Composting is the compliance obligation Brooklyn owners are most likely to be quietly failing right now, and the reason is a specific one: enforcement was paused for most of 2025 and resumed on 1 January 2026.
Buildings that had a routine going in 2024 let it slide during the pause. Very few restarted it when fines came back.
What the law requires
Local Law 85 of 2023, passed by the City Council on 8 June 2023, directed the Department of Sanitation to create a mandatory curbside composting program covering all residential properties. The program took effect 7 October 2024.
Separating food scraps, food-soiled paper, and leaf and yard waste from regular trash is mandatory citywide. It is not a subscription, an opt-in, or a pilot.
What goes in is broader than most residents assume. It is not only vegetable trimmings and coffee grounds — meat, bones and dairy are included, along with food-soiled paper. That detail matters operationally, because a building that explains organics as "fruit and veg" will have residents putting plate scrapings in the trash indefinitely, which is exactly the set-out that gets ticketed.
The fines, and the pause that confused everyone
The schedule is tiered by building size:
Buildings with 1 to 8 units — $25 first offense, $50 second, $100 third and each after.
Buildings with 9 or more units — $100 first offense, $200 second, $300 third and beyond.
The city suspended composting fines in April 2025, drawing sharp criticism from Council members who had backed the program. Enforcement resumed on 1 January 2026.
That eight-month gap is the whole problem. A pause reads to a busy owner as a repeal, the superintendent stops maintaining a routine nobody is checking, and the building is out of practice by the time tickets start again.
Confirm the current fine schedule with DSNY before relying on these amounts. This program's enforcement terms have been revised more than once, and there is no reason to assume they have stopped changing.
One question to settle for your own building
Reporting from the earlier phase of the program indicated that only buildings with four or more units were subject to fines, while separation remained mandatory for every resident regardless of building size. Later reporting describes enforcement running across the board from January 2026.
Those two statements are in tension, and I am not going to resolve them for you with a confident sentence that might be wrong. If you own a one-, two- or three-family building in Brooklyn, the question of whether you can actually be ticketed is worth putting to DSNY directly. The separation obligation applies to you either way; what is unsettled here is only the penalty exposure.
What a building actually needs to set up
The rules are simple. The implementation in a small Brooklyn building is not, because it is a space problem.
A third labeled, lidded container. The city's brown bin or any labeled lidded container of the right size. In a building with a four-foot areaway already holding trash and recycling, finding room for a third bin is the real obstacle, and it is worth solving deliberately rather than by stacking something in front of the stoop.
Set-out on the right day, alongside the trash and recycling routine. Composting collection follows its own schedule; confirm the day for your address rather than assuming it matches trash.
Signage residents see at the point of disposal, which means at the bins, not in the lobby. And it needs to say meat, bones and dairy explicitly, because that is the part people get wrong.
One person responsible. In a self-managed building that is usually the owner, and it is usually the thing that lapses first.
Where this sits alongside the bin rules
Composting is not a separate regime from the NYC Bin containerization rules — it is the third stream in the same set-out. A building sorting out its containers ahead of the 8 September bin enforcement date should sort out organics in the same pass, because doing it twice wastes the harder part of the work, which is deciding where the containers physically live.
Both belong on the same operational calendar as the rest of a building's recurring obligations, which is a large part of what apartment building management and a working preventive maintenance schedule are for.
If your building let the composting routine lapse during the 2025 pause and has not restarted it, schedule a consultation or call 718-568-9278.
This article is general information, not legal advice, and reflects DSNY composting requirements as of August 2026. This program's enforcement status and fine schedule have changed repeatedly since it launched. Confirm your building's current obligation directly with the Department of Sanitation.