Earlier this month, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced his Zero Waste Challenge, in which 31 businesses across all five boroughs have pledged to divert at least 50% of their waste. Already, participants have diverted nearly 13,000 tons, including composting 4,000 tons. The city’s goal: sending zero waste to landfills and incinerators by 2030.
Among commercial real estate and well-known building participants are SL Green (with tenants Viacom and COOKFOX Architects), The Durst Organization, the Barclays Center (above), Citi Field, the Starrett-Lehigh Building, and the Peninsula, Pierre and Waldorf-Astoria hotels, which will continue in the challenge through mid-June.
They join a variety of commercial tenants, food wholesalers, grocers and caterers, schools, hotels, restaurants and TV productions that have already achieved an average diversion rate of 60% and will be challenged to up that to 75% then ultimately 90%. The challenge also requires leftover edible food to be donated, and 107 tons have already been provided to hungry New Yorkers. (There are 1.4 million people who struggle to put meals on their tables regularly, according to City Harvest.)
The challenge comes ahead of the new commercial organics law, which will require certain subsets of businesses to source separate food scraps and other organic material for beneficial use in 2017, as well as new commercial recycling rules that simplify the city’s current rules and state all businesses must recycle all recyclable materials.
To read the full story, visit https://www.bisnow.com/national/news/property-management/10-ways-your-building-can-reach-its-zero-waste-goals-60339.