I’ll throw nearly anything in the compost at least once. I usually find a few bits of trash in the compost — usually plastic envelope windows, but one time it was an entire zipper, about three feet long. No sign of whatever it was attached to, and I couldn’t remember!

Your blog has become my resource for exploring ways to minimize trash/plastic consumption. Thank you once again for becoming an inspiration, I hope to become a tiny part of that for my friends :)

My husband was against composting because he thinks compost waste would stink up our garage/kitchen in one week. We live in a townhome so cannot self-compost. But we do have city taking care of compost in our yard waste bin and I plan to leverage that. Now I have finally kinda/sorta convinced him to give this a try. My question however is 2 fold -

1. What is the best way to dispose liquids (either food gone stale sadly although I dont let it happen very often) or genuine wastage (I have a toddler at home)? Especially considering that I have to store this in some form for a week before the yard waste is picked up. It will be great if you can share any ideas here.

2. If I chose to not line my kitchen pail with biobags (sort of use your idea) , how do I clean/protect the yard waste bin? Since we have a townhome, we dont actually have any yard waste (the community takes care of it) to line it with. Do we make the big can “Dirty” by dumping everything in there? how do people clean it – just wash it out?

I know these are smaller doubts in mind, but they seem to be delaying my switch to using the compost bin. I know partly if I just make the move, I will figure these out, but woudl still like to learn from this awesome blog/community if I can.

Thank you,
Purvi

Also just have to tote your recycling! We are a pretty bad household when it comes to plastic and waste in general (I have no control over the roommate and the husband doesn’t yet understand but at least I can get him to recycle) and once we started recycling it was amazing. We went from not being able to close the lid of our trashcan weekly to having tons of excess space! And all we did was add 3 bins to our system (CRV, containers, paper)! :) So yay for this blog and yay for you! Can’t wait til the city we live next to (we’re in a suburb that isn’t technically considered a part of the city ordinance) impliments their compost law! I can then use my parents compost bin they are required to use like we do for most of our recycling and our waste will go down another huge notch! :)

someone mentioned dog waste, I’ve been having this same dilemma. as far as plastic-free solutions, there is composting, burying (may contaminate water supply), flushing (may clog pipes, but is apparently the EPA recommended disposal option: http://www.epa.gov/weatherchannel/stormwater.html, plus there are flushable dog bags), or using paper bags (not water-proof, except for maybe wax bags? and not easily sealable without tape or glue). but since these are not always possible or practical solutions, there are ways of reducing the amount of plastic used (considering dog walking usually means a bag, or more, per day). I read a good blog post about this (here: http://itssoeasybeinggreen.blogspot.com/2007/03/what-to-do-with-fidos-poop-week.html) that suggested using things like bread bags that you’d be throwing out anyway, which made me discover that bread bags have a recycling emblem on them. so I’ve started using previously used ziploc bags (I won’t use them but my family does), it also mentions using found bags. there’s always the pooper scooper option so you can bring it home and add a lot more to one bigger bag, but carrying it with more than one dog can be difficult. the article also talks about using things like newspaper to scoop up the poop with, so you could theoretically carry a reusable, washable bag (some are made specifically for carrying poo bags) and place the poo-filled paper into it to bring home to a garbage bag. if you use butcher paper, that could be a good use for it.