Time to save the scraps. New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg is on a new crusade, and this one doesn’t involve bikes. He wants to require New Yorkers to quit wasting food and start composting.

Other cities, like San Francisco and Seattle, have implemented rules that call for composting, but New York was long thought too dense and too big for it to be even remotely sanitary. Now, pilot programs in the city have shown promising participation rates.

Composting might seem like something your crunchy aunt does in her garden out in the country, but it’s not just an environmentally conscious way of living. It has the potential to be a robust form of job creation should the plan rolled out the way Bloomberg envisions.

Bloomberg is “[a]nticipating sharp growth in food recycling,” according to the New York Times, and “the administration will also seek proposals within the next 12 months for a company to build a plant in the New York region to process residents’ food waste into biogas, which would be used to generate electricity.”

A plant. Depending on the size and scope, it could create some jobs in a sector that is only going to grow as more and more New Yorkers start composting. I’m not going to act like it’s the Arsenal of Democracy and we can expect thousands of jobs in a biogas boom. But it would create some jobs — a proposed biogas plant in St. Paul, a much smaller city, is planning for 20 permanent jobs — and the composting could save the city $100 million each year by “diverting it from landfills.”

I imagine this is something Bloomberg will continue pushing for even when he’s out of office. He has the kind of cash and clout to get it done.

Composting, like any other green lifestyle choice, isn’t just liberals forcing their views on people. It can create jobs and usher in a cultural shift that makes cities better and more sustainable places to live.

Bill Bradley is a writer and reporter living in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in Deadspin, GQ, and Vanity Fair, among others.

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