Set Up a Home Compost and Recycle System
One of the problems with becoming more self-reliant is the amount of garbage we produce at our house. I’m on a mission to get rid of my garbage service by recycling and reducing waste. This will save me $312 per year. The goal is to recycle all of it, so that none needs to go to the landfill. Can I accomplish that?
Well, not so far, but I’m going to keep trying.
I have set up some systems in the house to handle various items that we would normally send to the dump or have the hauler take to recycling.
Composting our kitchen scraps – my family is doing pretty good with this and I’m experimenting with different ways to turn it into compost for my yard. I’m planning on exploring worm and trench composting. For now it’s going in my DIY mimi compost bin so I don’t have to go to the garden in the rain.
An in home recycle bin – I found that the key to this system is to make sure it is clearly marked so my family has no doubt about what goes into it. I took an old, under the sink garbage can and wrote the recycling rules on it.
There is a recycling depot in my town, so once the bin gets full I just need to go and dump it. The rules, for my center are pretty simple; all plastic, paper and metal goes together in the same same dumpster. No sorting necessary! Call your local garbage hauler and find out of there is a recycling depot near you and what the rules are. The depot is centrally located so I’m not spending any additional gas money going there.
A separate paper collection area – My home office has always had a paper recycling tub and shredder. I use a heavy duty paper box and keep it under the desk. I’m looking for ways to use the paper and keep it out of recycling. For now it’s going in my compost bin as “brown” materials, its being added to the woodstove as a fire starter and I’m saving some to make a big batch of homemade paper this summer.
A separate glass collection container – The only sorting I have to do at the depot is for glass. I like to use glass containers for craft items and for leftovers, so I reuse a lot of them in my house. The rest go to recycling.
A small under the sink garbage can – This collects the plastic bags and paper that can’t be recycled. After one month on this system, I have the garbage narrowed down to one small grocery size bag a week. We are currently burning this and it is amazing how everything comes packaged in plastic these days! I am actively looking for ways to stop bringing this into our house.
Finally, pop and water bottles are worth money! Oregon has a .05 cent deposit on each pop and water bottle purchased. I have previously set these out to be collected by the garbage hauler – but no more! I used our old garbage can and made it the new “bottle collection area.” Now, once the can is full, I will take them to the store and reclaim the money. As a matter of fact, I should probably factor that into my yearly savings.
There a still a few items that I can’t recycle, compost or burn. My husband has permission to dump a small bag of garbage at his workplace each week. So far, it consists of items like butane lighters and ham bones.
I still have a few things I need to work out with my system:
- What else can I do with the non-compostable food (meat, dairy, etc)?
- What will I do about burning in the rain?
- What will I do do when I can’t burn in the summer?
- What should I do about that plastic I can’t recycle?
Here are some online resources for further reading:
Share your garbage service from A Life Unprocessed
16 ways to organize your recycling
I dumped my garbage service and saved $312 a year. What do you think, will it even be worth it? Would you dump your garbage service to save $26 a month?
Shared with: Frugal Days, Sustainable Ways – Tuesday Greens –
We do the same as well, it’s too bad all that astuc can’t be recycled!!
Where I live right now, we are required to have garbage service! When we build our home on our future homestead, where we are not required to have the service, we will also be composting, recycling and burning. However, we will NOT be burning plastic! That’s one of the worst things you can do for the environment! Instead, we will join with a couple other families once a month for a run to the local landfill and the recycling center. Right now we get enough money recycling cans and bottles to pay for a small vacation (gas money and hotel room for a couple of nights) every year or so! We take some of our kitchen waste up to our future property and throw on our compost pile, and the rest goes into our worm farm to feed the little squigglies! So, it is really unfortunate that we are required to pay for garbage service when we don’t fill up our cans every week! That’s another reason we can’t wait to get out of the city!
We still have garbage pickup – I’m sure about $300 a year from our local taxes goes into that – but now we also have curbside organic waste pickup! That’s $65 a year to me, but they do pick up citrus, meat, bones, pizza boxes, and other organic waste that my worms can’t handle. We get a load of compost once a year from that. I’m trying to get a pay-per-throw scheme going in our town, where you pay a set fee for the garbage truck, and then pay per bag that you throw out. People with less garbage pay less: sounds fair to me! I know I can’t get to zero garbage anytime soon, if only because of those unrecyclable plastics!
Haven’t had trash pick up service for 12 years. Compost it, chicken or rabbit feed it. Plastic goes to my jobs recycle bin. They get paid for it, so I traded for the occasional bag of trash. Glass has been my biggest problem since I don’t have any uses for it later. I’m saving the cans from all the canned goods and am looking for some way to reuse them, ideas would be appreciated for sure! ( I am the current owner of waaayyy too many tin punch candle holders if ya know what I mean!)
I use cans as individual. Planters, just punch hole in bottom /dide , paint and plant . hang from hole on side
I used to be a country woman and we fed our meat and fat scraps to the chickens and they LOVED them. We got eggs and had some very loyal pets out of it. Another use for fats is to save them up in a bag in the freezer and feed them to wild birds all winter. Don’t feed them any moldy or spoiled foods.
With composting, be sure to add plenty of fresh grass clippings, they heat the pile and speed decomposition.
Plastic bags can usually be rinsed out and recycled, or like we do, re-used as cat droppings containers, car litter-bags or dropped at target in the recycling bin at the entrance. Target only wants shopping bags, not food wrappings, etc.
If you look in the entrances, stores like Target and Best Buy are taking more things than ever. If we keep up the pressure on businesses, it will continue to build. Thanks everyone for recycling!
I love your site and was very inspired by your article until I read that you burn your excess garbage that can’t be recycled or composted. It is really bad for the environment to burn plastic and many commercial inks, papers and cardboards as they contain harmful chemicals like PCBs that go into our air, soil and groundwater. Also, in many states, like Oregon, it’s illegal. http://www.deq.state.or.us/aq/factsheets/04-AQ-005-OpenBurnEng.pdf. I applaud your sustainability efforts, but the chemicals in your excess garbage should go to a properly designated landfill, not a firepit.
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It’s worth considered doing hot compost – that was you can compost your bones, diary and meat waste