Compost - stuff you may not have known you could

I live out in a rural area. We don't have trash pickup where I live. We have to haul our garbage to the dump - actually, it's called a "convenience center," but we've always known it as "the dump." Of course, now the convenience center has the means to accept materials for recycling, rather than just forcing us to commit everything to the trash compactor.

Our goal this year is to be a zero-waste household. We're well on the way. We have set up an outdoor home recycling center with large cans for plastics, steel, glass (we usually have very little glass), regular paper/cardboard/paperboard, newspaper, aluminum, and hazmat (like batteries and other such things). When these are full, we take them to the recycling center. The aluminum cans, steel, and scrap metals we take to a metal center for cash.

Yes, it can be a pain to walk outside the house and deposit recyclables into their appropriate containers. To make it more convenient, we have several empty cat litter buckets throughout the house as "catch-all" recycling containers. When they're full, we take them outside and then sort them into the correct bins.

All that's left is compostable waste.

If you don't have a compost pile or compost bin going, it's never too late to start one.

Sure, it's a great way to make yourself some wonderful gardening soil and mulch, but it's also a great way to help you become a low-waste or no-waste household. If you don't want to use the compost soil yourself, I am sure that others would be glad to have it. Post the availability of your finished compost on some place like Craigslist and see how popular you become!

A lot of people think that only kitchen scraps go into the compost heap. Not true.

Besides vegetable kitchen waste (no meats, no oils), here's a list of things you may not know you can compost.

Paper napkins, paper towels and kleenex
Newspaper
Junk mail
Any other paper that isn't coated
Pet hair
Wood chips
Hay
Bird cage cleanings
Grass and weed clippings
Wood ashes
Houseplant trimmings
Aquarium plants
Soy milk
Q-tips (cotton swabs: cardboard, not plastic sticks)
Wilted/dead flower arrangements
Stale potato chips
Stale cereal
Guinea pig/hamster/gerbil cage cleanings
Nut shells
Moldy cheese
Shredded cardboard
Lint from clothes dryer
Wooden toothpicks
Moss from last year's hanging baskets
'Dust bunnies' from under the bed
Pencil shavings
Brown paper bags
Vacuum cleaner bag contents

Share this post