As he unveiled his 20-year waste management plan yesterday, Mayor Bloomberg focused almost as much on trucks as on trash.

His proposal, more than a year in the making, revolves around the idea of carting waste out of New York without resorting to unsightly and malodorous garbage trucks that clog city streets and belch exhaust into the air. The trucking system, Mr. Bloomberg said, is “ultimately unsustainable.”

Instead, the mayor wants to float trash out of the city, to load containers of compacted garbage at a handful of weigh stations along the waterfront and then ship the super-compacted trash somewhere else.

The plan, the first overhaul of the city’s trash-collection system since the decision to close the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island in 2001, is likely to win kudos from residents who endured the early morning clang of the garbage trucks in the streets. It will, however, just as likely cause grumbling among those who live close to four marine transfer stations Mr. Bloomberg intends to reopen in Brooklyn, the Bronx, Manhattan, and Queens.

“Every single part of the city has to participate in solving a very difficult problem,” Mr. Bloomberg told reporters in the Blue Room. “This has nothing to do with politics.”

The mayoral initiative received early support from members of the City Council, with David Yassky of Brooklyn, for one, saying Mr. Bloomberg was moving in the right direction.

“The general plan was to reopen the transfer stations used in the past, and that makes sense,” Mr. Yassky said. “Moving from a truck-based system to a barge system is a huge improvement for New Yorkers in terms of air and congestion.” But the council member added a caveat: “There’s a long road between now and this plan actually going into effect. I have learned that no major plan goes into effect exactly as announced.”

The changes Mr. Bloomberg proposed were born of necessity. Three years ago, when the city decided to close Fresh Kills, officials were left scrambling to find landfills out of state in which to dump garbage instead. New York’s wrappers and containers and wet waste were sent off to Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, loaded on a fleet of long-haul trucks. It was expensive. It was environmentally unsound. And it was, to hear Mr. Bloomberg tell it, a blight on New Yorkers’ quality of life.

“The plan reduces the number of private waste haulers’ truck trips by more than 600 each day,” Mr. Bloomberg said, “and eliminates nearly 3 million Department of Sanitation truck-miles on our city’s streets and highways each year.”

The mayor also vowed to right a bad policy decision made nearly 20 years ago when city officials, concerned that the Fresh Kills landfill was filling up too quickly, decided to encourage commercial waste haulers to take their garbage elsewhere by driving up dumping prices for commercial waste – from paper on Wall Street to food from restaurants – at Fresh Kills.

Private haulers responded by building a network of in-city transfer stations, from where collection trucks could transfer their local loads to long-haul trucks, which would take the garbage out of state. The move ended up segregating the commercial and residential waste systems in New York for the first time and created competing customers for out-of-state landfill space.

Mr. Bloomberg’s strategy is to weave together the residential and commercial waste programs in the city and then add a stepped-up, long-term recycling system.

For residential garbage, under the plan the city will renovate the Hamilton Avenue transfer station and the Southwest Brooklyn transfer station in Brooklyn; enter into a long-term contract with one or two private transfer stations in the Bronx; use the 59th Street transfer station on Manhattan’s West Side for commercial waste; develop a city-owned transfer station on East 91st Street; enter into a long-term contract with two private Queens transfer stations, Greenpoint and North Shore, and finally finish construction of a transfer station on Staten Island for garbage produced there.

The Upper East Side transfer station in the proposal happens to be in Council Speaker Gifford Miller’s district. Mr. Miller is likely to challenge the mayor in next year’s mayoral race, and members of the Democratic-controlled council are likely to disagree with Mr. Bloomberg’s site selection for the transfer stations, among other things, Michael McMahon of Staten Island, who heads the council waste committee, told The New York Sun.

“The sticking points are likely to be the siting of these transfer stations, some union problems because they intend to privatize some of these stations, and we still have the problem of where the trash is finally going to end up and whether there will be a program of waste reduction,” he said.