NEW YORK – New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is launching a citywide food compositing effort that will begin collecting food scraps from across the city, the New York Times reports. 

Bloomberg’s administration is expected to announce soon that it is hiring a composting plant to handle 100,000 tons of food waste each year, representing roughly 10% of the city’s residential food waste. It will also seek proposals within the next year for a company to build a regional plant to process residents’ food waste into biogas, which would be used to generate electricity. 

“This is going to be really transformative,” said Caswell Holloway IV, a deputy mayor. “You want to get on a trajectory where you’re not sending anything to landfills.” 

The program will begin on a voluntary basis but transition to mandatory within a few years, officials predicted. New Yorkers who fail to comply could be subject to fines, just as they are currently if they do not recycle plastic, paper or metal.

To date, the city has a relatively low participation rate in recycling, diverting roughly 15% of its total residential waste away from landfills. 

In his State of the City address in February, Bloomberg called food waste “New York City’s final recycling frontier.”

“We bury 1.2 million tons of food waste in landfills every year at a cost of nearly $80 per ton,” he said. “That waste can be used as fertilizer or converted to energy at a much lower price. That’s good for the environment and for taxpayers.”

While New York City does not handle commercial waste, the administration intends to propose legislation that would require foodservice businesses to recycle their food waste, too.