Waste, Bagged
July 30th, 2008 by Jonathan
You know the whole “greening your kitchen” thing has hit the mainstream when the AP writes about BioBags. That means these compostable food 
waste bags appeared in publications North and South.
I haven’t used these corn-based bags, mostly because I figure why buy something that’s not entirely necessary. But I can see their usefulness in encouraging folks who are a bit squeamish about keeping veggie scraps, etc. in their house.
This brings to mind the topic of coffee filters. For a few years, my wife and I employed one of those reusable screen filters. We composted the grounds that would come out with a few good whacks, but had to wash those stubborn remaining ones down the drain.
Since moving to a house without a disposal, though, we’ve switched to cheap paper filters to prevent a buildup of grounds in our pipes. I don’t love the idea of buying anything disposable, but composting coffee is now easier, quicker and cleaner.
My point is that whether you’re composting with BioBags, a tupperware container, a barrel with a neat logo, a worm bin or this pragmatic bucket, the important thing is that you’re composting. Or maybe you’ve decided that you can’t compost, but are cooking less food to avoid waste.
By any means necessary and whichever way works for you, try to keep food out of landfills, where its rotting releases that dastardly greenhouse gas methane.
Stumble it! | Posted in Composting |
Nice point, Jon. My mom always put coffee grounds out in the garden, long before she knew she was ‘composting.’ She also sometimes says that her original “compost bin” was her dog. She’s kind of kidding, but I think the question of what to do w/ leftover scraps or food bits that aren’t going to be eaten used to be answered with “feed it to the dog.”
In recent years, however, there’s been a push to avoid giving dogs “people food” (I assume this is mostly driven by dog food companies’ marketing teams), and so I, for one, feel guilty giving my dog a chance to clean my plate after dinner. Is it really that bad for her?
Honestly, she’s much more thorough than I can be when I try to scrape things into the compost bucket; she gets the plate dishwasher-ready and it requires little effort from me. And lately she’s been eating from the compost heap outside, anyway, so I don’t feel like I’m protecting her from the dangers of eating people food (if there are any).
I just wonder if you or any readers out there have thoughts on whether or not giving my dog my food scraps is a terrible thing (I know, no cooked chicken bones!).
I also wonder if you, Jon, see the example as part of a larger set of trends - I’m thinking it’s like this - back in the ‘old days’ we did lots of things differently that had less environmental impact without having the environment in mind at all … then we moved towards bad habits, often out of convenience or in response to a marketing campaign trying to make us buy crap … and now we’re swinging back in the other direction direction, this time with an agenda in mind, but in practice not so different from some of our old ways.
Long winded, I know, but what do you think? Are my dog and me a part of the wider cultural pendulum?
I’m no veterinarian, but dogs seem to have iron stomachs. I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t be able to handle anything we can. And based on the EPA hierarchy, feeding animals takes precedence over composting. Of course, they mean feeding livestock that will become human food. Hopefully that won’t be the fate of your dog. But maybe feeding table scraps to your pooch would reduce the amount of kibble you buy, which would have a few positive effects.
Agenda or not, doing the right thing is all that matters. But I think you’re onto something with this pendulum thing. The preferred method for handling food scraps changes every so often. Hog farmers used to collect food scraps door-to-door. Food disposals used to be state-of-the-art, now they’re frowned upon. I’m sure they’ll come back in vogue at some point, like feeding food waste to hogs is again seen as environmentally friendly.
Hog farmers used to collect scraps door to door? That’s fascinating! Wait - that reminds me - did someone used to come door to door to collect fats and oils? or rags? Do you know about this?
“Door to door” sounds so quaint. I guess now the big recycling truck comes door to door (sort of).
I have a friend who has a neighborhood composter - just some guy who lives nearby who collects all the food scraps from folks on his street, feeds it all to his worms, and then once a month brings each participating household a bucket of dirt. So that’s cool.
I feed my dog all sorts of table food, except bones and chocolate which is poison for dogs. Dog foods contain mainly all of the additives that human processed food contains anyway. I also have hogs, as mentioned by a poster above, and chickens. I work at a medical facility and we get all kinds of free lunches and breakfasts catered in by pharmaceutical companies. Many times there is a lot of food left over and it was all thrown out previously. I now take it all home and the pigs and chickens get a catered lunch as well!
Emily,
Many cities on the East Coast used to have rag collectors who would make the rounds. How’s this for door-to-door service: My parents’ 110-year-old house near Boston still has a foot-pedal-operated, in-ground storage space for the slop bucket. A farmer would come around and collect whatever a household didn’t eat. As for fats and oils, I think most families would use these to make soap.
Robert,
Those are some lucky pigs and chickens! Based on some of the things I’ve learned about dog food, just about any human food (not chocolate–good point!) would be better than the assorted animal parts that go into dog chow.
Well if it gets my nerd husband to contribute to the composting instead of throwing food scraps in the bin it’s worth it for me. Having the airflow with the little plastic bucket really eliminates odors that you get with a closed lid bucket.
Dear Mr. Bloom,
A pleasant day to you. I am Des Gestiada from the Philippines. I came across your site while doing research for an upcoming exhibition we’re putting up for the Oceanarium (where i work). Your articles are highly interesting and a good eye opener for people who likes to surf. Anyway, I was wondering if you can help me out with my research (if ever you have time to do so). We will be coming up with an exhibit on Garbage and we were hoping to feature the Top 3 Countries with most accumulated trash/garbage. Do you know any site where I can go to, to access this information or can you recommend any book which I can buy that has this info and other global information that we can include in our exhibit?
Thank you very much for taking time to read my email.
Sincerely,
Des Gestiada
Manila, Philippines
Hi Jonathan,
The Bio Bags, are they fully degradable? We had some degradable plastic shopping bags introduced in the UK they were plastic bags with 10% corn added.
The corn did break down naturally but left the 90% plastic remaining still in the soil but in smaller pieces and these took just as long to break down as plastic bags usually do, polluting the same as a normal plastic bag (less 10%) in the process. It also turned out that if some of these bags were in a plastic bag recycling batch, the corn polluted the batch and made the resulting product unusable.
I agree with you 100%, why buy something that’s not entirely necessary?
Blessings.
Kerry,
I did like the idea of the vents on that compost bin. I’ve stopped putting a lid on my kitchen compost container and it’s cut down on the smell. That and taking it out every one to two days…
Des,
Sounds like a thrilling exhibit there in Manila. I have seen information on trash production, now I just need to remember where that was. I’ll be in touch soon. One thing–are you looking for per capita trash production or just total output per country?
Father Peter,
Yes, they’re fully biodegradable and compostable, according to their web site. For transparency’s sake, I should say that I’ve never used them.
I had heard that you can use coffee grounds as exfoliants
here is a list of other things to do
http://www.ehow.com/how_2296631_use-old-coffee-grounds.html
I have struggled with the idea of environmental vs. economical garbage bags. Living in NYC, we shop with reusable bags most times but keep a supply of plastic grocery bags which we still use for garbage.
I’m not going to purchase garbage bags just to throw them away when I can get the free ones from the store.
My understanding from the biobags website is that unless you compost the biobags, they still take like 90 years to break down (if they do at all) in a landfill…that just doesn’t justify their expense to me.
We just started to compost our food scraps (in a bin without a bag), so the garbage we throw out is much less now, but I wish there was a more environmental and economic alternative to the plastic grocery bags.
I’d love to hear if anyone had any ideas!
Diane in NYC
Took my worm bin up to the Humane Society today to demo for the kids at their summer camp program. The kids love playing with the worms! We had a blast and the kids got over the worms being “yucky” until they were all handling them and finding out how cool they were. Learned all about composting, too!
Des,
I have a few answers for you about trash. I have a student workbook called “Talking Trash” that was distributed by the Need Project. In it, they list the top three trash-producing nations as the United States (4.4 pounds per person per day), Canada (3.7 pounds) and the Netherlands (3.0 lbs). The UK (2.8 pounds), Japan (2.8 pounds), France (2.1 pounds) and Germany (2.0 pounds) round out the top seven waste-making nations.
Of course, this doesn’t include recycling, which varies from country to country.
After a bit of looking, I’m confident that the “Talking Trash” book data comes from 2001 research by the Environmental Protection Agency. See the executive summary (page 12) of this PDF document. As you’ll see on page 4 of this report, the U.S. is up to 4.54 pounds per person per day. I’m sure you’re doing a better job in the Philippines!