Elected leaders name a number of reasons for the new budget line, including the role it plays in removing a significant chunk of material from ending up in landfills and incinerators. But it’s the scourge of city rats that has compelled many city officials to act in recent months and helped drive demand among residents.

“Most people don’t know this about me, but I hate rats,” Adams said in a speech announcing the new plan. “And pretty soon, those rats will be hating me.”

In August, Boston introduced its curbside pilot program with plans to expand it after three years. City leaders said it’s crucial to meet their “Zero Waste” goal of diverting 80 percent of trash from landfills by 2035.

But when it comes to getting people on board, rats are the big sell.

“You can talk to them about greenhouse gas emissions and all these different reasons, but those all feel abstract,” said Theresa Savarese, Boston’s director of city waste. “But when you talk about the rats and roaches, people’s eyes light up.”

New York City once offered a voluntary curbside program to roughly 3 million residents, but it was cut before the entire city had a chance to participate. The service was later restored in a handful of neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Manhattan. In October, Adams launched a new pilot program in Queens, offering weekly pick-up to every resident.

The city collected 13 million pounds of waste from the Queens pilot, the equivalent of 300 city buses. It will expand to Brooklyn in October and to the other boroughs by the end of 2024. The service will be offered year-round.

Challenges still remain. The city currently sends its waste to its compost facility on Staten Island or a waste transfer station in northern Brooklyn, where a private hauler then trucks it to anaerobic digesters in the region. Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch said she will need to find more facilities to process organic waste to avoid scores of trucks from invading the residential Brooklyn neighborhood.

“Before we turn on Manhattan, we hope to have — we plan to have — other options, which we’re working on right now,” she said.

Most residents will have to participate for it to be cost-effective, which was a challenge in the past voluntary program. Tisch has pointed to the success of the Queens pilot as evidence that residents will join, noting that the new service is much easier to access than the former one.

“You had to express interest, and then opt-in and then order the only type of bin you’re allowed to use and if that was stolen or lost or never arrived, you couldn’t participate,” Tisch said of the pilot program under former Mayor Bill de Blasio. “It made it so that only the truest of the true believers participate.”

But many have raised concerns that the program won’t be economically viable without a mandate for residents to participate.

“As we’ve seen in previous piloted non-mandatory efforts, such a program would undoubtedly result in less compost being collected, less efficient truck runs, and higher costs for organic processing,” Council Members Sandy Nurse and Shahana Hanif said in a joint statement. Nurse is chair of the Sanitation Committee and Hanif is the primary sponsor of a bill to mandate organic waste collection.

Environmental advocates also doubt the ability to get sufficient buy-in without making it mandatory like glass and paper recycling.

“That’s the fundamental weakness in the city’s approach thus far — this has remained a voluntary program,” said Eric Goldstein, New York City environment director at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “The lesson from cities across the country is you’ll never get into the sustainability playoffs unless you have universal curbside collections.”