17 Jun, 2011
Operation Garbage Reduction continues, and, I washed my Green Bin!
So the City of Ottawa has increased the number and type of plastics we can throw in our blue bins. Hooray! Garbage reduction excites me. What can I say, I am an eco nerd!
A long time ago I posted about composting and the green bin. I would like to take a moment to make some additional observations now that we’ve been using it for awhile:
- Good lord, do we ever create a lot of kitchen waste; mouldy stuff that’s forgotten in the back of the fridge, freezer-burned fish, uneaten sandwiches and crusts, etc. It’s unbelievable. And kinda sad.
- After dinner we scrape our dishes right into the kitchen bin (the little brother of the Green Bin).
- The Green Bin needs to be emptied almost every night, not because it stinks necessarily, but because IT IS FULL.
- I have not been brave enough to put things like shrimp shells in our bin yet. Those get tossed in the regular garbage. Some people wrap them in newspaper and freeze them, and put them in the green bin the morning of pick-up. I am not this organized.
- That being said, I’m tired of people complaining about Green Bin Stink. IT IS A TRASH CAN. YOUR TRASH WILL SMELL.
- To cut down on smells and absorb some of the moisture you will want to cover food with dead leaves, newspaper, or plant matter. This sounds like a bigger deal than it really is. Lately whenever I dump some compost in the green bin I have been doing a quick weed of the front garden and throwing that stuff in there on top. It’s so satisfying.
- For those who were concerned about the compost freezing to the side in the winter, you needn’t have worried.
- Some of the things we’ve been putting in the bin include toilet paper tubes, pencil shavings, hair from hair brushes, dryer lint, paper towels and kleenex, flour and breadcrumbs (tainted from having rolled chicken in it) mouldy bread (which cannot be fed to the birds), the gunk that has collected at the bottom of the kitchen sink after the dishes are washed, lettuce soaked with salad dressing (a backyard composting no-no) and much much more. It’s amazing how much this baby can take.
Mark, who is responsible for the collection and taking-out of said garbage, has reported that our output has been reduced by HALF.
No squirrels or raccoons have discovered our bin. We are lucky on that front I guess. I’ve taken preventative measures so it doesn’t become a maggot incubator. How? I washed it. And it wasn’t a big deal. It probably took me 15 minutes. I used a couple of buckets of water, a few drops of dish soap, and an old mop. The water got dumped in the clover patch (see previous post about our clovered lawn) and everyone is happy. Including me.
Here’s a photo of the before. (I used someone’s hockey stick to loosen the mucky parts at the bottom. Shh.)
And here’s what it looked like after. (It’s hard to get into the corners, and there’s no way I’m sticking my head down in there):
Not perfect, but not bad either.
How are you doing with your green bin? Loving it or hating it?
