Thursday, April 09, 2009

It Ain't Easy Being Green

On March 30, the City of Seattle added a mandatory food waste program to their weekly trash collection service. This means that all food scraps cannot be placed into a garbage can. Instead, food items must be thrown into a yard waste can, where it commingles with grass clippings and leaves. Before, our trash collectors picked up yard waste every other week, but with the new program, yard/food waste is collected weekly.

I think Seattle has always had one of the best recycling programs in the nation, and as far as I know, it's one of the most aggressive. Coupled with the new food waste program, our recycling no longer needs to be separated out between glass and paper and plastic. So long as everything is rinsed out, all recyclables can be placed into the same bin.

The launch of the new food waste program, however, has been a little difficult to adopt in our household. It's not that we're complaining about placing our food scraps into a compost bin, it's just one of those things that requires a little more thought beyond remembering not to throw egg shells and tea bags in our kitchen trashcan.

Last weekend, Pa bought a small compost bin that fits on top of our kitchen counter. To keep down the smell, the stainless steel bin has a charcoal filter on the lid, and there are small holes to help dry out the food scraps and keep them from generating a lot of icky-smelling bacteria. The only thing I have to remember is empty out the refrigerator once a week of those leftovers that never made it to repeat meals. I figure since they stay in airtight containers, it's better to dump them straight in the yard waste bin the night before our trash pick up.

So far, we've been really good at tossing our scraps into the compost bin; and surprisingly, the bin only needs to be taken outside and dumped into our yard waste can about once or twice a week. But yesterday, as I brought Lady La home from her first day of Pre-preschool, I noticed this underlying smell in our kitchen. It smelled like something was not full-blown rotting, just sorta, kinda rotting. I checked the handy-dandy compost bin, but as far as I could tell, it didn't seem to be the source. Then I checked around the pantry to see if I had any mushy onions or bananas--but again, nothing.

Then I stepped outside onto the back porch and noticed that the smell was coming from the yard waste can 10-15 feet away. Now, keep in mind, it's only springtime. With exception of a few 70 degree days, the average temperature here is still under 60. If the yard waste can is generating that much of a smell now, I can only imagine what our block will smell like come August! I'm thinking something close to Elizabeth, New Jersey on the smell register.
Thankfully, I bought some violets and impatiens from the store that I wanted to plant into a pot on the porch that was filled with lots of dead stuff, so I was able to dump a lot of that out into the yard waste can which seemed to absorb some of the odor.

So, you see, our new citywide trash collection service is now forcing me to grow a green thumb, and do more gardening, weeding, and mowing so the green stuff can hang with the food stuff and neutralize the smell. Personally, I think the new program is really an evil plot to keep our postage-stamp sized properties looking neat and trim, and free from dandelions.

I wonder when we'll have to separate out the dog poop and disposable diapers?

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