What To Do With Our Food Scraps?
By Caryn Prince
According to SB1383, we are no longer allowed to put organic materials in our garbage cans. This is to reduce methane emissions in our landfills, and helps to create composting materials. This means food scraps must be separated from our other trash, and placed into the yard waste can to be hauled away. What do we do with our yucky food scraps for a week!?!?
Many of us have already figured out a good system, and the change in the law doesn’t change anything for us, but for those of us who haven’t gotten there yet, here are two ideas that might work for you and your family.
We keep a small stainless steel colander in the corner of our sink that we use to collect all food scraps including meat and bones, coffee and coffee filters etc. At the end of each day, we dump our food scrap colander in an outside plastic paint bucket with a screw on lid (purchased at a local hardware store). Once a week we dump the scraps from the bucket into the big yard waste bin. It can get stinky and wet, so we try to be sure to have some leaves and/or weeding materials under it so that the bin doesn’t get gross. If we have no weeding, we empty the scraps into a doubled paper bag before dropping it in the big bin.
Other families keep a container in the freezer, and they keep all their food scraps in there for the week, and dump the frozen lump in the bin when they set out their bins for pick-up. This, too, can be placed on top of the yard clippings or in a paper bag so the bin stays cleaner.
Do you have a different system that works best for your family? Please share it with the Green Team, and we’ll add it to one of our “Environmental Moments” to help others to help Mother Earth!
Our sink colander:
