Before the year is out I wanted to tell you about an awesome gift I received for Christmas! In an effort to further reduce the organic waste, from our kitchen, that we contribute to our weekly trash (and ultimately, landfills) I was given a compost pail for Christmas.

Compost Pail for Kitchen Recycling - Click image for information and to purchase from Amazon.com

This compost pail (pictured left), which I will keep for kitchen recycling to help me with my goal of recycling more, allows for organic material waste from the cooking process to be placed in a gallon pail. This handy kitchen compost pail allows for vegetable scraps, egg shells, coffee grounds, tea leaves and other cooking herbs to be deposited in the pail and not the trash. Ultimately, the pail will need to be emptied into a compost bin or compost pile you keep (or frequent) outside.

The compost pail does come with filters to prevent decomposition (read: nasty, stinky and smelly) odors from overtaking your kitchen for a few days. I think this is a perfect gift for the cook and recycling minded individual looking for further materials to remove from the normal household trash.

Now with a compost pail and my knowledge about carton recycling, there will be a drastic reduction in our kitchen cooking scraps and cartons going to landfills from our trash.

If you’re a reader that already uses a compost pail or you end up purchasing a compost pail for your own kitchen recycling; please let me know your experiences with it, by leaving a comment below.

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Compost Pail for Kitchen Recycling is a post from: RecycleAllYear.com
Click to tell me about your recycling efforts.

Like any blog, one has to start somewhere. I start here, now…somewhere in the middle.

As I get older, I become more aware about what I consume in terms of purchases and all the physical materials that are part of a purchase. Whether it be groceries, clothes from a store, a new tv (or computer), birthday gifts, cards……you name it, I seem to be more conscious about the fact that if I buy something there are byproduct(s) of consumption/consumerism that have to be dealt with.

Byproducts of consumption/consumerism or where did all this stuff come from? There are plastic bags or cardboard boxes that enclose your items to make transport easier, there are product protection and preservation materials such as Styrofoam, rolled paper, plastic, air filled plastic, foam…there are enclosures such as paper, product packaging (mostly in the form of paperboard), aluminum, steel, other metals and glass to name a few. There is quite a lot that goes into delivering or shipping a product and quite a lot that packages or encases a product. All you want is that item(s) and you’re left with the byproduct of getting the item(s).

The latest information from the EPA and the Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) report from 2007 (FYI, this report gets updated every 2 years; awaiting a ’09 updated) noted that the largest percentage of MSW by category was Containers and Packaging; accounting for 31% or 78 Million tons. The good news (link to the 12 page fact sheet PDF) is that the recycling of those Containers and Packaging materials was the highest by percentage to be recycled. Through recycling efforts, 43% or 24 Million of the 78 Million tons was recovered through recycling.

So my question is, with consumerism on the rise (or is it just a volume adjustment of normal purchasing behavior due to population increase) how can we increase the recovery percentage of Containers and Packaging along with the other categories? I assume some folks recycle some of the recyclable materials? Maybe not? What if the majority of people throw everything away? What are people’s habits in relation to handling these materials and thinking “I should recycle this” or “I need to throw this away”? Is it a convenience to just throw things away and not worry about it? Out of site, out of mind? These are some of the questions I ponder more and more and relate to why I started a recycling blog.

Recycle This! is a post from: RecycleAllYear.com
Click to tell me about your recycling efforts.