NEW YORK, NY May 28, 2003 — It's a persistant belief among many New Yorkers that food disposers, that staple of suburban kitchens, are banned in the city. They're not. In fact, the right to grind eggshells and pizza crusts, and wash them down the drain, came in 1997 when the food disposer ban was lifted. Now, the City Council is considering bills that would expand their use and that has city environmental officials worried. WNYC's Amy Eddings reports.



Doris Van Clief says she uses her food disposer every day.



Van Clief: I have less trash. It's time saving. I don't have to go out as much with the trash and it's very simple to use. You just turn the water on and you hit the little button - (sound of grinder) - and that's what it does, it grinds up the trash.



About seven years ago, Van Clief's Bay Ridge apartment building was one of three sites chosen for a pilot study of food disposers conducted by the D-E-P -- the city's Department of Environmental Protection.



Van Clief: We were at a shareholders' meeting and they asked, anyone interested? And I said, yeah. And so they came up and installed it. Been here ever since, and I love it.



At that time, New York was the only big city in the country that had a ban on food disposers, fearing its antiquated sewer system couldn't handle them. But the DEP's study supposedly put those fears to rest. Based on a worst case scenario of 30-thousand disposers installed each year - that's one percent of the city's households - the study found that the appliance's impact on water quality, water demand, and water treatment costs would be, quote, de minimus, or below the need for concern. And the ban was lifted soon after, with the hopes that garbage costs and vermin problems would be reduced.



Since then, food disposers haven't exactly flown off the shelves. Developers have little incentive to put them in new homes. And retrofits aren't cheap. Buying and installing them requires a permit, an electrician, and a plumber. Total costs can run between $300 and $800. Clearly, food disposers can be a boon for plumbers, which is why the industry lobbied for years to get the ban lifted. And now, the Plumbing Foundation's Stewart O'Brien is back before councilmembers, urging them to make disposers mandatory for all new kitchens.





Stewart O'Brien: Now, if the point of legalizing residential disposers was to capture the public benefits - the public benefits! -- then the corallary is obvious. The city must achieve a critical mass of disposer installations through encouraging or mandating their use. That explains why disposers have effectively been mandated for decades in over 100 cities not small cities, large cities.



O'Brien argues that twelve thousand new homes and apartments are currently built each year - far below the thirty thousand annual installations the DEP used as the worst case scenario in its study.



But plumbers aren't the only ones who want to expand the food disposer law. Restaurants, green grocers, and supermarkets are still banned from using the appliance. Food industry officials are supporting a bill that would give commercial establishments the right to grind. The reason? The Bloomberg Administration is poised to raise the commercial garbage carting rate this summer. Richard Lipsky with the Neighborhood Retail Alliance, testified his members would prefer to literally flush some of those costs down the drain.



Lipsky: What we're asking you, in terms of this legislation, is to look at ways in which we can make these businesses more viable we can take some of their costs away .It's a difficult time. We're in this together.



But officials with the Department of Environmental Protection are worried about any proposal that could tempt restaurants to put grease and other fats down the drain a big no-no. Grease, says DEP sewer maintenance supervisor Bill Maggiulli, is the chief culprit of sewer backups .like this one in Flushing, Queens. He points down a ten foot shaft, to the sewer.



Maggiulli: You see the water running? Well, you see all that stuff around it that looks like cement?

Eddings: It looks like white rock.

Maggiulli: That's grease. And you can see it's clogging about a third of the pipe.





Pressurized water is used to break up the grease. Sometimes grappling hooks are needed.



Maggiulli: It gets hard like that, it kinda gets like cement and when we pull it out sometimes, we pull out .logs.



Grease has received special attention from DEP, and sewer backups have been on the decline in the last five years. But Commissioner Christopher Ward sees that good news reversing if either food disposer bill becomes law .despite the 1997 report from his agency that said food disposals would not affect the sewer system.



Ward: So when we say no discernable impact, that was on a very modest penetration rate that we would've seen through new housing starts, and not from, either, (1) mandated programs, and (2) clearly with the release of the rate cap, small commercial establishments just bascially disposing of garbage down their drain.



Ward also points out that, since the report, New York City has entered into a consent decree with the state to reduce the amount of nitrogen that several waste treatment plants discharge into Long Island Sound. (Nitrogen in organic material contributes to a lack of dissolved oxygen in water, which harms aquatic life. ) The total estimated cost so far: $1.7 billion dollars.



Ward: We'd be hard pressed to say that those costs are, in fact, de minimus, and, in fact, it's a significant cost risk to the city should our nitrogen levels and the nutrient loading reach the levels where they're no longer manageable.



Ward says the state, with support from the feds, actually wants the city to spend more than three billion on nitrogen reduction technology almost double what the city has planned. Ward says his efforts to reduce treatment costs will be undermined if, at the same time, the council passes laws that encourage more people to put more organic material into the sewage system. Mark Tedesco, director of the federal Environmenal Protection Agency's Long Island Sound office, agreed.



Tedesco: Certainly, if there is going to be a proposal for other approaches to meet nitrogen reduction requirements, it will have to be evaluated in terms of other factors that may increase the burden of treatment.



Meanwhile, food disposer-related problems have not surfaced in Detroit and Philadephia - just two of the many cities where the appliance has long been required. Local and federal environmental officials say they haven't noticed increased nitrogen in their waterways. But the plumbing industry's promise that widespread food disposer use will reduce vermin, since less food waste will be sitting on the curb that, too, has not materialized. Last fall, Philly suffered from an infestation of mice, while Detroit battled an increase in rats in 1999 and 2001.



At the council hearing, Eric Goldstein, senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, testified that expanding the use of food disposers would do little for the public, while doing much for plumbers and restauranteurs.



Goldstein: This is a special industry pleading that would shift the costs from the private sector to water and sewer rate payers. And if the city is going to dramatically change policy, as some have suggested here today, and pick up the costs of commercial waste disposal, today is not the day to do it.



Food industry representatives are calling for another study, this time with restaurants. And plumbing industry reps want a sit-down with the DEP to come up with an acceptable level of food disposal installations that could be mandated. Commissioner Christopher Ward believes that level is impossible to estimate but clearly, he says, the current food disposal usage rate has been just fine. For WNYC, I'm Amy Eddings.