The garbage police are back!
The Mamdani administration has quietly resumed slapping New Yorkers with hefty fines for tossing food scraps in the trash instead of the compost, The Post has learned.
The Sanitation Department has issued 516 summonses so far this year – ending a temporary enforcement pause on the composting mandate that former Mayor Eric Adams implemented last spring.
It also means the city made at least $12,900 off those unwilling to follow the compost mandate, which went into effect last April.
Summons range from $25 for first offenders who own small homes — but could rise to as much as $300 for repeat offenders who own buildings with more than eight units.
The 516 tickets are more than 13 times the amount that were doled out from May to December in 2025, when Adams decided to only penalize properties that repeatedly failed to separate their food scraps from their regular trash, records show.
DSNY issued a whopping 42,844 compost-related warnings from April through December, compared to just four so far this year, records show.
Enforcement is expected to beef up as the weather warms and the mandate approaches its first birthday, but some say New Yorkers still aren’t ready to fully convert to composting rules.
Staten Island councilmembers David Carr, Frank Morano and Kamila Hanks penned a letter to the Department of Transportation this week saying that while they support the program, they believe fines should still be a long way off.
“The current enforcement approach risks penalizing residents who have not yet received adequate notice, education or guidance about how the program works,” the bipartisan trio wrote.
The politicians asked for city to instead ramp up education outreach, including confirmation that the trash separation would be well worth the headache.
The DSNY started enforcement with a bang last April, issuing 4,339 fines that month before Adams – who was then flirting with a re-election bid – opted to temporarily roll back enforcement following widespread anger and confusion over the guidelines.
Landlords and property managers decried the mandate as unsustainable, arguing that it would force their staff to dumpster-dive to separate the food scraps that their tenants — benefiting from the anonymity granted by trash chutes — declined to sort.
But the initiative was successful in its first few weeks before Adams’ intervention, with the DSNY collecting record-breaking amounts of compostable materials each week.
In its first week, the program collected 3.8 million pounds of food scraps — equal in weight to eight and a half Statues of Liberty.
