And now we go again...

starnac

badmemory said:

Do those bags actually last that length of time because our food recycling ones certainly don't last a week once something is in them.  You can actually watch them biodegrade.

Food recycling is also collected weekly thankfully as no the bags don't last. 

The council has made enormous steps backwards. It has already increased fly tipping in the area and they can't see the connection. *rolls eyes*

I'm loving the Agile chat. We have solar panels and I love looking at the graphs and data. Octopods are great at giving us all the info on top of the app we got with the solar panels. 

Makingabobor2

We are supposed to be starting food waste recycling here in April....fingers crossed.  It neve occurred to me that they would just give us the biodegradable bags, I stupidly thought they would give us a caddy, but suppose that is too costly.  Think I'll probably get a caddy/bin or something and use that and then just put it in the bag when its due for collection.  No idea if it will be weekly or fortnightly. 

badmemory

From experience the biodegradable bags are fine just don't let them near anything like a caddy.  You can land up using lots if you aren't careful as they can really really smell.  Cooked food seems to be mostly okay but the likes of melon when 2 days old you do not need the smell in your kitchen.  Can you tell I have had a recent misadventure.  You can also land up using an awful lot of product to keep that caddy clean.  Food seems to ferment in them & the bags.

jwil

We've had food waste collections for 20 odd years and never had any problems.  Most councils give a small caddy for in the kitchen and a larger bin for outside.  The compostable bags are fine as long as you don't put hot food in there or liquids.  I put a sheet of kitchen towel at the bottom of the caddy.  The council here don't provide the bags, so we buy them from the supermarket, but we also use any paper bags that we get, or newspaper.  I've never noticed a smell, but put anything particularly smelly or wet straight out in the outdoor bin.  You can buy vented caddies and I plan to get one, as they help with the condensation. I just give the caddy a quick wash when I empty it, usually a couple of times a week.

Makingabobor2

jwil said:

We've had food waste collections for 20 odd years and never had any problems.  Most councils give a small caddy for in the kitchen and a larger bin for outside.  The compostable bags are fine as long as you don't put hot food in there or liquids.  I put a sheet of kitchen towel at the bottom of the caddy.  The council here don't provide the bags, so we buy them from the supermarket, but we also use any paper bags that we get, or newspaper.  I've never noticed a smell, but put anything particularly smelly or wet straight out in the outdoor bin.  You can buy vented caddies and I plan to get one, as they help with the condensation. I just give the caddy a quick wash when I empty it, usually a couple of times a week.

Using newspaper is a good idea. I do that for the dustbin with any nasty food stuff. Its all they did in the old days....in newspaper and into a metal bin.  No bin liners then to sit on landfill for years. I refuse to use proper bin liners.

PennysIntoPounds

We can get free food waste bags from our local library so might be worth checking that out to save a few quid 

milann

It does seem a backwards move…..what are the council going to do with all the old wheelie bins…..or is the plan to put the bags in them?

themadvix

We’ve not used bin liners in years - we have a compostable one in the food caddy but everything else either goes into the recycling, the bin which has no bag (contents just tipped into wheelie bin) or, on the rare occasions we have something unrecyclable and in any way wet or potentially smelly it goes straight outside into the wheelie bin. It helps that we don’t eat meat (well Mr MV does, but very little at home) and if we buy stuff like that I usually take own containers for the butcher to put it in. (The daily exception is clumping woodchip cat litter which is bagged in a small compostable bag and taken straight out). I’m currently working on maximising the stuff that goes into our compost bin (requires taking it down the garden every day) and minimising the food waste that goes into the lined bin (and is collected with our garden waste). It just requires me to make that effort to go out in the cold/dark/wet with the peelings etc!

starnac

milann said:

It does seem a backwards move…..what are the council going to do with all the old wheelie bins…..or is the plan to put the bags in them?

Ours told us that we can keep them to store the bags in! How kind of them! We can also ask them to collect them if we don't want them. Some people don't really have space for something they can't use, and the problem with using them to store the 3 bags were are allowed, is that some people then can't reach the bottom bag to pull it back out. It's a terrible decision to be fair based on the penny pinching ways of our local council.  

The trucks that have a lift to pick up the wheelie bins are costly and they now need replacing and/or maintaining. Our council don't want to pay for that, when the ones without a lift ie ones the workers just throw the bags into, are much cheaper. 

EssexHebridean

Good afternoon lovelies - excellent food waste/rubbish chat here! I generally use the small food waste caddy we were given at the flat when they trialled food waste collections there years ago - it’s handy because it has the lift-over and lock handle the same as the (far bigger) main house caddy does. The smaller house caddy just has a regular handle so invariably the squirrels manage to get into it! I’m in agreement with jwil that I’ve not found any issues with the degradable bags - and because we produce barely any food waste mine sometimes sit in the caddy for several weeks before going out the front for collection. I hasten to add I don’t keep a caddy indoors at all - ours sits outside the back door! Pretty much the only things that end up in the food waste caddy are residual hard fat from cooking, fat scraps from meat, meat bones and any whole potatoes thst need discarding either because they’ve been slugged or have gone green - we don’t put those in the compost as otherwise you grow tatties everywhere! 😂

Compost gets collected in an old mushroom tub in the kitchen then MrEH tends to take it to the compost bin last thing at night - as well as the fruit and veg waste that takes tea bags and coffee grounds too. 

I almost never use bin bags either - don’t use bin liners for the house bins at all, we have a “dry waste only” rule in the kitchen bin. As MAB I think it was says, anything wet gets wrapped in newspaper and thrown straight in the wheelie bin. I’m frustrated that I do still have to use nappy sacks or similar for time-of-the-month related waste - and before anyone says it I know you can get paper bags or biodegradable plastic ones for that purpose but they’re not cheap and thanks to the pesky fibroids I could go through a LOT of them during each period. It’s the same reason why period underwear just isn’t going to cut it for me, sadly, as much as I like the idea of it! For emptying the bins from the bathroom, downstairs loo and bedroom/dressing room I usually reuse food packaging of some sort - the outer bag from multipacks of crisps is a favourite as so far as I know it won’t recycle and at least that way it’s providing some additional purpose!