New York City has an opportunity to create thousands of good-paying jobs by raising the city’s low recycling rate and investing in recycling and composting infrastructure. Leading green cities around the country, including Seattle and San Francisco, have 60% more recycling jobs than New York and they recycle at more than double the rate of the Big Apple.

This study compares New York, which recycles or composts just 29% of its trash, to cities with far higher recycling rates. San Francisco, Seattle, San Jose, and Portland, OR recycle or compost as much as 70% of their waste stream and have at least 60% more jobs collecting, processing, and reusing recyclable materials than New York. Seattle has more than twice as many of these jobs than New York, relative to the amount of waste each city produces. Recycling and composting waste creates many more jobs per ton of waste processed than landfilling and incineration.