Bloomberg tells New Yorkers to "Recycle Everything"

Two new initiatives in New York City aim to encourage New Yorkers to recycle food waste as well as rigid plastics.

Mayor Bloomberg unveiled a new “Recycle Everything” ad campaign and announced an expansion of the city’s food waste recycling pilot program Monday morning.

The “Recycle Everything” ads will be spread throughout the city to promote recycling a wide range of materials. The campaign comes after the city’s recycling program began processing all types of rigid plastics this spring. 

The city is also expanding its organic food waste recycling programs to more locations. Since the spring of 2012 the program has expanded from public schools to residences in parts of Staten Island and Manhattan. This fall the program will come to parts of Brooklyn and the Bronx.

Mayor Bloomberg said it costs less to recycle than to ship waste to landfills and predicted the new recycling policies will save New Yorkers at least $60 million.

“This saves us money”, Bloomberg said, “and it dramatically makes the environment that our kids are going to inherit from us better”.

The mayor said the city has to cut back on its waste.  

“New York City is so big we send something like 22 thousand tons of solid waste every single day to landfills,” Bloomberg said, “we’ve got to be able to save a lot of that.”

The new recycling measures are part of the city’s goal to double its recycling rate to 30 percent by 2017.