Is your Ed Miliband compostable food waste caddy a health hazard?

[AndyBurkhamstocks]

On the government directive our local council has taken away our landfill bins and replaced them with 1 tiny landfill bin and a compost food waste caddy which is removed on a weekly basis for burning.

I have put a (compostable) bag of food waste in the council food waste bin and bloody hell, it’s a sea of maggots and live flies. I feel sorry for the bin people who have to collect this stuff on Thursday. I have already drained out the liquid before a previous collection and I wash and dry the caddy after each collection but f me, the only way to stop the food waste from putrefying in this heat is to keep it in the fridge .

Am I the only one f ing this up? How do you stop the liquefaction of your food waste and a potential cholera outbreak?

I struggle to see why maggots suddenly become a problem. It’s not like you suddenly have food waste, what happened with your food waste before? We have the bags in your photo. Not seen any maggots yet. Bags do disintegrate sometimes. Think depends on what you have put in there.

Some people bag up food waste and put it in freezer until bin day

I have seen the famous Liverpool purple bin - I wonder if there are any other real outliers. Is there a pink one anywhere?

Only come across these in the Welsh air BnBs we’ve stayed in. We don’t have them in Yorkshire and I’m glad. Makes me think of the Here We Go episode where the fox keeps getting in so food is constantly strewn across the driveway. It’s grim.

I can see I have all this to look forward to once our area gets food bins/caddies in October. We currently just have black sacks (household waste) and purple sacks (recycling). I'm not even convinced our area will get food bins! We'll see.

I am in Wales. The only time I have had food strewn across my driveway is when next door's Bengal cat somehow managed to get into my food waste bin to get at some chicken bones. Once in nearly 20 years. Not grim at all.

Not sure what this has to do with Ed Miliband who is (was) minister for energy but shoehorn away.

We’ve had one for decades, under a conservative county council. Absolutely no issues. The countertop one gets emptied twice a week and the compost bin itself (which lives outside obviously) gets collected once a week. The outside one gets a bit fly blown in summer but no more so than an actual compost heap.

We have...
brown wheely bin for garden waste
green wheely bin for general landfill
Indoor food waste caddy
Outdoor food waste caddy
Blue bag for cardboard - must be in the bag /cut/folded
Green box for paper
Green box for plastic - bottles, trays etc
Green box for cans
Green box for glass
Additionally can put out our own
Clear bag with batteries.
Carrier bag with shredded paper waste
Carrier bag with Tetrapak
Carrier bag with small electrical items
Carrier bag with unusable textiles for rag bag.
In a few months we will also have soft plastics, for which they will sell us plastic bags.

Keeps me busy in retirement I guess.

I'd love to have soft plastics and rag bag getting them to the Coop and Dunelm is a bit of a faff. I suppose if people in your area are reasonably compliant with all that sorting, it's worth giving them more. We just separate paper and card from other recycling (including tetrapak), and there are little bags for batteries if you want to use them too.

We’ve had these types of food waste bins for years and they’re fine. We’re in the South East and it gets hot and you need to rinse them out after they’re emptied. Also I use green waste liners. I have never seen a Facebook post (ever!) complaining about them. It’s just generally accepted as a good thing to do. In fact, I really don’t like putting food waste in the black bin - feels really wrong.

Oh I hate the slop bucket. Especially since the other day when I discovered maggots crawling around in it 🤮🤮🤮

In Cornwall we have only had these for a few years.

We have had no problems with the outside caddy.

You will get maggots if flies have access to the food, and have laid eggs on it, before it's put in the caddy. The only thing that causes us problems is left over cat food, but this is only a problem in the summer, in winter it is fine.

Our area introduced them earlier this year. We were told to keep the small food waste caddy, lined with a small plastic bag, in a convenient place in the kitchen and to place the waste daily into the small orange outside bin provided with it. As the weather got hotter this indoor caddy attracted swarms of ants and it’s been a month now trying to get rid of them, even though the caddy is now outside. From the start, I’ve bleached disinfected and used the Bin Buddy powder in both the caddy and the small bin, but ants and flies are still swarming. I’ve had to move them again around the side of the house into the shade, which at my age is a pain to keep on making frequent trips there. It’s completely unhygienic for households and refuse collectors alike and now I’m having to deal with ants.

Had the brown caddy outside for some years as well as one for the kitchen.
I stopped using the ktchen one as it attracted flies.
I have a kitchen bin 63Ltr it has a 3ltr food section in it so I put a bag in that then i put it in the doorstep caddy which i line with some nice thick bags i found on Amerzon,
i buy a bit bigger than needed.
No issues since touch wood.

I've had to keep an eye on it this week as they missed my one last Thursday its now full and very heavy now. I've just put a note on it to ask them to take as they missed it last week.

On collection day I try and be up to ensure they take it, if im not in the in the morning i think they wont take it due to its weight now.

If that happens i am going double bag it and put it in the general rubbish bin thats due next week.

My useless orange outside food waste caddy has now been destroyed by a badger. The flimsy locking mechanism was clearly no match for Brock's claws.

That sounds really annoying. I've never had a missed weekly collection in well over a decade living here. They even collect on bank holidays.

I can see from this thread how frustrating this initiative can be when councils don't support it properly. I hope some of them will get their act together

We've had these for about 20 years. The food bin is collected weekly so if the waste is put in a compostable bag that is tied, it keeps the bin clean. If your bags are disintegrating so quickly you need better bags. They shouldn't disintegrate in a few days.
It's better than having food waste in the general rubbish bin, as that only gets collected fortnightly here, so more chance of bugs hatching.

We have an InSinkerator sink food disposal plug hole and I have to say it’s the best thing ever. No stinky bins or bin juice or maggots or flies ever. The wheelie bin is always clean as is the interior bin. Our food caddy sits empty… it either goes in the sink (even chicken bones etc) or our own compost.

Only thing that doesn’t is the stones from stone fruits.

Freezer would be more suitable btw…

I don’t see the link to Miliband either.

Like others I have had a food caddy for years and have had no problem with it. Having said that, most of my food waste is fruit and vegetable peelings, which go into my compost bin.

Most weeks I have no other food waste at all, but if I have anything that is likely to smell or attract flies, like meat, I keep it in the fridge until the night before the waste is collected.

They are very environmentally unfriendly though. They use a lot of water, a lot of power, and they mess up the sewers.

https://www.water.org.uk/sites/default/files/wp/2023/01/WUK-FWD-Positionv2.pdf

How do they use a lot of water? It’s my kitchen sink and just requires me to run the tap for 5 seconds while it runs. It takes less energy than boiling the kettle…

I put the oil/used grease in foil and then in the bin. Though I suppose some fat from cooked food would make its way through.

On the whole, I think my combo (80% compost, 10% sink, 10% bin) probably works fine for most things. I can’t see how food waste caddies can supposedly be used to make compost when they contain cooked foods and meat and dairy anyway…

@MyDarlingRose

The document I linked to says:

Wastewater Treatment Issues – Widespread use of FWD’s would be increased costs to
Water Companies due to the increased biological load that macerated food waste causes at
the Wastewater Treatment works. This would lead to increased energy consumption
required to treat this load so that our treated wastewater can be safely returned to the
water environment. In these times when we are all trying to do what we can to reduce our
carbon footprint this would be most unhelpful

Water Use – FWDU’s tend to use just over 12 litres of tap water to dispose of 1kg of food
waste. As 1 litre of water weighs 1kg, this means that over 12 times as much treated water
is used than the food waste and 1kg of food waste therefore becomes 13 litres (13kg) of
wastewater. Where FWDU are installed in homes, water usage increases by between 3 and
4.5 litres per person per day. Again as we try to reduce our carbon footprints and use only
the tap water that we actually need this is unhelpful

I see well that’s unfortunate to learn. I love my insinkerator (it came with the house).

You can put meat, dairy etc through hot and industrial composting systems, @MyDarlingRose . That's what councils do

Not criticising your sink thing, but just to reassure people the whole business isn't a scam!

I was terrified of them as a child - always expecting them to crunch up my fingers!

It sounds as if you don't use yours much so I wouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, since it's already installed.

Our council takes kitchen roll (used only on food) and pizza boxes in the food waste bin, so I mop up oil with kitchen roll and pop it in there.