Composting is now mandatory in New York City, but compliance doesn’t have to stink. Here’s how one building figured it out (and you can, too).

NYC’s new composting law went into effect on April 1st, and it’s no joke. Like bottles, cans, and boxes before them, food scraps, food-soiled paper, and yard waste must now be separated from the rest of your trash, lest you risk accruing hefty fines for you and/or your landlord.

New Yorkers want to do the right thing and compost, really they do. It’s the actual process of doing it — keeping a bucket of decomposing food scraps in your kitchen and then taking it down to the back alley or basement bin to add to your neighbors’ ick — that discourages some from participating.

These screw-top buckets can make the composting life a lot easier.

With only the Department of Sanitation to instruct residents via carrot and stick, apartment buildings have been left to invent their own new systems for dealing with compost. Some management companies report that many high-end residential buildings, reluctant to burden their tenants with trash disposal, are opting to pay the city fines instead. In the first week after the compulsory composting law went into effect, the city’s Department of Sanitation slapped summonses on 1,885 buildings that were not in compliance. That’s bad news for buildings, but good news for environmental advocates. (And good for the city’s coffers, too: For small buildings, the fine is $25 but, for larger buildings, can jump up to $300 after several offenses).

Other buildings, however, are getting a bit more inventive. 172 East 4th Street, a 100-unit prewar co-op in Manhattan’s East Village (and this author’s residence), got ahead of the curve months before the mandate went into effect. Last fall, its board conducted some A/B testing in trash rooms on a few floors, tweaked their methods, and then rolled out the refined system building-wide.

The low-tech, easy-lift process is made possible by easily procured items. Each floor’s trash room has two stacked five-gallon buckets with twist-off lids. These buckets, specifically designed for food storage, are airtight and designed so that trash bag liners — compostable, of course — don’t interfere with the twisting on and off of the lids.

Here’s how it works: Each floor’s residents bring their compost to the trash room, twist off the top bucket’s lid, drop in their scraps, and seal it back up. Once a day, when porters are collecting the other recycling from the trash rooms, they pick up the top buckets from each floor and take them downstairs to add to the city-issued brown bin, leaving the bottom buckets behind to accept new scraps. After dumping their respective payloads, the porters then reline the buckets they’ve taken with fresh bags and redistribute them throughout the building, placing them in the lower position. So far, the only time a single bucket at a time wasn’t enough was during the December holidays, high season for kitchen trash.

The simplicity of this system demonstrates that solutions don’t have to get your hands dirty or be expensive. In truth, not 100% of the banana peels, cheese rinds, and eggshells from 100% of the apartments is being composted, but this one building alone has mastered keeping them well ahead of the 5% participation that the city’s reporting. And, knock on hardwood floors, they haven’t gotten any fines yet.

Ann Shields is a longtime resident of 172 East 4th. Her husband, Thom, regularly advises condo and co-op boards about sustainability — how to deal with composting comes up often.