This week, New York City’s war on rats starts a welcome new offensive with the mandatory organic food waste collection (also called curbside composting) for all New Yorkers’ homes. The rules to separate out food scraps and food-soiled paper, along with leaf and yard waste, started first in residences in Queens and Brooklyn and now goes citywide. Fines, which apply for failing to separate metal, glass, plastic and liquid cartons (blue bins) and paper/cardboard (green bins) from regular trash (black bags), won’t start for another six months. To make things easy, the organic/compost (brown bins) will be collected on your existing recycling day. Coupled with the new mandate for all residential buildings of fewer than 10 units to use hard containers with secure lid starting next month (goodbye black bags), it will be a double blow to the hungry rodents always looking for their next meal in the garbage. Mayor Adams isn’t the only New Yorker who hates rats and now all 8 million-plus of us are joining the war effort. Having used organic collection for years going back before COVID (because we live in one in the early pilot areas) we find it is fabulous. The household garbage no longer smells. The banana peels and apple cores along with unwanted leftovers, from poultry to fish to onions, and spoiled food left too long in the fridge all goes into a small odor-resistant container in the corner of the kitchen floor. When the little kitchen bin is full, it gets brought to the basement and dumped in an airtight and bug and rodent impervious brown bin with a locking cover, supplied by the Sanitation Department. The brown bin goes on the sidewalk once a week to be collected by the Sanit truck. What remains in the garbage in the home are mostly things like dry cleaner bags and other flimsy plastics along with nonrecyclable items like disposable razors, ballpoint pets and empty toothpaste tubes. It doesn’t smell at all or get full very often and doesn’t take up much space either. The building’s trash chute and the compactor room in the basement also stay much cleaner and odor free. The same goes for those who keep their refuse in their garages. Once the organic/composting is picked up and processed, it is put to good use as fertilizer. As for the remaining nonrecyclable garbage, the environment is also helped by filling up fewer landfills (and the city’s expensive bill for the landfilling is also reduced). This organic/composting collection started under Mayor Bill de Blasio and Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia, but he later cut it back, prompting a justified angry retort from Garcia when she resigned to run for mayor herself. Adams and his Sanit boss, Jessie Tisch, put it back in place and have now expanded it citywide, proving that Garcia, now working for the governor, was correct all along. So to tally it up, we get reduced garbage, which is cleaner and far less stinky, in our homes, while on the macro level, the city saves money on landfills, spares the environment, creates beneficial compost and cuts the rat population. We only wish that NYC had done this earlier.