I’ll just be thinking through some of these methods out loud for now.
The bare minimum is to avoid putting any food waste in the trash. For me, this means not letting anything get so gross that I will be tempted not to handle it. If I follow my previous rule of going through the fridge once a week, that should be fine. Here is one of many articles on why putting food in the trash is the worst possible option, environmentally speaking.
This morning I made a list of ways to avoid throwing away cooked food. I’ll keep circling back to it as I figure out what works. Obviously the less is thrown away, the better from every perspective. It doesn’t make sense to buy things, cook them, and then put them in the trash.
And yet it happens. My solution right now is to divide things up between my Reencle composter and filling a bag that I bring to my local dump to put in with food waste. This is then turned into clean energy.
In my household, whatever can go in the Reencle does. It’s still fairly new to me and I’m still learning the rules, but it’s working very well so far. My interpretation of the rules is, if it’s something you could have eaten, it can go in. Stems, shells, peels, cores, bones, and paper are excluded. They go to the food waste bin at my local dump and get recycled into clean energy.
Now that I have the Reencle the food bin for the dump is filling up less quickly. A similar thing happened when we started separating out food. There is less trash, it is less smelly, and it fills up far less quickly. And because it’s less smelly and wet, there is not the same urgency about getting it out of the house that there used to be. Onion skins and egg shells are fine sitting on the countertop for a while. Bones and banana peels less so.
Soon I will start drawing soil from the Reencle and growing other food in it.
Now for some other ideas of how to deal with the items that it won’t accept.
Banana peels are apparently delicious in curry. Here’s a traditional banana peel thoran from Kerala.
Egg shells and onion skins can be broken up and added to soil. So it seems like this is just a matter of sequence. Create the soil in the Reencle, then mix in onion or eggshells once I’m potting the soil. I could even start some pots on the porch and put the onion skins and egg shells in early on. I don’t anticipate a problem with that, and it’s fairly easy to do.
Here is another method for working with onion skins. I’d need to have a dedicated spot for letting them pile up and then dealing with them all together. It’s a little bit of a project but it might be fun.
Those are the top three food items I regularly come across that are not supposed to be put in the Reencle. I’m curious if they could be processed somehow and added to it though. I suspect if the eggshells or onion peels were crushed, or if the banana peels were cooked and broken up, they would do fine. I will try to follow up with them or maybe try it on my own once I’m more confident about using this machine.
Another item that’s worth exploring uses for is orange peel. I don’t eat very many whole oranges, but I get them from time to time and I want to know some options. Using them to make candles seems like a fun novelty project, but not something I’d do very often. Maybe at the holidays, with a few cloves thrown in. Candied orange peel seems like a great solution. This article lays out many options, including adding them to tea, to dried flower arrangements, using them for fires, and adding them to soil. There’s an ingenious suggestion here of using orange peels as seed starter pots. I guess this could work with eggs too, using an egg container to hold them. Both could be planted directly into the garden. At least it seems like it might work.
I do enjoy herbal tea, and I’m wondering if onion peel and orange peel could yield an interesting combined result. It wouldn’t hurt to try. I would think once they are ground up and/or steeped in boiling water they might be something that the Reencle could process. I will keep looking into it.
Back to the hardware side of things for a moment. A friend mentioned that he is looking to get an outdoor Tumbler composter that can be used by close neighbors as well. It seems ideal to provide solutions that can work for more of the community.
