NEW YORK, June 18 (UPI) -- Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants New Yorkers to separate food scraps for composting as people in San Francisco and Seattle do, a City Hall official said.
Deputy Mayor Caswell F. Holloway IV told The New York Times Bloomberg has rolled out a plan to begin collecting food scraps throughout the city, based on the success of recent pilot programs.
The administration will soon announce it is hiring a composting plant to handle 100,000 tons of food scraps a year, about 10 percent of the city's residential food waste.
"You want to get on a trajectory where you're not sending anything to landfills," Holloway said. "This is going to be really transformative."
The program will be voluntary initially, but New Yorkers who fail to separate their food scraps could eventually be subject to fines, the newspaper said.
