I had one in my first apartment (in the UK, mid 90s). I rarely used it. It weirded me out slightly, to be honest. I was always afraid of getting things, particularly my fingers, stuck in it. And why not just put waste in the waste bin? I didn’t really get it. Anyway, recycling is much bigger now, so I guess garbage disposal units arrived just a little too late in the UK. They would now be seen as slightly decadent.
My parents have one in their home, but hardly ever use it (I think it may even be broken).
Garbage disposals make waste treatment a bit messier since the waste water now contains ground up food bits. If you’re in a country that doesn’t treat its waste water, you won’t see garbage disposals. If you live in an area where their waste water facilities cannot handle the load, garbage disposals will be banned.
Garbage disposals are not Garbage Dispose-alls. You have to be careful about what you put in them. Stringing stuff is a no-no. So are bones. When I was in college, our kitchen sink clogged. The plumber came over and told me that I clogged it because I was putting egg shells down the garbage disposals. When I asked him what I could put in the garbage disposal, he told me that I should scrape off all excess food into the garbage and only rinse the plates in the sink. To him, it wasn’t a garbage dispose-all or even a garbage dispose-some. It was a garbage dispose-very-little.
I’m just glad he wasn’t there fixing a clogged toilet.
No wonder it’s clogged! Look what you’re putting down there. If you have to do that, use your cat’s litter-box.
The question of “why” is easy. Organic garbage stinks. Toss it down the drain, and it gets treated along with the rest of human organic waste. Unless you’re in a third-world country* or have a septic field, there’s no reason that waste treatment plants have to discriminate among the types of waste.
*Now I don’t mean to imply that Toronto is the third world, but c’mon, their justification sounds like either (a) poor sewage planning which is very third-worldish, or (b) some justification invented by a government administrator who doesn’t really “get” that waste is wate, and that it’s somehow evil not to recycle it via other means.
Well, the issue with combined sewage lines is that they take storm runoff as well as blackwater and greywater. As a result they sometimes overflow during storms and discharge directly into the lake. I can see why the city would try to reduce the amount of waste going into them. They are gradually being replaced with separated storm and sanitary sewer lines, but that takes money and time.
As for recycling? The philosophy has for some time been “get everything out of the waste stream as soon as possible by whatever means”. Composting organics is a good thing for a number of reasons. It reduces the amount of waste we ship to landfill (and for a time, that meant trucking it to Michigan), and not using garburators means we don’t have that load on our sewage-treatment plants as well. They have enough problems. (I live three blocks from one. I can tell.) I suspect that the sewage-treatment plants will need to be expanded soon anyways, even though the one near me has been under construction for at least the last four years.
Really, they should be advocating a lot more on-site composting, either in the backyard or even as worm composting, which can be done in one’s apartment. That would prevent the stuff from getting onto the waste stream in the first place.
Yes, we have plastic cans with lids; that’s what I use for food waste. But once in a while, they get knocked down and the trash scattered. That’s why I put everything I can down the disposal. Just no bones or banana peels!
Ground up food in the sewage system is no worse than solid human waste, one just hasn’t gone through your digestive system.
Interesting. It did come up for me actually, though it tells me to call my local store for availability. They seem fairly reasonable in price, too.
I do suspect there’s a certain amount of politics involved in the official word on garbage disposal units by the City of Toronto, especially in light of the green bin project. However I’ve always viewed the green bin as a little impractical for anything but things like egg shells and potato peels – stuff that doesn’t start to stink after a while, which is also usually stuff you’d normally compost or toss in the trash anyway. I expect there’s also certain environmental concerns (valid or not) involved here; the waste of water and electricity for one, which can indeed be issues. (During the summer there is a risk of water shortages due to lots of people watering lawns, and ever since the northeast blackout of 2003, conserving electricity has also been a big talking point.)
Waste is waste, true, whether it’s going down the toilet or the sink, but I don’t know enough about the robustness of our sewage treatment systems to say whether the installation of a lot of garbage disposal systems would have an appreciable effect on the ability to treat waste.
Infrastructurally it’s an efficiency issue. Environmentally it’s probably a closer question; I’m not sure that the marginal cost of transporting the extra waste matter through sewer pipes is less efficient than the marginal cost of transporting it through trucks.
It’s just a different way of doing things that some of us get used to. It’s slightly less trash to carry, and if there’s food in the sink, you can just wash it down while you’re cleaning the sink, rather than scoop it out and put it in the trash. The water use can be minimal this way too. The breakdown or clog risk is tiny, AFAIK.
We make these tradeoffs elsewhere: after all, we could poop into bags and put that out with the trash too, but we’ve opted instead to wash it down with water. The garbage disposal is just one more step along that line.
Isn’t that what waste is?
Precisely. It’s like trying to explain the bidet to Americans: “Can’t you just wipe your ass?”
I’m a bit confused here about the assumption that because the sewage system can handle human shit, it can also handle other ground-up food. I’m not a plumber, so I don’t know at what place - in the house itself, or outside - the two sewage lines from the toilet and from the sink join, but I can imagine that the sink line isn’t up to dealing with a lot of ground-up food regularly, because it’s far smaller.
Secondly, our water is most certainly treated - we have a 3-stage-treatment (upgraded now to 4 steps), which is generally considered the best that’s currently possible, which tries to get most biological and chemical stuff out of the sewage water before it is released back into the river. But our water company regularly advises us not to make their job more difficult by putting anything into the sewage system that’s not supposed to go there. So human feces goes into the toilet, because that’s why we have WCs, but everything else, Q-tips, tampons, and food, would clog up the sewers and cause more problems at the plant. (Q-tips with their shape and tampons with their strings catch a buttload of other debris and cause huge obstructions; food attracts rats into the sewers).
The first step at the plant, after all, is filtering out mechanical the big stuff, drying it and dumping it into the fouling tower (where the rotting organic parts produce methane which is burned off to produce energy and warmth).
As for the smell, I don’t have any problems with that: the bag for organic stuff is small, and whenever it’s too full, I empty it out into the compost bin from the city, which can be closed with a lid. Also, IIRC, the city empties the compost bins weekly in summer instead of two-weekly in the colder months.
Well, reading on the boards, I certainly get the impression that a lot of clogging occurs because people stuff things down there that they shouldn’t, but find out too late.
Never heard of it in Switzerland.
Quote Gaffa: “A good garbage disposal has just about the same efficiency at rendering food into a moist waste slurry as the average human being. If the sewage system can handle feces and toilet paper, it will handle the output of a garbage disposal”.
Wasting a lot of water…
I have a super-efficient toilet in the same apartment, a pressure-assist model with dual flush, that uses 1.6 gallons for poop and .9 gallons for pee. I have a high efficiency washer that uses very little water. I have a high efficiency shower head.
The 30 seconds of water flow for the garbage disposal is well worth it, in my opinion, and more than mitigated by the toilet alone.
Reading some of the responses above, I thought of another cultural difference that might explain some of this. I believe in the US, kitchen bins tend to be larger than in say UK and Oz? If you have no outside bin, then it would need to be sized to hold the rubbish for the whole week. Ours, which is pretty standard, is 15 litres (shopping bag size) and you take it out to the big “wheelie bin” outside every couple of days, so there’s no food smell issue really.
Almost no-one has them in the Netherlands. Actually, how much space takes a disposal unit under the sink? Do bottles of detergent still fit underneath?
I am of European descent but I don’t really speak European but I will try. Garbage disposal units aren’t very big. I just looked at mine and it is about the size a a medium sized milk bottle. It takes up some small amount of space but, even if it were not there, the pipes still would be so I am not sure it takes up any significant amount of usable space. There is still plenty of room under my sink for bottles of detergent, 120 sorts of different types of cleaners, latex gloves, paint cans, and even a medium sized dog if you wanted. That is pretty typical in the U.S.
I’ve never seen them here in the UK, though I’m sure there’s the odd home that has one - I’ve always thought it would be cool to have one, but then I like kitchen gadgets.
Perhaps the reason we don’t have them is that most of our sewers are hundreds of years old and lots of the plumbing in houses is a century or two old; they weren’t set up to expect anything but liquids going down the sink. Modern homes could have them, but people don’t expect them so it’s not worth the expense to the builder.
Animals don’t seem to be a huge problem getting into the rubbish. You usually put the rubbish in either a very large (dumpster-sized) communal bin, with a lid, or in a plastic wheelie bin also with a lid. Some of the council flats here just have a chute leading to a massive (the size of maybe 7 dumpsters) underground bin which a machine lifts out and empties once a week. I’m sure animals do get into the food now and then, but I’ve never heard of it happening to anyone I know.
What whole week? In many European countries, the rubbish truck comes daily. From my experience, this tends to be more common in southern countries (that is, in countries where hitting 40C in the summer is normal).
A friend of mine went through a major kitchen add-on / remodel a couple years back and she had disposals put in both halves of the sink. She said it saved a lot of yelling, as her husband and daughter would often dump food in the wrong half of the sink prior to that.
Dunno if I’d go that far when remodelling, myself - I like having a bit of storage space under the sink for cleaning supplies / paper towels.
In New York City, garbage disposals used to be illegal, due to concerns about overloading the sewage system. Since they’ve been permitted, I don’t know how that’s panned out.
well, ok - but in the US? After all, these European countries don’t generally have garbage disposals either, which kind of emphasises my point.
Where I live, garbage is, and as far as I know always has been weekly, and these days things are just getting worse, with limits on how much you can put out on a weekly basis and surcharges if you exceed that limit. They’ve started some sort of pilot project around here where you get loaned one standard sized wheelie bin for free, but you can “upgrade” to one or two sizes larger for an extra fee to have more room for your garbage. The problem with that though is that there are always people on every street who start putting their crap in your bins.
If anything, I think now would be a good time for garbage disposal units, to save on the amount of waste you put out on the curb.