In response to recent reports of rodents running wild in a KFC/Taco Bell in Greenwich Village, restaurant industry leaders are calling on the city to consider allowing garbage disposals to be installed in restaurant kitchens.

It’s been nearly 10 years since Mayor Giuliani lifted a ban on garbage disposals in New York homes, but restaurants, grocery stores, and delis are barred from installing the systems, considered by many an essential modern convenience.

The New York Department of Environmental Protection has opposed the idea, saying it would increase the amount of nitrogen in the sewer system and become an environmental hazard. A message left yesterday with the department was not returned.

A lobbyist for the National Restaurant Association, Richard Lipsky, said installing disposals would address a public health crisis by ensuring food scraps don’t sit around restaurants in garbage bags, attracting rodents until they are collected each night.

“Obviously you are not going to totally eliminate the rodent problem, but you are going to mitigate it,” Mr. Lipsky said. “We’re hopeful that this crisis will encourage the mayoral people and the council people to take a second look.”

In 2006, City Council Member Joel Rivera introduced a bill to study the impact of allowing garbage disposals in commercial businesses, but no hearings were held. Mr. Rivera’s senior adviser, Michael Nieves, would not comment on the restaurant industry’s call for disposals.

A spokesman for the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Andrew Tucker, said rodents are on the prowl for food and are attracted to garbage. He said that if a restaurant is kept clean and free of garbage, and holes and cracks in the building are sealed, it decreases the chance that a rodent will enter the premises.

He would not comment on the idea that restaurants be allowed to install garbage disposals, and said questions would be best directed to the Department of Environmental Protection.

In the past, many restaurants stored garbage in Dumpsters outside, but a 2003 sanitation program, dubbed Operation Dumpster, began requiring stores and restaurants to keep their trash inside or in the rear of their buildings until shortly before the garbage is scheduled to be collected.

A spokesman for the Department of Sanitation, Keith Mellis, said the program was designed to keep Dumpsters off sidewalks and to reduce smells on the street.

“We feel it is working well,” he said. “People are adhering to it.”

The president of the Latino Restaurant Association, Louis Nunez, said restaurant workers sometimes get busy with customers and aren’t able to put their garbage on the curb before pickup. When that happens, trash may sit inside a restaurant overnight or even for a few days, he said. He estimates that between 80% and 85% of a restaurant’s garbage comprises wet food scraps, which could be disposed of quickly if disposals were allowed.

“We have tons and tons of solid, wet garbage,” he said. “Garbage in restaurants is the no. 1 prime reason why you begin to have a rodent or roach infestation.”