Tilth has a great guide to Seattle’s new food and yard waste pickup system, which allows homeowners and apartment dwellers with compost Dumpsters (talk to your building manager!) to put just about any food item (including meat and dairy, yay!) in the yard waste. A sample:
Q: I compost food at home and will opt out of collection. What does the city want me to do with my meat and dairy scraps now?
A: If you produce a lot of meat and dairy scraps, consider subscribing to the collection. If you produce less, talk with a friendly neighbor about using some space in their cart, or continue to throw them in your garbage.
Q: How do I demonstrate that I compost food at home to opt out of this service?
A: Call the Seattle Public Utilities (SPU) customer service line, (206) 684-3000, and tell them that you compost food at home. You must be willing to have an inspector come and verify that you have a system set up if SPU decides to check up on you.
Q: Is it prohibited to put food in the garbage?
A: Unlike Seattle’s prohibition on recycling in the trash, there is not currently a ban on food in the garbage. However, Seattleites sent 45,000 tons of food waste to the landfill last year. With the new system, much of it can be diverted to Cedar Grove Composting to be turned into valuable compost to improve our soil.
Can dog crap go in those things?
Seems like with the global warming catastrophe caused by all the carbon that came out of producing your meat and dairy it doesn’t make much difference whether landfill waste is reduced.
Also, glass wine bottles can now go in the recycling bin along with paper, metal, and plastic containers.
Dog crap goes in your Doggie Dooley.
I just found out you can put tea bags in the compost as well as shrimp tails and fish bones.
That does it, I’m moving back to Seattle.
That’s one of the problems of high density living…you can’t just put your “tilth” in the backyard…like in the suburbs…you have to dump it on other people.
What about cat waste?
Would someone please acknowledge that will has moved to DC and tell him you are very impressed with his new job so he can fishing for it already?
…stop fishing for it, of course.
hey 3, that’s more subtle than usual. you’re getting better at this.
We’ve had this in Berkeley for a couple of years. The city gave us a small green container for under the sink (that we empty into our large green bin by the curb). We find that we have more compost and recycling than regular garbage these days. It is amazing what all we can compost in our city can–coffee grounds, tea bags, all food table scraps, soiled pizza boxes, paper napkins etc.
I love that our kids are learning that separating trash is just a regular part of kitchen life.
Fine, food waste, including meat and cheese and the soiled cardboard box it came home in from the deli/pizziaria/asian take out place, can be put in with the yard waste which is now picked up each week instead of every other.
But anybody notice the fine print? Anything which can’t be placed in your designated yardwaste container, even if it’s not full, such as bundles of sticks and branches from the yard, is charged at $2.95 a pop.
The old rules allowed four bundles or four 32 gallon cans, or any combination totalling four cans and bundles, to be picked up twice a month at the base rate. Now you get half that amount picked up per month at the base rate, even with the new weekly instead of biweekly service.
For people with gardens it’s quite a price hike. While prices rise, what’s irksome is this hike isn’t openly explained anywhere. In fact, SPU’s publicity makes it sound like base rates are coming down. But that’s because they’ve reduced the volume of compostables they’ll pick up by half.
Hm, interesting point @12. Any idea how that might relate to say, dead leaves from the trees in the City’s planting strips? Presumably, the City owns the trees, but I have to rake-and-bag the dead leaves in front of my dwelling. If I leave more than two bags out every two weeks – and in the late fall I can easily fill six or seven at a time – is the City going to charge extra for disposing yard waste that by rights, doesn’t even belong to me?
12 and 13
Ever thought about keeping more of those sticks, branches and leaves? If you have a garden, then you probably have room to compost them, or build a wood pile that birds will use to forage and take shelter in.
Consider that – instead of sending all that wood away, just pile up the sticks and branches in no particular order and sit back. Soon you’ll have a flock of sparrows and juncos foraging in your yard. Wildlife. In the city.
I keep big bags of fall leaves all year and periodically add them to my compost bin. Leaves are an excellent carbon source to balance out the super nitrogen-rich content of table scraps and green garden clippings.
It is just so sad that so many city folks send off so many of their own valuable resources.
@12,13 – I’m going to keep my 96-gallon yard waste container, and it will set me back $6.90/month. The 32-gallon is $5.40/month. Keeping the big one makes sense in the spring and fall, and they’ll be taking away twice as much yard waste as before. In the winter it will be kind of silly and mostly empty every week.
It does look like you can no longer set out one additional 32-gallon yard waste container at no cost, but, again, they are now taking away twice as much.
@14:
We already have two of the large round composters on our property, and frankly the grass, trees and plants in the yard itself provide more than enough raw material for those. Plus, I’d have to haul the leaves from the street up a flight of steps to get them to the composter, which means they’d have to be bagged anyway, since that’s the only practical means of transporting them from one spot to the other.
As a matter of fact, we’ve never even had a yard waste container previous to this, because nearly 100% of our food waste has been put into the composters. The only thing we’ve ever disposed of were the dead leaves from the street.
And the pile of sticks next to the composters is now almost at head-height, so again, we’ve already got plenty of those. Plus, sticks generally aren’t a problem on the street, since what little does come down from the 70 or 80 year-old oak trees are small enough to be easily broken up and compacted into the leaf bags.
I just don’t think it’s fair that we have to pay for disposal of dead leaves that A. the City owns and; B. requires us to clean up for them.
(And don’t even get me started on the fact that much of what we pick up in front of our house is blown over from across or down the street.)
Dear The City of Seattle – My neighbors aren’t nice enough to let me use “extra space” in their container to give you my left over “cheese and chicken bones.”