Before Diving In: Establishing a foundation for food scraps diversion programs for multifamily buildings

More than 30% of housing in the U.S. today consists of multifamily units, yet most food scraps diversion programs focus on single-family residences. Expanding municipal programs to include multifamily buildings could help divert more food waste from landfills, while also providing more equitable access to organics recycling services. Ensuring that all residents, regardless of housing type, can participate in diversion efforts strengthens community resilience, supports broader environmental and public health benefits, and advances an inclusive circular economy.

With approximately 40% of unsold or uneaten food across the country ending up in landfills, where it emits climate-warming greenhouse gases, many communities are trying to do something about it. According to a 2023 study from BioCycle, residential food waste collection programs are on the rise; in 2023, municipal programs grew by 49% compared to 2021. Programs, including curbside pick-up and drop-off, divert organic waste from landfills and process food scraps through anaerobic digestion or composting. These efforts align with circular economy principles by minimizing waste and producing valuable materials, such as energy and compost, while helping to tackle climate change.

The next frontier

The New York State Pollution Prevention Institute (NYSP2I) regularly seeks new opportunities for mitigating food waste. While community-scale food scraps diversion programs most often focus on single-family residences, expanding programs to include multifamily buildings—the next frontier for residential programs—provides an opportunity to divert greater amounts of food waste from landfills in the state. However, along with the opportunities that programs offer these building types, they also pose unique challenges. Collection programs in multifamily buildings are often more complex than those for single-family residential areas. They can involve extra steps for residents and staff to move waste to collection locations. Additional challenges arise when trying to retrofit existing building infrastructure to accommodate food scrap collection. Resident training and education often need to be repeated due to tenant turnover. The good news is that there are organizations leading the way to address these challenges.

Advice from experts

NYSP2I brought together three industry practitioners across the U.S. who are each involved in aspects of design, setup, and maintenance of food waste diversion programs for multifamily buildings. The discussion points and key takeaways they shared for establishing a strong foundation for diversion programs are highlighted below. The information is valuable to anyone looking to start a food scraps program in a multifamily residential building.

Build momentum from existing initiatives

Starting in fall 2024, the City of Austin’s Universal Recycling Ordinance (URO) began requiring food scraps collection from multifamily buildings following a successful six-month pilot. Managed by Elizabeth Nelson, senior planner at Austin Resource Recovery with the City of Austin, Texas, the pilot helped identify challenges, strategies, and best practices for implementing organics programs at multifamily sites. It also simulated the post-pilot financial structure to better assess cost implications for this type of residence.

Rather than starting from scratch, food scrap programs may be able to leverage the structures, learnings, systems, and policies already in place that have proven to be successful. Recycling is a great example. Municipalities with well-established curbside pickup and drop-off recycling collection programs may find a multitude of replicable aspects of these programs to adapt to food scraps.

Nelson’s team leveraged both the existing organics recycling program and policy frameworks during the pilot, which included eight multifamily properties throughout Austin. “Having this ordinance in place, we had this precedent for mandating recycling. It was a lot easier to tack on organics diversion to that existing policy and the existing structure for educating residents,” Nelson said.

Katy Burgio, senior program manager for waste-related capital projects at the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), built off the momentum of existing efforts in New York. “The New York City Department of Sanitation did a characterization study in 2017 that looked at the city as a whole and residential material, but then specifically focused on NYCHA and found that a third of our material is organics and suitable for composting or processing,” she said. “The volume of that is around 193 tons of organic material generated on our sites daily. We have a long way to work toward that, but that is the full potential of the work that we’re doing.” The data, in Burgio’s case, helped lead to a holistic sanitation approach that incorporated organics into waste management systems.

Look at all the steps of the diversion process

A successful multifamily housing food scraps program is more than just hauling or end-of-processing. According to Burgio, it’s also about collection and process flow within the building—addressing how food waste gets out of an apartment, to an interim storage location, to the end location for processing, and every touch point in between. At NYCHA, Burgio and her team planned for how waste moves through their properties by considering questions from a resident’s point of view such as, “What do I do as a resident? How do I move my waste?” and questions from staff point of view such as, “How do the residents interact with waste? Where do they put it that's convenient? And then how does our staff move it from there to these end destinations?”

For Burgio, answering these questions can aid decisions around infrastructure and procedural development; ensure that equipment is up to date or replaced to manage appropriate waste streams; and reveal whether centralized spaces on the property require redesign to be more holistic and able to accommodate multiple waste materials, including organics.

Once the material streams coming out of residential buildings are understood, it’s important to look at what local outlets may exist for the collection and processing of waste materials (e.g., compost or anaerobic digestion). If none are available locally, on-site recycling at multifamily properties may be an option, but requires significantly more space and effort by staff.

In Austin, Nelson’s team utilized surveys at multiple touchpoints of the city’s pilot program to provide beneficial data and feedback from property managers and residents alike. “[We] asked them all sorts of questions about whether they used the service, what worked, what didn’t, [and] what their challenges were,” Nelson said. The surveys also provided qualitative data, including service costs and participation rates.

Staff are vital to program success

“We need to make sure that all the right people are in the room,” says Anthony Baker, a professor at Seminary of the Southwest (Southwest) in Austin, Texas.

Baker spearheaded Southwest’s participation in Austin’s pilot composting program—the very program established and run by Nelson’s team—for apartment-style on-campus housing. Before committing to participate in the pilot program, Baker emphasized how important early conversations with staff are. He needed to be sure that it was feasible and “within range” for everyone involved.

Building staff are an invaluable source of information and knowledge. They know the facility firsthand, what the challenges are, and what the constraints will be for implementing any new system. They are also the stakeholders who will (most likely) be interacting with tenants and facilitating the movement of organic waste material within and from the building. Their assistance and input are central to making a program work.

According to Baker, collaboration with staff is just as essential as it is with residents when it comes to waste collection and movement of the material in, out, and around a multifamily housing site. Building good relationships with the facility’s staff is a key foundational aspect of any program, and that starts with initial conversations.

In the context of training, Burgio expressed particular importance of having preliminary discussions with staff. Hurdles arise when upfront conversations don’t include all stakeholders. Burgio emphasized this aspect with staff training: “Training development is really huge to build out when [deploying] these types of systems.”

When staff aren’t included in conversations, it becomes a hurdle. Burgio explained that staff training is a focus of NYCHA. “We need to think of these folks who are moving the material […] and give them the education and the training.” Efforts like this to both learn from and train staff are critical to avoiding potential hurdles.

Engagement leads to participant buy-in

Education, training, and engagement are key foundational aspects of a successful organics waste diversion program because they lead to understanding by residents and staff alike.

Nelson’s team utilized the outreach mechanisms, knowledge, and access associated with the URO in Austin as they pertained to recycling and leveraged these resources for community outreach around organics recycling. For example, her program used educational materials—such as brochures—to explain what can and cannot be composted as well as what collection resources are available to residents, including kitchen countertop compost containers and compostable bags. Participant engagement with these outreach tools played a key role in improving understanding and adoption of organics recycling practices in multifamily housing.

With Southwest being a participant site in Nelson’s program, the benefits of these educational materials also trickled down to Baker’s team. The additional use of signage and video helped remind residents what to do and what not to do when it comes to waste separation, how to separate materials, and where the food scraps go.

Baker acknowledged that many participants didn’t (initially) have a sense of why composting was important. Skepticism and worry due to misunderstanding can be initial barriers, but dialogue and education help. “Education, support, and buy-in all seem to be connected,” he said.

At some NYCHA properties in New York, Burgio’s programs use on-site processed organics as a hands-on tool to teach kids and residents about the benefits or organics recycling and of applying it to soil.

Baker reinforced the value of the pilot program for providing momentum. “By the time the year was out, we understood it. We had a rhythm… so all we had to do was contract out with somebody else who would just keep it going.”

These takeaways are derived from a live webinar, “Food Scrap Diversion for Multifamily Housing,” hosted by NYSP2I on September 26, 2023. Click here to access the webinar recording.

Communities looking to design and implement pilot programs for reducing food waste can additionally utilize NYSP2I’s three-part Municipal Food Waste toolkit for guidance on defining goals and the scope of programs, as well as scaling programs.

About the experts and their programs

New York City, NY

The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) houses roughly 1 in 17 New York residents, serving over 500,00 people across over 2,400 buildings. Katy Burgio is the senior program manager for waste-related capital projects within NYCHA. She leads a team focused on implementing waste infrastructure and program strategies and goals under the authority's Sustainability Agenda (published in 2021) and the NYCHA 2.0 Waste Management Plan (published in 2019). Two of the goals included in the waste management plan relate to increasing the convenience of correct disposal and eliminating food scraps from the landfilled trash.

City of Austin, TX

Like NYC, the city of Austin, TX, has been working towards minimizing waste to landfills for the last few decades with commitments, ordinances, and master plans. Austin Resource Recovery is the city's department responsible for services such as composting, trash, recycling, and outreach and education, where Elizabeth Nelson serves as a senior planner. She has worked with the Strategic Initiatives division since 2016 and works on zero waste and circular economy policy development and long-range planning. She has managed incentive programs and worked on the implementation of waste diversion ordinances impacting the business and construction and demolition sectors. For residences with four units or fewer, the city provides trash, recycling and compost service; multifamily units greater than four must contract privately. As of 2018, only 2% of multifamily properties had compost services set up. In 2019, the city launched a pilot program in multifamily properties to "accelerate" food scraps collection with the goal of updating the city's Universal Recycling Ordinance based on pilot findings.

The Seminary of the Southwest (Southwest) is located in Austin, TX, and was one of eight locations to participate in the city's multifamily housing pilot. Dr. Anthony D. Baker is the Clinton S. Quin professor of systematic theology at Southwest and established Southwest’s “Green Team”, a sustainability-focused group on campus. He and the Green Team spearheaded participation in the city’s food scrap diversion pilot program for on-campus multifamily buildings.

About the New York State Pollution Prevention Institute

The New York State Pollution Prevention Institute (NYSP2I) is a partnership between the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, Rochester Institute of Technology, and the university’s Golisano Institute for Sustainability, Binghamton University, Clarkson University, Cornell University, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, with a statewide reach. NYSP2I also works with the state’s Manufacturing Extension Partnership to help disseminate data and strategy.

NYSP2I’s goal is to make the state more sustainable for workers, the public, the environment, and the economy through pollution prevention. Pollution prevention is reducing or eliminating waste at the source by modifying production processes, promoting the use of non-toxic or less-toxic substances, implementing conservation techniques, and reusing materials rather than putting them into the waste stream.

Funding provided by the Environmental Protection Fund as administered by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. The opinions, results, findings, and/or interpretations of data contained herein are the responsibility of Rochester Institute of Technology and do not necessarily represent the opinions, interpretations, or policy of New York State.