Waste management experts say that by changing the way New Yorkers think about their waste, the city can exploit some innovative measures to reduce sanitation costs.

J. Winston Porter, Assistant Administrator of the E.P.A. for waste programs, said that the strategy was a result of six months of meetings with states, industry, waste management experts and citizens' groups.

"The environment is definitely a boom business for lawyers and lobbyists at the moment," said Anthony Montrone, a waste management expert for the consulting firm of Arthur D. Little Inc. in Cambridge, Mass.

Some waste management experts have recently incorporated an additional R: "Re-think", with the implied meaning that the present system may have fundamental flaws, and that a thoroughly effective system of waste management may need an entirely new way of looking at waste.

"Until now it has failed about as badly as a program can fail," said John Schall, a waste management expert who teaches at Yale University and who, as a consultant for the Tellus Institute in Boston, wrote much of the city's new comprehensive solid waste proposal required by the state.