Patricia Gualinga (right), a representative of the Serayaku community in the Amazonic part of Ecuador, told the Summit of Conscience for the Climate in Paris: “We’re here because we want the voices of indigenous people to be heard”. Credit: A.D. McKenzie/IPS

By A. D. McKenzie
PARIS, Jul 24 2015 (IPS)

“We received a garden as our home, and we must not turn it into a wilderness for our children.”

These words by Cardinal Peter Turkson summed up the appeal launched by dozens of religious leaders and “moral” thinkers at the Summit of Conscience for the Climate, a one-day gathering in Paris earlier this week aimed at mobilising action ahead of the next United Nations climate change conference (COP 21) scheduled to take place in the French capital in just over four months.

“The single biggest obstacle to changing course [over climate change] is our minds and hearts” – Cardinal Peter Turkson, an adviser for Pope Francis’ encyclical on climate change
“Our prayerful wish is that governments will be as committed at COP 21 as we are here,” said Turkson, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and one of the advisers for Pope Francis’ encyclical on climate change, released in June.

With the theme of “Why Do I Care”, the Summit of Conscience drew participants from around the globe, representing the world’s major religions – Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism – and other faiths and movements.

Government representatives also joined activists from environmental groups, indigenous communities and the arts sector to call for an end to the world’s “throw-away consumerist culture” and the “disastrous indifference to the environment”, as Turkson put it.

“The single biggest obstacle to changing course is our minds and hearts,” he said, after pointing out that “climate change is being borne by those who have contributed least to it”.

The summit was used to highlight an international “Call to Conscience for the climate” and to launch a new organisation called ‘Green Faith in Action’, aimed at raising awareness about environmental and sustainable development issues among adherents of different religions.

Participants drew up a letter that will be delivered to the 195 state parties at COP 21, signed by summit speakers including Prince Albert II of Monaco; Sheikh Khaled Bentounès, Sufi Master of the Alawiya in Algeria; Rajwant Singh, director of an international network called Eco Sikh; and Nigel Savage, president of the Jewish environmental organisation Hazon.

Voicing the concerns of religious groups and faith leaders, the letter is equally a reflection of the challenges faced by indigenous communities, who made their voices heard in Paris, describing attacks on their territories and way of life by the petroleum industry, for example.

“We’re not some kind of folkloric tradition, we’re living beings,” said Valdelice Veron, spokesperson of the Guarani-Kaoiwa people of Brazil, who delivered her speech in traditional dress.

She and other indigenous delegates spoke of their culture also being decimated by the practice of mono-cropping, where large soybean plantations are causing ecological damage.

“We’re here because we want the voices of indigenous people to be heard,” Patricia Gualinga, a representative of the Serayaku community in the Amazonic part of Ecuador, told IPS.

“We share all the concerns about the climate and we too are being affected in many different ways,” she said.

Ségolène Royal, the French Minister for Ecology, Sustainable Development and Energy who spoke near the end of the summit, said the participants’ appeal was “first and foremost, an appeal for action”.

“Climate change should be considered as an opportunity – for business, technology, [and other sectors],” Royal said. “We need to pave the way together.”

Three participants at the Summit of Conscience for the Climate stand together for a photo. Credit: A.D. McKenzie/IPS

For Samantha Smith, leader of the “Global Climate and Energy Initiative” at green group WWF, the Summit of Conscience reflected a “really big and unprecedented social mobilisation” of civil society, which she hopes will continue beyond COP 21.

“When I read the latest climate science report, it keeps me awake at night. But when I see the mobilisation and the strength of the conviction, I’m optimistic,” Smith said in an interview on the sidelines of the summit.

“Now is not the time to focus on where we disagree. Now is the time to work together,” she added.

But not everyone is invited to the same table – the alliances do not necessarily extend to companies in the fossil fuel industry, said Smith.

“When I say that we need to be united, it doesn’t mean that we need to be united with the fossil fuel industry,” Smith told IPS. “That is an industry which has contributed vastly to the problem and so far is not showing a very substantial contribution to the solution.”

The business sector, including oil producers, held their own conference in May, titled the Business & Climate Summit. At that event, which also took place in Paris, around 2,000 representatives of some of the world’s largest companies declared that they wanted “a global climate deal that achieves net zero emissions” and that they wished to see this achieved at COP 21.

Then at the beginning of July, hundreds of local authority representatives, civil society members and other “non-state actors” took part in the World Summit on Climate & Territories in Lyon, France.

There, participants pledged to take on the “challenge” of keeping global temperatures below a 2 degree Celsius increase “by aligning their daily local and regional actions with the decarbonisation of the world economy scenario”.

The scientific community also held their meeting on climate this month at the Paris headquarters of the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).

At most of these conferences, French president François Hollande has been a keynote speaker, reiterating his message that the stakes are high and that governments need to show commitment to reach a legally binding, global accord at COP 21, which will take place from Nov. 30 to Dec. 11.

“We need everyone’s commitment to reach this accord,” Hollande said at the Summit of Conscience. “We need the heads of state and government … local actors, businesses. But we also need the citizens of the world.”

Even as he delivered his speech, another conference on the climate was taking place – at the Vatican, with the mayors of about 60 cities meeting with Pope Francis to formulate a pledge on combating greenhouse gas emissions.

Mayors from around the world will meet again, in Paris during COP 21, through an initiative organised by the Mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo, and by Michael Bloomberg, U.N. Special Envoy for Cities and Climate Change and former mayor of New York. Billed as the Climate Summit for Local Leaders, this meeting will be held Dec. 4 and should bring together 1,000 mayors.

A question that some observers have been asking, however, is how does one cut through all the grandiose and repetitive speeches at these incessant “summits” and get to real, sustainable action?

Nicolas Hulot, the “Special Envoy of the French President for the Protection of the Planet” and the main organiser of the Summit of Conscience, said he has faced similar queries.

“I’ve been asked ‘what is this going to be useful for’,” he said. “But a light has emerged today, and I hope it will light us up.”

Hulot sought to encourage indigenous groups and others who had travelled from South America, Africa and other regions to Paris for the event, promising them continued support.

“Don’t you doubt the fact that we’re all involved, and we’ll never give in to despair,” he said. “We want to make sure that everybody hears your message because we heard it.”

Edited by Phil Harris

The writer can be followed on Twitter: @mckenzie_ale

Smog over Cairo. Former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurria reaffirmed their commitment Sep. 17 “to support international cities’ efforts to lead in the global fight against climate change”. Credit: Wikipedia

By A. D. McKenzie
PARIS, Sep 17 2014 (IPS)

If former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg had used the Vélib’ – Paris’ public bicycle sharing system – to arrive at the headquarters of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development here Wednesday, he might have sent a stronger message about the need for cities to be “empowered to take the lead in combating climate change”.

Yet, despite arriving by car, Bloomberg, the United Nations Special Envoy for Cities and Climate Change, spoke persuasively about how efficient environmental policies at local level can lead to a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

A key step is to make populations more aware of the issues by sending the right message, so that voters can make informed decisions, Bloomberg said during an open “discussion” with OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría.

For example, if people saw an image of a baby on television with “two or three cigarettes dangling out of his or her mouth” and understood that as a symbol of the polluted air that they were breathing in their city, or the air that their children would breathe, the message would hit home, said Bloomberg, the founder and principal owner of the international media company that bears his name.If people saw an image of a baby on television with ‘two or three cigarettes dangling out of his or her mouth’ and understood that as a symbol of the polluted air that they were breathing in their city, or the air that their children would breathe, the message would hit home – Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York

“People will understand the issue, they will understand how it affects them … and what they can do about it,” he said, adding that such understanding will affect their political choices.

At the meeting, Bloomberg and Gurría “reaffirmed their commitment to support international cities’ efforts to lead in the global fight against climate change” and urged governments to adopt policies to achieve this.

Their pledge ties in with the former mayor’s current role: UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appointed Bloomberg as a special envoy in January to assist him in “consultations with mayors and related key stakeholders in order to raise political will and mobilise action among cities as part of his long-term strategy to advance efforts on climate change”.

This assistance includes “bringing concrete solutions” to the 2014 Climate Summit that the UN Secretary-General will host in New York on Sep. 23.

However, many non-governmental organisations regard this Summit as a gathering where world leaders will once again be “fiddling with flimsy pledges instead of committing to binding carbon reductions”, according to environmental group Friends of the Earth.

“A parade of leaders trying to make themselves look good does not bring us any closer to the real action we need to address the climate crisis. This one-day Summit will not deliver any substantial action in the fight against climate change,” said Dipti Bhatnagar, climate justice and energy coordinator for Friends of the Earth International (FoEI).

“World leaders are falling far short of delivering what we need to truly tackle climate change in a just way. Their flimsy non-binding pledges in New York will do little to improve their track record. What we urgently need are equitable and binding carbon reductions, not flimsy voluntary ones,” she said in a statement.

Friends of the Earth will join with thousands of protesters on Sep. 21 to march in New York, Paris, London and several other cities around the world to “demand climate justice, standing with climate and dirty energy-affected communities worldwide”, the group said.

Some of the cities where the demonstrations will occur have already taken steps to reduce emissions and improve the quality of life for residents, as Bloomberg pointed out in Paris. But political awareness needs to be heightened so that special interest groups are not the ones imposing directions, the former mayor said.

Over three consecutive terms as mayor of New York, where he reportedly spent 268 million dollars of his own money on election campaigns, Bloomberg set up schemes to make New York “greener”, including recycling food waste and aiming at converting organic waste to biogas.

For Bloomberg and Gurría, cities are a” crucial part of efforts to slow climate change” because urban areas produce more than two-thirds of the world’s carbon emissions. The share of the global population living in cities is also set to increase to 70 percent, or 6.4 billion people, by 2050 from the current roughly 50 percent, says the OECD.

“Cities have the potential to make a great difference in the global effort to confront climate change: they account for more than 70 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and two-thirds of the world’s energy use today,” according to Bloomberg and Gurría.

“Mayors have, within their authorities, many ways to reduce emissions, change the way energy is consumed, and prepare for the impacts of climate change,” they added.

Both men called on world leaders gathering at the UN Climate Summit to “look for ways to help their cities accelerate their progress and empower them to do even more.”

“We are all aware of the immense scale of the global challenge presented by climate change,” Gurría said. “It is no longer simply an environmental issue. It is an economic and a social issue. It is vital to our quality of life and to the life of our fragile earth. Action is becoming ever-more urgent.”

The OECD and Bloomberg Philanthropies also issued a “Policy Perspectives” document Wednesday that recommends measures for enabling cities to fight global warming. The recommendations include actively involving the private sector because “green” policies cannot be separated from economic growth, according to Gurría.

He said that various sectors needed to work together to “enable real progress in reaching international climate goals and a meaningful, global agreement next year in Paris,” where the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference will take place.

Friends of the Earth and many other NGOs remain unconvinced, however, of the commitment by wealthy nations such as those that are members of the OECD. The group said that the positions of developed countries’ leaders “are increasingly driven by the narrow economic and financial interests of wealthy elites, the fossil fuel industry and multinational corporations.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

One in four families in the shelter system include an employed adult, meaning that in today's New York, a job may not be enough to get you off the street. Credit: FaceMePLS/cc by 2.0

By Samuel Oakford
NEW YORK, Nov 6 2013 (IPS)

When Michael Bloomberg was elected mayor of this city only weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, few imagined that by the time he left office a new building would have risen in the shadow of the Twin Towers.

Fewer still could have foreseen that a few miles uptown, the foundation would be laid for a super-luxury condominium that, when completed, will be the tallest residential building in the Western Hemisphere, with a penthouse apartment on presale for 95 million dollars.“Sandy, like Katrina, ripped the band-aid off the wound, a wound that is still festering." -- Joel Berg

That building, 432 Park Avenue, is part of a slew of new luxury constructions in New York which, only five years after the global financial crisis threw millions out of work, contrast starkly with a deteriorating housing picture and a widening income gap in the rest of the city.

“New York is the poster child for the national trend,” Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition against Hunger, told IPS. “The wealthy get wealthier at the expense of everyone else.”

The dissonance apparently proved too much for New York voters, who last night overwhelmingly elected progressive candidate Bill de Blasio to be the city’s next mayor with 73 percent of the vote.

The New York metro area suffers from the widest gap between rich and poor in the U.S., an issue that de Blasio campaigned on heavily, referring often to New York as “a Tale of Two Cities.”

“That inequality, that feeling of a few doing very well, while so many slip further behind, that is the defining challenge of our times,” de Blasio told supporters during his victory speech.

The outgoing mayor’s brand of politics were no clearer than during a September weekly radio address, when Bloomberg – himself the 10^th wealthiest person in the world – told listeners “if we could get every billionaire around the world to move here, it would be a godsend.”

The remark, like Bloomberg’s support of a New York Police Department stop-and-frisk programme that overwhelmingly affects minorities, struck many, even those dulled to 12 years of the aristocratic foibles of a man who spent a quarter billion dollars of his own money to get elected, as out of touch.

During three terms (made possible when the city council overturned term limits in 2008) Bloomberg became known around the country as the “nanny mayor” for his progressive stances on access to healthy foods in poor neighbourhoods, nutritional labeling, banning sugary drinks and gun control, but locally was seen as at times deaf to the underlying question of why so many residents were poor in the first place.

Activists say that whether de Blasio is able to stem the rising income gap depends in large part on undoing much of the logic of the Bloomberg years, a period that saw a reintroduction of the language of trickle-down economics into one of the most liberal cities in the United States.

An affordable housing crisis

According to a study by New York University’s Furman Center, median rents in New York rose 19 percent between 2002 and 2011, while the real median income of residents saw a small decline.

During the same period, the percent of rental units considered affordable for low income households earning less than 50 percent of the area median income declined from 40 to 26.

And this year, the average rental price in New York City, excluding Staten Island, rose above 3,000 dollars per month, triple the national average.

Housing advocates are quick to point out what they see as feeble efforts by the Bloomberg administration to safeguard lower income households.

In 2006, New York City updated its inclusionary zoning provisions, increasing building allowances for developers willing to provide 20 percent of their units as affordable housing.

But the programme was voluntary and reports found the zoning effort had led to a net gain of only 2,700 affordable housing units in a city where 1.7 million residents live below the federal poverty threshold.

De Blasio has promised he will make the 20 percent cut-off mandatory, but for thousands of families who can no longer afford any type of housing at all, the debate came too late.

In 2005, the Bloomberg administration ended a longstanding practice of assisting homeless families to obtain federal rent vouchers and subsidised housing, replacing those programmes with short-term assistance.

In 2011, that assistance was cut off, leaving many homeless families with little choice but to remain in the shelter system, which has swollen to record levels.

“The next mayor is going to confront a historical homelessness crisis,” Patrick Markee, senior policy analyst at Coalition for the Homeless, told IPS. “There are over 50,000 people in the shelter system, including 20,000 children. It’s a real black mark on Bloomberg’s legacy.”

The rise in homelessness frustrates advocates who point out the ultra-wealthy and disproportionately foreign buyers of new luxury developments often spend little time in their new pied-à-terres.

But perhaps most disturbing are city estimates that one in four families in the shelter system include an employed adult, meaning that in today’s New York, a job may not be enough to get you off the street.

“This isn’t something that happens naturally,” Berg told IPS. “It’s a failure of public policy.”

Hurricane Sandy, which one year ago displaced thousands of low income families, laid bare city-wide inequities and made de Blasio’s messaging resonate with New Yorkers, he said.

“Sandy, like Katrina, ripped the band-aid off the wound, a wound that is still festering,” said Berg. “It exacerbated existing problems.”

During 12 years in office, Bloomberg repeatedly applied a ‘financial consultant approach – one he honed for decades at his eponymous firm – to issues like poverty, notably pooh-poohing calls for an increase in the minimum wage on the grounds it would force businesses to leave New York, ignoring the inevitable fact that many minimum wage workers had already made the financially-sound decision to do so themselves.

“Bill de Blasio obviously touched a chord that resonated with a lot of people,” said Tom Angotti, a professor of Urban Affairs and Planning at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center.

At the same time as he was cutting programmes for the homeless, Bloomberg welcomed developers with open arms and generous tax breaks, Angotti told IPS.

“Neighbourhoods have gone from being diverse to being sharply divided between rich and poor. You have a gentrification process that displaces tens of thousands, forcing many to leave the city because there is no affordable housing left.”

Bloomberg’s administration oversaw the rezoning of a full third of the city, spurring breakneck development in Manhattan and nearby parts of Brooklyn and Queens but also driving out those who could no longer pay rent.

Areas that were “upzoned” for greater development were more often in poorer, minority neighbourhoods while “downzoning”, which is seen as way of preserving communities, was more prevalent in wealthier, whiter areas.

Higher rents in historically Black and Latino areas made this year’s election in part a referendum on gentrification.

The question of displacement is especially painful for minority residents, many of whom lived through the city’s darkest years in the 1970s – when middle class families abandoned entire neighbourhoods and fled for the suburbs – only to find its new cachet among the professional and jet set has priced them out.

“People tell me this all the time – they struggled for decades and generations to improve their neighbourhoods,” said Angotti. “Why should we do all this work?”

A mural in Bushwick aims to raise awareness about residents' rights in dealing with the police. Credit: Kim-Jenna Jurriaans/IPS

By Kim-Jenna Jurriaans
NEW YORK, Aug 27 2013 (IPS)

A colourful mural occupies the full left side facade of a three-storey house on the corner of Irving and Gates Avenue in the Brooklyn neighbourhood of Bushwick. It depicts a group of youths taking cellphone footage of an arrest scene. Above it, a message reads, “You have the right to watch and film police activities.”

“We painted this mural to make people aware of their rights,” says 19-year-old Justin Serrano, who grew up in this predominantly Hispanic community, where about a third of households live below the poverty line.

The mural, painted by youths at Make the Road New York, a non-governmental organisation that offers community and youth-empowerment programmes in working-class communities across the city, reflects the prevalence of police in the lives of young people in Bushwick. It also provides insight into their relationship with the New York Police Department (NYPD) in their community."It makes me feel like I'm non-human."
-- Justin Serrano, on stop and frisk tactics

For youths growing up in communities of colour, such as Bushwick, that relationship over the last decade has been marked by one policing tactic in particular: Stop, Question and Frisk.

Stop and frisk, as it’s popularly known, allows police officers to stop and search persons under reasonable suspicion they are involved in criminal activity. It’s a staple tactic in New York’s zero-tolerance approach to policing and has become the modus operandi under the city’s last two mayors.

A high return rate?

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the city’s police commissioner Ray Kelly have credited the policy with a citywide decline in violent crime and 8,000 guns being taken off the streets.

Criminal justice scholars and civil liberties advocates, meanwhile, have long questioned the policy’s effectiveness and the police department’s predominant focus on poor communities of colour.

Available NYPD data shows that between 2003 and 2012, New York police performed close to five million stops. In roughly 88 percent of these stops, the subject was black or Hispanic.

In 90 percent of stops, police were unable to prove any wrongdoing. Last year alone, blacks and Hispanics were subject to nearly 400,000 innocent stops.

While the number of stops skyrocketed in recent years, gun recovery has been persistently low throughout the decade, at less than one percent of stops.

Collateral damage

Change seems to be on the horizon after two historic wins for police-reform advocates in New York this month, but community advocates and criminal justice scholars emphasise the collateral damage created by millions of innocent stops.

The explosive rise in the number of stops involving young men of colour has raised particular concern about the adverse impact on generations of youths growing up “overpoliced“, according to researcher Brett Stoudt, a psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the CUNY Graduate Centre.

From 2008 to 2009, youths between the ages of 14 and 21 made up one-third of all stops while accounting for only one-tenth of the city’s population, one of his studies revealed.

Stoudt says that repeatedly being stopped under suspicion of criminal activity without having done anything wrong has a demoralising and disempowering effect on young people.

The high number of stops in select neighbourhoods also creates a “cyclical environment” by increasing the chances that youth in these communities “for one reason or another” are caught up in the criminal justice system, according to Stoudt, co-author of the recently report “Stop, Question and Frisk Policing Practices in New York City“.

For example, “during a stop, an officer may find a small amount of marijuana. Or [the young person] can get scared and they run,” he tells IPS.

Changing behaviour

“It makes me feel like I’m non-human,” says Serrano of the more than twenty times he’s been stopped. On one occasion, he was rushing home to bring medicine to his mom and ended up at the local precinct instead.

In New York, young people’s experiences with police don’t stop in the streets – they also extend into schools and residential buildings, where NYPD can legally be present.

This surveillance of all aspects of daily life can lead youth to significantly change their personal behaviour, says Stoudt, including not seeking help from police when they need it.

Sitting on a bench at a local playground, Serrano takes a minute from eating ice cream to offer advice to two younger friends pulling up on BMX bicycles.

“You gotta stop riding your bike, man,” he says. “Since I started riding my skateboard, I’ve been stopped way less.”

Serrano also stopped “hanging out” inside his community, he says. Instead, he meets his friends in a gentrified section of a nearby neighbourhood, where they are not bothered.

In the Brooklyn neighbourhood of Flatbush, a few miles south of Bushwick, Keron Gray says he avoids being outside with his “louder friends” and stays clear of routes where he is more likely to be stopped.

“It’s annoying,” says Gray. “When you’re shopping on Fifth Avenue [in Manhattan], that doesn’t happen.”

Is reform inevitable?

City officials have long defended the tactic of stop and frisk by pointing to a higher prevalence of violent crimes in target communities.

In a landmark decision on Aug. 12, U.S. District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin rejected that argument, ruling that the NYPD’s application of stop and frisk created “a policy of indirect racial profiling” that had violated the constitutional rights of non-whites.

Scheindlin, who found that “the racial composition of a precinct or census tract predicts the stop rate above and beyond the crime rate,” ordered a sweeping reform process.

Last week,  New York’s City Council overrode a mayoral veto and passed two bills that establish independent oversight over NYPD policies and expand legal recourse against bias-based profiling.

The NYPD did not respond to a request for comment. Meanwhile, Mayor Bloomberg, who has moved to appeal the federal ruling, has warned that both decisions will stifle police work and cause a surge in violent crime.

But between this month’s events and a new mayor taking office in 2014, reform seems inevitable for the nation’s largest police force.

For Serrano, however, some damage is irreparable. “The first time I was stopped, I was with my little brother… To this day, [he] sees me different[ly] – he sees me as a criminal.”

One of the organic waste collection bins distributed to New York households. Credit: Kim-Jenna Jurriaans/IPS

By Kim-Jenna Jurriaans
NEW YORK, Aug 6 2013 (IPS)

Ask a random New Yorker what their city is famous for and “composting” is about as likely to make the list as “cheap housing” and “warm winters”. But if it is up to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, this will soon change.

Bloomberg, who will leave office at the end of this year, announced in June that the city’s Department of Sanitation has begun collecting organic waste in pilot communities across New York and plans to drastically expand the number of participating households in the coming two years.

The ultimate goal will be mandatory organic waste recycling for all city households by 2016. The waste will be turned into compost, a fertiliser obtained from decomposed organic matter, or converted into a source of clean energy.

The initiative is part of Bloomberg’s plan to divert 75 percent of city trash from landfills by 2030 and cut down on the city’s greenhouse gas emissions, to which trash contributes about three percent.

Currently, New York City is hauling a large part of its solid waste, more than 14 million tons annually, to out-of-state landfills in Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Ohio, where it is paying 86 dollars a ton to dump the trash – transportation costs not included.

If the residents of the city’s nearly three million residential units separate organic matter from regular trash, the city hopes to divert 1.2 million tons of garbage from landfills. This move could save up to 100 million dollars per year, or just under a third of the total money spent annually to dispose of residential trash, according to the Department of Sanitation.

The initiative’s test phase currently involves two high-rises in Manhattan, the neighborhood of Westerleigh in Staten Island, as well as around 100 restaurants and public schools across the city.

But the Department of Sanitation is preparing to expand the scope to 150,000 single-family homes, 70 high-rises across all five of New York’s boroughs as early as 2014.

About a quarter of New York City trash is made up by residential garbage. Roughly another quarter is produced by businesses, and with 70 percent of that trash coming from restaurants, getting the hospitality sector involved in the initiative is an important part of the composting pie.

For eco-conscious restaurants that are already paying for special food waste pick-up, a citywide scheme for restaurants would likely be welcome. For others, with small kitchens, adding an extra bin may not be feasible, as a report on restaurants published Jun. 20 by the New York Times shows.

In addition to easing the burden on the environment and the city’s chequebook, there are various other ways in which New York can benefit from collecting organics, according to Ron Gonen, deputy commissioner of sanitation for the City of New York.

“There are two main things that can happen with your organic waste currently,” Gonen told Tierramérica*. “It can be turned into compost, which is an organic fertiliser – and we have a composting facility here in New York City – and that compost is donated to local parks and gardens or sold to landscapers.”

“You can also convert organic waste to renewable energy via a process called anaerobic digestion (in the absence of oxygen),” he added. The result is a methane-rich biogas.

New York already has one anaerobic digestor in one of its waste water treatment facilities, and the city is considering issuing a call for proposals for a large anaerobic digesting facility that could convert most of New York City’s food waste either into natural gas or clean electricity.

“But there are also some interesting emerging technologies,” said Gonen.

“One, for example, can turn food waste into a clean-burning fuel called DME (dimethyl ether, a substitute for gas oil), so it’s not unforeseeable that sometime in the near future we’d be running our sanitation vehicles off of the food waste we collect,” he added.

Changing attitudes

Westerleigh, a neighbourhood of 3,500 residents in the New York borough of Staten Island, is one of the test communities for the new composting initiative. While the participation rate stands at around 50 percent, responses of participants are mixed.

Rosemary Caccese, who was already composting in her own backyard before Bloomberg’s plan, welcomes the new city programme. “I put mine out every week,” she told Tierramérica, referring to her new brown trash can that gets picked up once a week.

“It’s work, it’s not easy to do,” she added, but as someone who cares about the environment, it is a small price to pay for her.

When it comes to citywide implementation, she expects it may be difficult for the elderly to keep up.

Across the street, Donald Carullo says the fact that he and his wife are older is precisely what allows them to participate in the initiative. For his son, who has three children, on the other hand, it is too time consuming, he told Tierramérica.

Over on Burnside Avenue, Lois Conti, who describes herself as “green” and proudly runs down a laundry list of environmentally friendly features she has added to her house, is nevertheless sceptical about the new plan, mainly for practical and design reasons.

“My girlfriend has five children; you’re going to need more than this,” she told Tierramérica, while pointing at the new oval-shaped one-gallon (4.4 litres) container in her kitchen, one of the two models that the city is distributing to households.

For a small household like hers, it is hardly worth the effort, she said. And in a hot New York summer, “It starts to smell.”

Changing attitudes is a large part of the challenge for the city in the coming months. Emphasising the financial savings to the city, and ultimately to the taxpayer, is essential to selling the programme, says Gonen.

While the current phase is voluntary, the programme would eventually become mandatory and include fines for trash offenders.

Alexander Allen, who talked to Tierramérica at one of a few dozen compost drop-off locations in the city, thinks the initiative makes a lot of sense environmentally.

He is less sure whether making it mandatory is going to work, however, and thinks that fines alone will not be enough to change attitudes. “In the end, it’s up to people,” he said.

New York City is following in the footsteps of other U.S. cities like San Francisco and Seattle that have implemented similar initiatives. But it is also charting new ground.

“There is no city in North America, and perhaps Europe, where waste management is as complicated as in New York City,” said Gonen.

“We have an old built environment, we have a diverse built environment, and we’re multicultural,” he noted.

But this also means an opportunity for the Big Apple to serve as an example for other cities around the world.

“There is no other major city,” he said, “that can look at what New York City accomplishes and say ‘Oh, we couldn’t do that, we have a more complex system.’”

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

 VIDEO: Compost Collection Challenges New Yorkers’ Fast Lifestyles

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