If you compost your veg peelings, etc, will you still do this when the council food waste collection kicks in?

[MyThreeWords]

The statutory provision of council food waste collection is coming in very shortly in most council areas, so I wondered how home composters are responding to that?

I currently compost my veg peelings and fruit waste, but my heap isn't good enough for me to compost any other food waste -- it would just lead to vermin if I tried to put other food waste in.

Until recently, I'd been assuming that I would carry on with my own veg/fruit composting when the council food waste collections come in, but it's just dawned on me what a faff that would be. Two caddies in the kitchen. Yuck. One of them decanted into my compost heap and the other into the council food bin.

Those of you who already have food waste collections, has it changed your composting habits? If you stopped adding fruit/veg waste to your own compost bin, how, if at all, did that effect the success of your compost.

Those of you who don't yet have council food waste collections but will do soon, what are your plans?

We've had food waste collection for many years, and a home compost bin. We have two caddies in the kitchen, it's not really that much faff. Council caddy has anything we can't put in home compost eg cooked food scraps, meat bones. Home compost everything else, including paper, brown cardboard, egg boxes etc.

I am a huge fan of recycling and separating waste, but I have a garden, decent size kitchen and a garage, I do wonder how people manage when they have less space. Currently we have:

box for chickens scraps
compost bucket
food waste caddy (although this is in the garage as rarely used)
one bag for tins
one bag for hard plastics
one bag for soft plastic that we can take to the tip for recycling
one recycling box for glass
one recyling box for paper and card
one box for stuff going to the charity shop
an old bucket by the back gate with bits of scrap metal
an old outside dustbin for garden waste that can't go on the compost heap

It is both good and somewhat ridiculous

We already have the food waste collections here. I have 2 caddies, one for home composting and one for the bin. It's not a big deal 🤷‍♀️

Good question! No food waste collection here yet but will come in later this year. Right now I take out vegetable peelings etc to the compost heap immediately I get them - no putting them in a kitchen bin. I've a cat who deals with any vermin! However during the cold months the peelings don't rot down so they've been going in general waste. I guess those will now go in the food waste bin which is good. I'm going to use my regular small bin in the kitchen for food waste and put other stuff like wrappers in a general bin in another room.

Our Council aren't doing food waste collection; they are working on it, apparently. Generally they are good to us (unlike steppemum's Council!) because we can throw all recycling (paper. plastic, metal, glass, etc) in the one bin and they sort it at the depot.
We have hardly any food waste anyway - there's only two of us and I try to plan to avoid any wastage. This thread has made me realise that I don't buy much meat on-the-bone.
Food prep (peelings etc) goes in the compost bin.

Egg shells are not a problem. If you microwave them for a minute then they become very brittle and therefore very easy to grind to a powder in a pestle and mortar.

I’ve had food waste collection for about 15 years. I do not home compost these days, we barely have any food waste anyway (I rarely peel!)

We have a food caddy, a green box for paper and card, a black box for glass, a bag for hard plastics and metal plus you put all you soft plastics in a bread bag and place it on top of the glass (can also send batteries, small electricals, clothing etc bagged up. It’s really easy as they take everything here and have done so for a long time (except soft plastic, that’s only the last year) I’m so surprised other places are so behind. We don’t subscribe to garden waste as garden is miniature

I don't think we will have much to put in the food waste bin
all our veg peelings, apple cores etc, tea leaves, coffee grounds, egg shells (yes!) go on our compost
left overs, anything more than a small portion is either frozen or eaten the next day- anything less than that goes to the hens
it will really only be mouldy bread or other spoilt food that goes in the food waste
we've only had it a week so far and last week it was just a few handfuls really

Yuck. I will not be scraping food waste into a bucket of existing slop and having it rotting away on my counter, not a chance. Absolutely rank. It will be going in my household rubbish as it always has done.

I have 2 cadies on the counter top. You described this as 'yuck' but I can't see how its more 'yuck' than just having just one???

Raw veg peelings, tea bags and dead flowers etc continue to go in 1 caddy for the compost. Meat/bones, cooked food, mouldy bread, off cream etc all go into the other caddy, which eventually goes into the larger, council caddy for collection. I can't see an issue?

You don't have a bucket of slop on your kitchen counter... That's quite a leap! You can keep your container outside assuming you don't live in a flat.

It's more gross if the food waste is in the main bin where its just sat there making the whole bin disgusting. Especially these days when so much is recycled it takes a while to fill a bin.

It’s insane how big the bigger food waste bin is! After putting the peelings, tea bags, coffee grounds, egg shells in the compost we wouldn’t fill the small caddy in a month, never mind the big one in a week!

Council waste for cooked food, citrus peel etc. Home compost for fruit and veggie peelings. Urban foxes and crows for stale bread and chicken carcasses.

I guess it probably varies depending on the council, but our outside caddy is so light that it blows up in the wind. We end up with food strewn around the street. I don’t think I’ll continue using it.

We have a compost bin that is collected fortnightly. I use this for peelings/fruit etc. I have a caddy on the draining board and put my peelings in there and transfer to the green bin. When they start collecting food waste separately, will it be for meat/fish (skin/bones etc) and waste cooked food too? I currently put them in the black sack general waste.

We only have a tiny garden, but had a compost bin before food waste collections started. Being vegetarians, there is no meat/bone residue, but a lot of veg peelings, tea leaves and coffee grounds! We ended up giving up the compost bin (went to a friend's allotment) as it had never really got going anyway and it is much easier to just put everything in the one caddy in the kitchen, decanted regularly to the outdoor one for the weekly collection. No slop or rotting anything.

Re all this mouldy bread people are chucking - we never have any, as I make it myself and value it too highly to ever let it go mouldy. If there is too much it goes in the freezer sliced or made into breadcrumbs.

You fill a small bin using a compostable liner and empty into a larger bin as needed, daily if you prefer. I use this one as it’s out of eyeline, https://www.dunelm.com/product/joseph-joseph-compo-4l-food-waste-caddy-graphite-1000185358?defaultSkuId=30720184&branchCode=0265&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Utility_Cleaning-PMax_%5BGOO-LIA-HOMEHYGIENE-CLEANING%5D&gclsrc=aw.ds&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=20599969652&gbraid=0AAAAADGqyX18ymZ5SHMaPY6zdAPaeAQ1M&gclid=Cj0KCQjw4a3OBhCHARIsAChaqJOVzudUXAZLxylMeMCTBQDYO37HGTvPXveQ6fGn6WWqA-IXCeNdcBoaAg8OEALw_wcB

Can’t you empty the food waste bin regularly? You don’t have to keep it on a counter, you can keep it under the sink or any where you choose, such as you do with your normal bin, most modern kitchens have pull out bins with a food waste section.

cooked food, mouldy bread, off cream etc all go into the other caddy
Those would probably all go in my freezer: cooked food saved as a future ready-meal, bread frozen (before it goes mouldy), cream turned into 'ice-cubes' (before it goes off) to be used in future cooking.

So you prefer having 'rotting' food in your main, household bin instead of a smaller one your could empty more often- YUCK! 🙄

We have food / green waste collection here.
Vegetable peelings go on the compost heap.

We stopped home composting as soon the council introduced food waste collection. We were producing massive amounts of not very good compost, so I was quite happy to do away with the compost bin.

We have a small caddy on the counter. It gets emptied into the large outdoor caddy anything from daily to twice weekly. Depends mostly on how full it gets, though if we scrape fish into it we empty it that day. Very rarely gets smelly. You can put a charcoal filter in the lid, but we stopped doing that after we got the hang of when to empty.

One thing the food waste collection is VERY useful for is getting rid of fats and oils. We have had to clear fatbergs generated by households 'upstream' from us, that were blocking our sewers and causing the downstairs loo to fill from the waste pipe! If you do nothing else about food waste, bottle your waste oils and fats and put the bottle in the outside caddy.

We’ve had council compost collection for over twenty years- I didn’t know some areas didn’t have it.
it all goes in the caddy then all goes out to the bigger bin most evenings.
we do have a compost bin in the garden but it’s currently full of apples.
put kitchen roll in the bottom of the caddy or use a corn starch liner.
the big bin is disgusting. It needs cleaning out and it’s my least favourite job ever.

Yes - but I don’t use the council box, I gave it a really good go but the liners always disintegrated, the bin would smell and get really disgusting. So I compost fruit/ veg/ egg shells etc in the garden and don’t feel too guilty chucking all other food waste in the normal bin.

We only really have fruit and vegetable peelings and egg shells and they usually go straight out onto the compost heaps. I don’t know if it’s because we are vegetarian, but we don’t seem to have much else in the way of food waste, Maybe a bit of oil after we’ve seasoned the frying pan?