Tips for Your Home > Yard

Food and Yard Waste

New York City residents discard more than one million tons of organic waste each year. This includes kitchen scraps (fruit and vegetable peels, egg shells, tea bags, coffee grounds and filters, and used paper towels) as well as yard waste (leaves, branches, weeds, and grass clippings).

Reduce

You can make your own compost in your backyard or side alley, or keep an indoor worm farm. For all the dirt on composting in New York City, visit the NYC Compost Project.

Leave it on the lawn! After you mow, just leave the clippings on the lawn. The nutrients in your grass clippings will nourish your lawn, reducing the need for chemical fertilizers. Learn more about "grasscycling" and natural lawn care at the NYC Compost Project website.

Garbage disposals are also an alternative to disposing of food waste in your trash. Garbage disposals are simple, electric motorized grinders attached under the counter of a kitchen sink that mince food scraps as they flow down the drain.

Recycle

NYC residents and institutions in the city's leaf collection districts are required to recycle their fall leaves by setting them out in paper lawn & leaf bags (or unlined rigid containers) for Sanitation collection during designated time periods. For more info, go to Fall Leaf Collection Program.

Hired commercial landscapers are required by law to remove and compost (if possible) any yard waste and other waste that they generate through their activities; it is illegal for commercial operations to set out their waste for Department of Sanitation collection. See the flyer, NYC Yard Waste Removal Regulations on the Laws & Directives page.