalties again - a $250 to $1,000 fine - for establishments that serve or prepare food but don’t lawfully separate their organic waste. Kaczmarek and other dumpster divers have a firsthand understanding at how separating organic material is rarely practiced by restaurants and grocery stores (though many spots along her dumpster diving route aren’t big enough for the commercial compost rule to apply to them).ĭata obtained by THE CITY shows that the Department of Sanitation has not issued any violations for businesses out of compliance with organics requirements since before the pandemic. Under a Bloomberg-era law, several food-related businesses - among them, supermarkets, restaurants, caterers, hotels and cafeterias above a certain square footage - have long been required to separate their organic waste and ensure it’s composted or otherwise digested for beneficial use.īut it’s unclear how often that’s actually happening. The city is about to bring back fines to push businesses to do more to reduce food waste. She thinks of the activity as an intervention to prevent edible food from ending up in a landfill or being incinerated - both of which are bad for the environment - and wishes more places in the city donated their food or composted. “I’m not able to stop this machinery of waste, but I can do this.” I don’t think anyone’s OK with waste, so when you see it, it’s very upsetting,” Kaczmarek said. “When I first did it out of curiosity, there was a very emotional response to seeing perfectly good food in the garbage. She either brings the rewards of her foraging home or to community refrigerators. Sometimes she finds, as she did last Thursday with THE CITY, prepackaged salads in plastic clamshells, loose grapes and strawberries, flower bouquets, ripe avocados, cartons of yogurt, fresh bagels, whole heads of cauliflower and unopened bottles of hot sauce. Kaczmarek, 44, is one of several dumpster divers, or freegans, who has developed an intimate sense of the edible food that local bodegas and grocery stores throw out in her Brooklyn neighborhood.Ī data scientist by day, she hunts by night through trash bins and shines a flashlight into garbage bags she makes sure to carefully tie back up. Ursula Kaczmarek estimates that about 90% of her diet comes from the trash.
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