City lawmakers want every New Yorker to do what Upper West Side resident James Langford has done for the last decade: compost.

“I think it’s about time. You know, let’s look back and remember there was a day when we did not recycle cardboard or plastic,” Langford said.

On Thursday, the City Council passed a package of bills called the Zero Waste Act, which mandates every New Yorker separate food scraps from their trash.

The city has been trying to make composting easier for eco-conscious New Yorkers.

Mayor Eric Adams launched a program for New Yorkers to voluntarily separate their food waste for composting, along with the Sanitation department picking it up curbside.

This was first offered to select neighborhoods, then to all of Queens, with the service slated to go citywide by October 2024.

The council now wants to make the mayor’s composting program mandatory, and roll it out on the same timeline: first to Brooklyn and Queens in October. Then to the Bronx and Staten Island in March 2024, then Manhattan in October 2024.

The Zero Waste Act would require New Yorkers to separate food waste and leaves and other yard waste from trash.

“Right now, more than a third of all trash that New Yorkers produce is organic waste,” Councilwoman Shahana Hanif, a Brooklyn Democrat who sponsored the bill, said Thursday.

Food waste that will be incinerated or left to rot in landfills, releasing climate-warming methane gas.

It’s why Langford said he’s been composting in New York for nearly a decade, and did it as a kid growing up in Massachusetts.

“We need to give back in some way to the Earth,” Langford said.

While it may be an inconvenience for some New Yorkers, Langford said, so too are the harmful health effects of poor air and climate change.

A representative for the mayor’s office wouldn’t say if he’d sign the council’s bills.

But in a statement, a spokeswoman said that the mayor’s program works for everyone — calling it efficient and cost effective.