On Leftovers

December 26, 2018 8:17 AM

“When table scraps break down, they release methane, a potent greenhouse pollutant, into the atmosphere. Because organic waste makes up by far the largest segment of materials sent to California’s landfills each year, state leaders see a lot of opportunity in learning how to harness its energy.” Already a Climate Change Leader, California Takes on Food Waste : The state’s innovate programs and laws to tackle excess food and reduce greenhouse gas emissions could be a template for the nation. (Civil Eats) The Pros and Cons Of NYC’s New Composting Program (NYT) (Find a GrowNYC compost drop off location near you or sign up your building, school, or business )
posted by The Whelk (23 comments total)

If you can, I recommend keeping chickens: our household food waste went to zero since we started keeping chickens. (Interesting fact: the eggs from chickens that eat food scraps are tastier than the eggs from chickens that eat even organic commercial feed.)

(Yes, I know that this is a societal-scale problem that requires societal-scale solutions. But chickens are so cute.)
posted by ragtag at 8:30 AM on December 26, 2018 [13 favorites]

I'm in an NYC composting neighborhood. I use it weekly for all my food scraps. Some of my neighbors do, but mostly for yard waste. The biggest problem in a city that's infested with vermin is what to do with food scraps all week while waiting for pickup? I don't have roaches or mice and I really want to keep it that way. Theres no space in front of my building to keep the brown bin out front permanently so it lives inside at the bottom of my stairs. I keep the smaller countertop bin in my freezer til Friday. So if I eat a lot, or forget or am out of town, my freezer is sometimes overflowing with frozen food scraps. Not at all ideal. The plus side is that the amount of actual landfill garbage I throw out is really small now. We have twice a week collection and I usually only put a bag curbside every other week.

I can't imagine how this would work in large buildings. Ive been in enough big buildings to know that the best kept secret of luxury apartment buildings is that they too can get roaches, mice and rats (although the rats usually stay downstairs in maintenance areas). How would non-doorman buildings without 24 hour staff fare?
posted by Conrad-Casserole at 8:36 AM on December 26, 2018 [2 favorites]

Vermont's been working on this- Act 148 was passed in 2012.
I thought that I was already not allowed to put compostable food in my trash starting this year, but I don't see that in my link (for private houses).
It might be that my trash service is not allowed to accept it because of their size.
Anyway, CA is going to make a bigger dent than VT, so good on them.
posted by MtDewd at 8:53 AM on December 26, 2018 [1 favorite]

Bokashi is a countertop composting system that is suitable for apartments. The only problem is that if you live in a apartment you often have nothing to use the outputs on.
posted by srboisvert at 8:57 AM on December 26, 2018 [6 favorites]

Toronto's had a similar program for ages. I'm not sure how successful they've been at capturing and refining the gas but it saves space in landfill.

Link.
posted by Evstar at 9:10 AM on December 26, 2018

How would non-doorman buildings without 24 hour staff fare?

FWIW, the building across the alley from me in DC (where we do not have municipal curbside compost yet) offers Compost Cab pickup as a tenant perk, and they have several of their very thick plastic super-cans in the (outdoor) trash area next to their dumpster and recycling bins.

Rats can chew through these, obviously, but it takes them a while and they only seem willing to do so in the absence of other, easier options. CC looks to be pretty good about replacing the cans when they're compromised, too.

It's obviously voluntary to use the bins, and outdoor space is limited, but at least in places that can put trash outside, this seems like an at least partially scaleable solution. Even getting to 50% would likely make a huge difference in a city like Washington.

Bokashi is a countertop composting system that is suitable for apartments. The only problem is that if you live in a apartment you often have nothing to use the outputs on.

I spent ~2 years experimenting with bokashi composting in an apartment, and ultimately abandoned it. There are 4 of us and, even in weeks when I was mostly by myself, we generated more scraps than the bins could break down (I've found the volume reduction potential of bokashi to be wildly oversold). Also, rats seem to *love* bokashi-fermented vegetable scraps, so I found myself futilely building a ziggurat of cinderblocks on and around the buried scraps which they happily tunneled under, making a mess.

The person that can invent an affordable, mass-produceable, durably rat-proof food scrap bin for municipal urban composting operations - well, many people will beat a path to their door.
posted by ryanshepard at 9:17 AM on December 26, 2018 [4 favorites]

We have big city rats in the backyard of our urban house/apartment. They've never gotten into the green bin. More suburban neighbourhoods have raccoons to contend with.
posted by Evstar at 9:24 AM on December 26, 2018 [1 favorite]

I actually keep leftover table scraps and other food waste in a covered container in my refrigerator. I use the green bags to line it, and take it out to the compost bin outside when its full. I used to keep them in a bit at room temperature, but I don't eat enough to fill it quickly and it would inevitably get moldy and gross.
posted by dancing_angel at 10:14 AM on December 26, 2018

We have compost bins at our apartment-building. I've never heard of rats getting in there, and I feel much better about leftovers than ever before.
Before, I brought my leftovers (only the veg-scraps) to my local cemetery, where there are multiple compost bins.
posted by mumimor at 10:16 AM on December 26, 2018

We've been doing the full composting routine for more than a decade: several compost piles, regularly turned. Each year we add the results to several beds. Building the soil.

But that's because we live in a very rural location. When I travel I regularly get disoriented by not being able to compost in most hotels, restaurants, etc.
posted by doctornemo at 10:26 AM on December 26, 2018

NYC has really convenient dropoff locations at farmer's markets and subway stops. You can get compostable plastic bags and keep things in the freezer for a week or three until you can drop them off somewhere.
posted by kokaku at 10:32 AM on December 26, 2018

Yeah I have a cheap plastic box from the container store that fits nicely in my fridge that holds about a week’s worth of food prep scraps (and we cook a lot) which I drop off at the Sunday greenmarket. I notice a lot of people use double bagged sturdy paper bags and just dump the whole thing in
posted by The Whelk at 10:35 AM on December 26, 2018 [1 favorite]

Compost bins in my apartment building are kept in the garbage room next to the dumpster. They are taken to the alley for pickup on designated days. Residents can remove food waste daily. It’s great (although cleaning the bin can be gross). This is the way to do it in a city.
posted by crazycanuck at 11:07 AM on December 26, 2018 [1 favorite]

In my big(ish) Brooklyn apartment building we have compost pickup once a week. Like Conrad-Casserole I keep my scraps in the freezer. The bins are put out the evening before pickup day to keep people from putting any scraps in during the week. We only have one pickup day a week, and it's true that some weeks I have more scraps than fit comfortably in my freezer, but I think overall it's working pretty well. Our building started out with 2 brown bins and we are now up to 3.
posted by maggiemaggie at 12:04 PM on December 26, 2018

My Canadian province has province-wide municipal composting since before I moved here ... since 1996, in some municipalities, apparently? Every household can get a free large green bin, which is much like a regular municipal dustbin (it can be shut relatively securely - a raccoon could open it, but not your average rat (even a major port city cunning and well-fed sort of rat - vermin and green bins isn't a huge additional problem in Halifax, even though rats are definitely an issue in some neighborhoods)), but has a slightly fancier vent system in the lid. Whether or not your green bin smells depends a bit on how often your take it out the curb on green bin collection days as well as what you put in it. They can breed flies in the summer.


(On the other hand, the main city, Halifax, was still dumping its sewage into the harbor ten years ago. Nova Scotia can sometimes be an unusual mix of forward-thinking and behind the times.)
posted by eviemath at 12:28 PM on December 26, 2018

Just the other day I was thinking about landfills. I understand that they are a largely anaerobic environment, so most of the food waste doesn't break down. I imagine a future where the biomass in landfills can be actively reclaimed.
posted by rebent at 12:54 PM on December 26, 2018 [1 favorite]

Just a note that our city food waste program is different from composting. Some non-compostable things (like meat and cooking oil) can go in food waste, but compostable paper products can't.

Our food waste is cooked and sold as pig feed.
posted by muddgirl at 4:37 PM on December 26, 2018

The Philadelphia water department encourages people to use garbage disposals. They use the methane produced in the wastewater treatment process to power the treatment plants, and the solids are turned into fertilizer.

At the household end there's little food waste to keep safe from rats and no driving the waste around.
posted by sepviva at 5:42 PM on December 26, 2018

Composting is a lot more difficult than it seems. Everyone thinks: well, just throw it into the pile, and things will decompose nicely. Guess again; compost has to be worked and turned, otherwise that orange or banana peel you tossed in a week ago?--it'll still be there in a year.
posted by pjmoy at 8:23 PM on December 26, 2018

Composting is a lot more difficult than it seems. Everyone thinks: well, just throw it into the pile, and things will decompose nicely. Guess again; compost has to be worked and turned, otherwise that orange or banana peel you tossed in a week ago?--it'll still be there in a year.

Master Composter here (yes, that is a thing). There are quite a few ways to compost. Some require lots of effort and turning, some do not. Most methods require the right combination of "brown" and "green" materials, the right amount of moisture, and the right amount of air circulation. The methods you can use to provide those things are varried and you can get creative. Wildlife is often a problem, but usually not an insurmountable one.

If you are trying to compost and running into difficulties, I recommend checking in your area to see if there is a master composting group at your county extension office. If anyone wants to, you can memail me with questions and I will answer in as timely a manner as I am able. I will say that I have not had to deal with rats so I may not be able to help with that. My suggestion there would probably be the same as above, to try bokashi and/or worm composting (vermiculture).
posted by WalkerWestridge at 9:44 PM on December 26, 2018 [5 favorites]

We live in a block of flats in London and our local council introduced food waste bins for composting about 2 years ago. Like others on here, one of the problems we have is the food turning rancid inside the flat due to the amount of time it takes to fill the caddy. This can actually become extremely horrible. The other is that there is a large food waste bin for the caddies in the yard and people keep throwing all kinds of stuff in there - even plastic bags and bottles - so the waste is compromised anyway and could never be composted. A little depressing, but we ended up reverting to throwing food scraps into the general waste.
posted by Myeral at 7:40 AM on December 28, 2018

A few years ago I was helping run a supply chain IT solution project for a company that sells roughly half the denim in America and one of the other project leads was, like myself, a contractor, but one that traveled into SF from his hometown of LA.

At one point in one of our leads meeting he made a wise crack about how we northern California weirdos have 3 different trash cans and he can't keep them all straight. I calmly replied:

"Aw it's not that hard - food wastes and anything paper that touched food goes in the green bin, nearly everything else can go in the blue bin, and the trash that's left we just keep in southern California."
posted by allkindsoftime at 1:24 PM on December 28, 2018

One if the best composting programs in the world? Dollywood
posted by The Whelk at 9:57 AM on January 16, 2019 [1 favorite]