The Rye City Council is considering reinstating curbside food scrap recycling.
On Wednesday, the council asked City Manager Brian Shea to study the feasibility and costs of bringing back the program, brought forward by Councilman James Ward.
“Tonight, I’m asking the City Council to direct the City Manager to conduct a financial and operational feasibility study for citywide, curbside food scrap pickup,” Ward said during the Old Business/New Business portion of the meeting. “The questions are concrete: What would it cost to integrate food scrap recycling into the existing collection routes? What is the current subsidiary rate from Westchester, and how do those numbers compare to what we’re paying today to incinerate those same scraps in Peekskill?”
According to the city’s recently published 2025 annual report, there were 2,145 tons of recyclables collected in Rye last year. However, collections in the city’s food waste recycling program dropped to 42.6 tons in 2025, down from 53.5 tons in 2024 and 67.6 tons in 2021.
“We collected 67 tons back in 2021, and it’s been falling ever since. The EPA estimates that food waste makes up approximately 22% of everything in our trash,” Ward said. “Applied to Rye’s numbers, that suggests we may be sending over 1,000 tons to the Peekskill incinerator every year.”
Ward emphasized he was not requesting implementation of the curbside program, but rather an analysis of whether the city should move forward.
The city maintains a residential drop-off food scrap recycling program located at the Department of Public Works and Highland Hall parking lots. However, Ward and Councilman Keith Cunningham noted people are more likely to recycle food scraps outside their own homes than driving waste to another location in town.
“My guess – but I don’t have the data – is that a food scrap recycling program would be cheaper than regular garbage,” Ward said, “and if brought to scale, will be financially beneficial to the city and community to divert 1,000 tons or more of waste into a much more efficient and cleaner usage.”
Ward said the previous curbside food scrap recycling program was introduced in 2019 for about 160 households, and by 2021, the program had a 72% rate of activity, which fell below the council’s self-imposed 85% threshold for continuation of the program. Ward also said there was a wait list of 196 households to join the program.
“There were a lot of voices in favor, and none came in and said they wanted the program canceled,” Ward said. “Nonetheless, in March 2020, the City Council voted 4-3 to cancel the program. It’s a shame the pilot program wasn’t used as a starting point for real analysis into the financial costs and benefits as well as getting an actual plan to bring it to fruition.”
Mayor Josh Nathan said he voted against ending the program in 2020, when he served as a councilman, because there was a lot of useful recycling data and plans from the county that weren’t considered at the time.
“I think it’s worth restarting this conversation about what it all looks like today,” Nathan told Shea. “I think there’s some good data that’ll give you a running start and make it a lot easier to pull together because we did a lot of that back then.”
The council agreed that exploring a potential curbside program and gathering more information was worthwhile, though a timeline for a study or when the issue might return to a council agenda has not been set.
