Good bucket hygiene
By: Timothy Kiefer
Tags: St Louis Composting, Perennial City Composting, Composting, Perennial City, Daily Blog

Our 11 simple tips for a happy composting experience

Have your bucket out on pickup day!

This one doesn’t need much explaining. We can’t help save those precious scraps from the landfill if they’re not waiting for us when we swing by. A big part of our job is making sure everything gets properly balanced and oxygenated. A few weeks without that care, your food remnants may go to the dark side.

Accidents do happen, so if you do miss a pickup or two, adding extra brown and shaking up a little could help. If you’d like a little extra carbon to have on hand, let us know, we have plenty.

Are you weekly yet?

We are happy to offer pick up every other week as a low barrier to entry option for new members. This works well for singles or folks that travel and dine out a lot. Two weeks, with the right materials and not over-packed, is the limit— if you over-pack, accumulate lots of liquids, or miss pickups, your bucket can take a turn for the worse.

If you started with a biweekly subscription, and now you’re hooked on composting, having learned just how much you can put in your green bucket instead of the trash, consider upgrading to weekly pickups any time.

Not only is our six month subscription the best value we’ve seen in the concierge composting world, it just happens to be the same monthly cost as our biweekly offering. That’s a half off discount for your commitment! And, you are always able to skip as many weeks as you’d like for a credit to your account if you have light weeks or are out of town.

Do you need a second bucket?

If you’re already weekly, but find yourself overfilling your bucket and leaving extras in paper bags regularly…nice work! We have a special double bucket subscription you can move up to any time. And, it’s a great value — still less per pickup than a single bucket on the biweekly subscription.

Don’t pack it in too much

Just as we humans need oxygen, so do the healthy micro-organisms that break your food scraps down into nutritious earth. We’ll make sure your scraps get all the care required to transform into beautiful compost. Ensuring they can breathe until we collect will keep anaerobic bacteria from taking over, causing things to get objectionable under your sink.

If you find your bucket regularly too full to allow for some fresh air, consider upgrading.

Compost as much as possible!

Members regularly reach out in excitement sharing their surprise at just how much they’re able to keep out of the landfill. We love hearing, “I only take the trash out every other week, and it doesn’t smell anymore!”

There’s so much you can compost in addition to food scraps: paper towels without harmful cleaning chemicals, uncoated paper, cardboard without tape, plain newspaper, dead houseplants, old love letters (we’ve seen ‘em!)… — and all of this material provides added benefits of loft for the previously mentioned oxygen and absorbing moisture.

Limiting liquids

Speaking of oxygen and moisture, liquids in your bucket can cause things to quickly run off the rails. Your kombucha failure, too-sweet tea, and abandoned pot of coffee would all be appreciated more by your backyard than the bucket.

Make good use of that liner!

The paper bag we leave is there to keep food from getting caked and stuck on, to help make sure it’s super easy to rinse. If this accidentally gets pushed down instead of filled, coffee grinds and nacho cheese sauce will ruin your day.

If you find moisture-heavy items causing your liner to tear regularly, feel free to double or even triple it up — a great use of your Trader Joe’s bags! If you need extra liners, let us know and we’ll add a message for your courier to hook you up. We’ve even noticed some members padding the bottom of their bucket with folded newspaper.

If you find paper is just not working, we are now able to accept compostable bioplastic bags, and now offer them well below retail in The Market.

Eat as much of what’s edible as you can

Composting keeps your food scraps from going to waste, and does so much good for the planet. We all know the three R’s — “reducing” in this case means limiting how much of your food is scrapped in the first place.

A whole section of watermelon, full stalks of celery, and an entire casserole will lead liquid-y, anaerobic situations fast, especially if you’re not adding any dry, carbonaceous material.

If you have full melon past its prime, definitely don’t throw it in the wastebasket, but you may want to hold it back in the fridge until it’s time to set out your bucket.

Save science experiments for the lab

That mini-biome morphing in the back of your fridge for eons, guarding the entrance to the netherworld — is it compostable? Technically…yes. But we guarantee it will make for a very unhappy week or two of opening your bucket, will likely throw everything else off in the meantime, and rinsing will not be fun.

Keep the lid on between fills

Up until this point, the focus has been on avoiding an odoriferous situation. The other, less common, issue is finding bugs in your bucket. YUCK!

This problem occurs almost exclusively during hot summer months, and in less than 1 in 50 buckets. Members are more likely to reach out, so when it’s happened, we’ve been able to clear it up quickly.

The primary culprits are 1. access to flies, and 2. fly residuals in your bucket.

Keeping the lid on and tight will keep flies from being able to lay eggs on the scraps. If you are using a smaller container to transfer intermittently to your bucket, we recommend one without holes so flies do not have access. Some members even like to keep their intermediary container in the fridge — now that’s fresh…

The nuclear option — keep your scraps refrigerated or frozen

Our most meticulous subscribers’ scraps look so good you might be tempted to pour on some dressing and chow down if you were hungry. That’s because they keep their buckets crisp.

If you don’t want to leave anything to chance, pause the decomposition process altogether by reserving a spot for your bucket in the fridge or freezer. Collect scraps in a smaller container throughout the day, then put them to sleep in your chilled bucket. This might sound extreme, but you won’t find a cleaner bucket than this.