How to Recycle your Food Waste Garbage

Everybody is very concerned these days with green energy, how to reduce the amount of oil we need from foreign countries or the amoutn of fossil fuels we need to burn to create energy, but a lot people forget about thinking of reducing our landfill needs as well. Burying our garbage is just as harmful to environment as burning fossil fuels. Here is an easy way to do your part to reduce the amount of garbage that gets buried in a landfill.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Tupperware bowl
• Shovel
• 2 minutes of your time each week
• a stick

1. From now on instead of flushing your food waste garbage down your sink via a garbage disposal, or scraping it into your trash bin, you are going to recycle it. Yes that's right I said recycle it. From now on scrape your food waste into a tupperware bowl. You can recycle any food waste except for bones from steak, fish or poultry.

2. Once the tupperware bowl becomes filled, pick a spot in your yard and using your shovel dig a hole about two to three feet deep. If you have a vegetable or flower garden this works even better you can dig your holes in your garden. You'll see why in a moment.

3. Dump the food waste from your tupperware bowl into the hole you dug in the previous step and fill the hole in with the dirt.

4. Now mark the spot with a stick. You do not want to dig up this same area within 6 monhts. What happens now is that worms will find your food waste and eat it. The resulting worm droppings create the most nutrient rich soil. Far more valuable then any chemical fertilizer you will find and far more safe for the environment.

Tips & Warnings

• If you find that you do not have enough spots to dig, then you can dig a 3 feet hole, dump the food, put some dirt on top (about 2 inches) and then when the tupperware bowl fills up again, dump more on top, until the hole is filled. I call this layering. It is very handy when space is limited.

Resources

• Mike's "How-to" Blog

[esko00]

on 11/3/2009 I live in an aparment complex and I don't have a garden to bury my food scraps so a couple of us got together and bought a composter. We give away the compost to friends and the maintenance staff to use in the complex. We used an Earthmaker composter from www.thinkjustme.com.

[PawPawFrankie]

on 2/2/2009 Great tip. 5*

[MariM]

on 1/15/2009 Good idea. Thanks for sharing.

[thesquirrelymom]

on 12/30/2008 I have just recently started composting and I love it! *****

[bossypants]

on 12/13/2008 Terrific easy way to compost! Holes aren't an option right now (frozen ground), so I have a closed compost tumbler just waiting for spring! Thanks for the good directions on worm composting!