I cannot stress enough the efficacy of composting! My wife and I do it year round, and by now our garden is mostly composted soil. We’ve only been doing it for 2 years at this local, but at least it’s not the acidic soil that is found naturally here.
Back in the 50’s farmers in our area used DDT. And that stuff stays in the soil for a long, long time. The product it breakes down into also stays in the soil for loner periods of time. No cite, but we don’t want to take chanes, so our soil comes from our compost, not the natural stuff.
Plastic. I have two dogs and I’m a responsible dog owner, which means when I walk them, I pick up dog shit. I don’t like it, but I do it, which is why I have to restrain myself from physically assaulting dog owners who don’t.
Anyway, plastic grocery bags are always put to this second unattractive task before they make it to the garbage.
One bag per scooping, but it is a used bag that was going to be discarded anyway. After it held a sliced onion, no way am I putting anything else (edible by humans) in it!
Man, I wish I had somewhere to PUT the compost, that’s my problem. We’re in an apartment with about six containers for herbs and flowers in the back, which is otherwise covered in concrete. The front is grass (grr. I hate grass) and ground ivy, which would probably wither away and die if there was an actual nutrient presented to it (probably the only thing that would kill it, actually!) So I have all these loverly kitchen scraps and nowhere to put them.
Anyone live in Rogers Park and have a compost pile we could add to?
The stores I shop at don’t offer paper bags. I get plastic bags at one store, and boxes at the warehouse type store store that charges for plastic bags. We re-use the platic bags for lining the small trash containers around the house. We always plan to take some plastic bags to warehouse store, but rarely remember.
We recently switched from plastic to bags made from recycled cotton. They’re really huge and I love them. They only credit us $.02 per bag at our supermarket, but that’s okay.
We use our leftover plastic shopping bags for the kitty litter (we double them if they’ve got holes). I still wrap meats in a plastic bag before putting into our cotton bags so the juices won’t spill. When we go to Trader Joe’s we sometimes ask for paper bags, because they (1) have handles, and (2) are useful for storing the paper that we recycle. We drop the entire paper bag off at the recycle center.
I’ve never composted. Perhaps I should look into that.
I’ve always liked the “Midnight Fertilizer” approach:[ol][li]Wait until your compost is brown and crumbly and ready to be spread on the soil. (No visible food fragments!)[]Select a public area, such as a traffic island, boulevard, or park, that looks like it could need some help.[]Case the joint at several times of day.[]Gather a bucket, gloves, and an optional pitchfork.[]Dress in dark, anonymous clothing.[]Go to your target soil around midnight.[]Aerate the soil by poking holes in it with the pitchfork.[]Spread the compost around.[]Leave while giggling madly. [/ol]This should get rid of your extra compost while improving your local soils. [/li]
Oh, you mean a place to put the stuff while it turns into compost? I put my worm composter in the closet beneath the coats. Coolest part of the apartment.
Actually the City of Toronto is about to stop sending it’s garbage to Detroit and begin sending it to a land fill they purchased in my fair city.
The citizens of this fair city are indeed miffed to say the least, however there was little they could do about it. It was a real estate transaction that was kept very hush-hush until it was too late!
Unless I’ve been completely wrong about WhyNot, she’s not likely to be anything “Man” unless the disguise is so complete it includes a change of gender.
My apologies. I do not like secret transactions at all.
We should be reducing, reusing, and recycling much more fiercely than we are. I’d support mandatory packaging takeback and design regulations as well.
(Why can’t I get my spiral light bulbs in a simple cardboard box instead of those damned indestructible plastic hang-on-the-hook packages that I have to cut open with scissors, wrecking the scissors and gashing myself on sharp plastic?)
We use our own bags, but I end up buying (biodegradable) bags for picking up dog poop :rolleyes: . This annoys me greatly, but I haven’t figured out another solution and I figure at least they’re biodegradable. Maybe I can stop feeding the dog.
I have a few canvas grocery bags. I rarely buy more than two bags worth of stuff, but I have more than that so I can keep a couple of empties in the car on a rotation basis, for those unplanned grocery stops.
