How to make food waste caddies more sanitary?

[georgarina]

I've got a caddy from the council to recycle food waste, but it's really horrible :( smells bad, steams up and the inside gets wet with rotting juice, and I have to keep it on the kitchen surface so toddler DCs can't get to it.

(I can't keep it outside because we live in a building with daily rubbish collection so it will be collected daily if left outside.)

Is there any way to make it more sanitary/inoffensive?

Do you use the bags?

You just need to take it out regularly, that’s why they are small. You aren’t meant to store rotting food in it for ages.

Plus you need to clean it well.

Take the bag out regularly and clean the caddy.

As above and use brown / newspaper to soak up the liquid!

Do you not line it with the compostable bags?

With ours we bung some folded kitchen roll in the bottom then put the bag in. I tend to wipe inside the lid when I use it and notice any gunk.

Plus we empty it often and give it a wash in between and whenever it looks grim.

Line it with a compostable bag?

If you have daily rubbish collection, can't you just leave it to be collected daily or every other day? We have a big bin for food waste that gets collected weekly so I empty the small counter-top caddy (in which we use bags) into that every day or so, so it's not sitting around inside for ages

We have small one for kitchen and use bags and put a bit of paper in bottom as well, we then have a big one that is outside and is whats collected and we empty daily in the big one
But if your rubbish is collected daily why not put it out daily ?

I line mine with a compostable refuse sack and put the caddy liner in that. Every couple of weeks fill with hot water and disinfectant and wash.

Your right, they are absolutely disgusting & I hate mine. Best method i've found is empty it regularly, wash out splash a bit of zoflora in the bottom & then put the compostable bag in

Compostable bag. Line bottom with newspaper or whatever. Mine neither smells or is unhygienic. I disinfect when I change it and the bag goes into the bigger food caddy that the council collects. My ex neighbours had one teeming with maggots because they didn't line it and never cleaned it. That was disgusting.

The Joseph & Joseph bags are brilliant. The ones we got from the council were as strong as wet tissue paper and always leaked. The J&J ones are still compostable but haven’t leaked yet (we have to walk to our nearest communal food waste bin so this makes a huge difference!)

I store food waste in an old cracked plastic box, lined with newspaper, in the fridge. On collection day, I tip it out, wrap in newsaper in old fashioned fish and chip paper style and pop it in the council bin. If a bit wet from condensation or the fat of stock, I put that in a compostable bag. f I get more than a boxful in the week I wrap it and store in the Council bin outside.
I should say that we compost a lot of peelings and tea leaves etc, so its mainly cooked stuff, bones, fish skins etc in the food waste

We keep ours in the fridge - takes up space but stops it getting too gross.

Yea we just use the compostable bags and when they are full or close to getting stinky we put them out in the outside food bin. No need to have old rotting food sitting on your worktop for days and days! We don't have any smell or residue.

Oh and we stick ours in dishwasher when needed. It just fits in the bottom!

I empty mine into the large compost bin outside every evening and if needed I wipe inside. If it’s particularly gross it goes in the dishwasher

Kitchen roll in the bottom, then the bag & leave the lid open after scraping plates until everything has gone cold so no condensation forms. Empty every 2/3 days.
Wash out weekly.

They are sent by Satan because kitchen cleaning wasn’t hard enough. The compost bags fall down or fall apart inside the container and the whole thing gets disgusting anyway. My last one got mould spores inside the lid then it just kept coming back every three days no matter what I did. I won’t use one now. I put compostables in a tupperware tub in the bottom of the fridge and take it up the garden every few days.

Same as other posters - I line mine with newspaper and then add a caddy liner.

Lidl and Waitrose have fruit and veg bags that are compostable (the ones for loose fruit and veg), so you could try those. The co-op green shopping bags are also compostable.

The trouble with ours is it gets full so quickly and I'm always forgetting to empty it. Though I'm not sure a bigger bin would necessarily be a good thing. We don't have a food waste collection but I put ours into the compost bin outside- bag and all. Then wash it with the outside tap, then indoor tap and zoflora.

This. Mine doesn't get rancid like that.

Empty it daily and wash it out.

Same here re compost bin ( I don't pay for garden/food waste collection) however I notice that when I went to use the compost, a long time down the line, the 'compostable' bags hadn't composted and I had to pick them all out of the compost in my garden so now I put waste directly into the caddy ( I bought my own, slightly nicer looking one) and empty/wash it every few days.

Use liners or bags. Let it get collected everyday?

I put a compostable bag in mine and take it out every day.

Why wouldn’t you avail of the daily collection?