I’ve never jammed up a garbage disposal, and I’ve done some pretty heinous things to it in the name of fun. Maybe yours is underpowered?
Ok, I hear what you’re saying, I really do, and excuse me if this is TMI. But, umm, what about the “fibrous” material that goes undigested and ends up down my other drain - the one in the littlest room? There’s lots of color some mornings. Things aren’t all that chopped up, ifyouknowwhatImean. And the sewers outside get lots of leaves, twigs, cig butts, potato chip bags and other much larger particles going into them. Sewage Treatment facilities have screens and filters to get this stuff out - why not food particles? After all, the stuff in the littlest room is food particles, too - just in a different form.
The user manual for the In-Sink-Erator specifically says to use cold water, not hot. I’m not sure why. Of course, they also tell you not to pour grease down the sucker in the first place.
They also maintain that it’s environmentally more friendly to send food waste to the sewage treatment plant than to the landfill (they don’t mention composting, of course). I’m not sure I buy that one.
WAGging: If we all chopped up our food waste into little bitty bits and sent it through the sewers to be strained out and sent to the landfill from there (as it is) then the pieces are tiny, some decomposition has already ocurred, and the volume of waste is decreased, simply because the pieces are smaller and fit together more tightly. Less air space in the landfills.
Not as good as composting, but better than throwing huge chunks of carrot in a plastic bag.
I can’t be the only one here who has had to fish bits of shredded coins and pretzel’d flatware from thses things. The one’s I’m familiar with really do dispose of anything you intentionally throw down them.
The rotating unit in the “insinkerator” is called an “impeller.” It is designed to force water down the drain. By design, an aquatic impeller does of course contain blades, but their primary purpose is to increase the water pressure in the drain, not to chop waste. They aren’t made to chop waste finely enough to handle large amounts of waste. In fact, if you refer to the insinkerator manual, you can see a diagram of the blades showing this fact. You can also see an admonition that some hard food material needs to be pre-chopped, and you shouldn’t put large amounts of fibrous or vegetable material into the disposal.
I was just as surprised as you to hear it; I had always considered it a food processor for waste until I had one choke on carrot peelings.
Good to see so many composters here I missed this bit in Kymodyce’s reply:
Oops. Supplementary garbage question: it almost seems a given in US culture that taking out the trash is a big deal, with reference to it being a chore for teenage boys and husbands in particular, what’s with that? If it’s any help my dustbin is just outside the back door, the binmen used to fetch it and bring it back but now I have a wheelie bin which I take to the roadside myself.
Isn’t so much about taking out the trash. It is about making it easier to do dishes. You throw dishes with food still on them in the sink, turn on the water to rinse the food down the drain, and then hit the garbage disposal switch. Then you throw the dishes in the dishwasher and turn that on and go watch TV. Now wasn’t that easy.
Oh, I see that I didn’t answer your question quite right. The answers vary but factors are that Americans ten to generate a whole lot of trash so you could be looking at some oversized 40 pound Hefty bags there, and many Americans have large yards and it could be a walk. Please, we are lazy as shit.
I have relatives in Hawaii (I forget the exact place, but it’s across the island from Honolulu), and they said that garbage disposal units were required there. The authorities didn’t want people to throw out or compost food waste due to concerns about insects, particularly cockroaches.
We also tend to use huge honkin’ trash bins in our kitchens here. Ours holds a 30 gallon bag. So stuff tends to sit around and putresce (my new favorite word!) for the week or so we’re filling the huge container before we take it out. Eeew. But living on the third floor with rickety steps leading down to the dumpster, it’s not something I like doing often.
Also, there are people like my mother who overfill the garbage can, and then cram the garbage down and tie the bag off. Those bags are under a lot of stress by the time she throws them out, and if you so much as look at that bag the wrong way, it’ll rip open.
No, taking out the trash was not a fun chore when I was a kid.
No, they’re not. I’m an environmental engineer, and one of my specialties is wastewater collection and treatment.
Actually, as populations increase and standards get more restrictive, many municipalities are looking for ways to postpone another expensive upgrade to their wastewater treatment facilities.
One way is to encourage people NOT to use sink disposer units. Some towns here in Connecticut have even started banning them.
If you have a septic system, it’s a even worse idea. You are just asking for your leach field to get clogged with food debris, and a leach field replacement goes for about $10K these days. The chance of this can be reduced by pumping your septic tank at least annually, but it’s still risky.
Most of the engineers in my office have septic systems, and we have all flat-out told our spouses that they are never going to get a sink disposer system.
I have one, and I’m on a septic system. 12 years No problems. I’ve had it pumped three times. The last time I pumped it was because I had to uncover it anyway, so what the heck. The other times I pumped was purely precautionary, I wasn’t having problems.
I only use the disposer for what gets rinsed off plates before they get washed. So it’s not like I stuff trash down it. It’s just for cleaning up the little. And it’s great for that.
Two points: whether or not most people understand it or make a habit of it, many places that have one of these also have an automatic dishwasher, and every setup I’ve seen (3? 4?) has the dishwasher’s drainage line (hot soapy water) plumbed in upstream of the garbage disposal. That way when you run the dishwasher, the hot water clears out your disposal.
Secondly – and this is from my lack of understanding of where the sink’s drain goes – surely it’s no worse for the waste processing plant than, say, feces? I know I should compost it, but I end up flushing most of my poop down the toilet. Does my house (city sewer) have two different drainage systems?
You brought up a good point, dishwashers discharge into the disposal. This allows an additional grinding of stuff left on plates. I’m not talking about lots of food, just little bits that did not get rinsed off before put in the dishwasher.
I haven’t seen a good description of them yet, so here you are:
Instead of a simple drain hole in the bottom of your kitchen sink, you have a powerful cylindrical motorized unit in between the sink drain and the waste pipe (most houses equipped for them will have an electrical hookup in the cabinet under the sink basin).
A few bits of food didn’t get scraped into the trash, and clogged up your sink while you’re washing dishes? The disposer chops it up and your sink drains normally again. Saves time, effort, or a call to the plumber.
That’s the origin of it, anyway.
Since their introduction, people have found all sorts of uses for their disposal, requiring them to become more and more powerful. For instance, if the thing chops food, why scrape any food into the trash at all? Just put it down the disposal unit*. Now you don’t have old food making your kitchen wastebasket or your outdoor trashcan stink until it gets emptied.
Once the electric dishwasher got a foothold, it made sense to hook up its drain to the disposer, so that the dishwasher didn’t clog your sewer lines either. It’s common in real estate listings to see “modern kitchen with D/D” (dishwasher/disposal combination.
My current dishwasher, even though it drains through my disposal, has its own disposal unit built right into the bottom.
*But never, ever, EVER (as my wife can tell you from last year) put the peelings from five pounds of potatoes into it on Christmas Eve twenty minutes before the guests arrive. You will spend a waterless wreck of a holiday getting up-close-and-personal with the giant, reeking, disposal-julienned mess that has prevented all aqueous egress from your dwelling until the next normal business day when the plumber may not require the relinquishment of your first-born to come fix it.
I missed this bit in Kymodyce’s reply:
