Where we live recycling isn’t an odd thing, pretty much everyone does it here n King County, Wa. It is even more aggressive in the city of Seattle, where they have stricter rules, but out in the far edges of the county where we live, we have 3 bins besides garbage: recycling (yes, we have 2 full size cans. The garbage company told us we had to have an extra, as we recycle so much. It was free, so hey!) and yard waste. We get pickup of the bins every other week so we have a nice turn over. No fuss, no sweat, just wheel it out to the road, and it disappears. But while I recycle nearly everything I can (and our list is lengthy here!), I used to fail too often at ‘green’ waste in the house. It isn’t that I meant to…but all it took was me being busy with cooking, or it was nasty out, and I found myself dumping onion peels in the garbage. I hated having an open bowl on the counter stinking up the kitchen.
So a few years back I saw this at the store and picked it up. A BioBag bin:
It is easy to use, and has a lid on to control stinky odors. Also helps control fruit flies from getting out of hand. You can buy the fancy BioBag’s that compost down:
I often use up plastic shopping bags from the store, I can use, and reuse them till they fall apart. It just depends on my mood and if I bought BioBags. (Side note, I find the BioBags don’t always compost fast enough at home, so they go into the yard waste bin when worn out.)
What has happened is I am sending all my scraps out the door now to the composting bin out back. It is so easy. It doesn’t stink, it doesn’t attract fruit flies. I have my oldest son empty it every day.
We are allowed to yard waste things like paper towels, Kleenex, napkins, pizza cardboard, greasy cardboard food boxes, paper bags, and more, and all those end up in there as well. Stuff that never made it out of the door in years past. So now I see all my scraps happily joining the leaves and branches, and off to become yard mulch! About half goes to the compost bin, the other half to our yard waste bin for pickup (and yes, it is commercially composted, then is sold commercially back to the public!)
3+ years later, I am happily composting and recycling so much, we have the small garbage can, not the typical “big” can. And every year now, I have at least 2 batches of compost to add to our gardens!