How to Use Your Freezer to Get Into Composting
Keep buying spinach only to end up with half a bag of green sludge you have to throw away at the end of the week? You’re not alone. Each year the average American throws away 290 pounds of food, and added up we waste 90 billion pounds of food every year. If the idea of that is turning your stomach, taking up composting is a great way to reduce your food contributions to our landfills.
Maybe you’ve considered composting before, but you don’t have a garden or house plants that would benefit from the compost. Or live in an apartment, and aren’t keen on keeping decomposing organic matter in a tub in your kitchen for fear of odor, or vermin. And you have no desire to be that person with an indoor worm composting bin.
Fortunately, there is a low-lift way you can divert food from landfills, and keep those decomposing potato peels off your counter, and odds are you already have the basics you need to do it. With as little as a freezer and internet access, you can get into composting.
Why You Should Consider Composting
Food waste makes up nearly 25% of what goes into landfills annually. That’s a lot of sludgey spinach. And this isn’t only wasteful, it’s not good for the climate. Have you ever cleaned out old leftovers from your fridge, then gone away for a few days after forgetting to take out your trash only to come back to a horrific stench? Now imagine a couple of hundred acres full of bags just as smelly as your gross garbage.That odor is methane gas from the food rotting, and that greenhouse gas is not good for the climate. Keeping food out of landfills can help reduce the methane gas they release.
Besides being helping to reduce the amount of methane released into the atmosphere, composting is also great for plants. It creates a natural, nutrient rich fertilizer that helps plants grow. So if your plant babies are looking a little wilty, compost could give them a much needed pick-me-up.
Prepping Your Freezer
The key to starting off with using your freezer to get into composting is having the space in there to store your food scraps. If you’re able, clearing out all the freezer-burned leftovers from the back and reorganizing to dedicate one drawer to composting is the least costly way to start off.
If you’d rather spend a little to get a dedicated place to store your scraps in then adding a compost bin to your freezer can be a great solution. Another option is compostable bags, especially if your freezer has a limited capacity, but you still want to keep your scraps somewhere other than the drawer where you usually store your ice cream. Compostable bags make for a more flexible means of storing your scraps, and are super easy to tie up and cart off to your composting hub when they’re full (more on that later).
Not Everything is Compostable
If this all sounds doable to you, that’s great! And hopefully this isn’t much of a deterrent, but: you can’t compost everything.
Some food scraps are not made for the compost pile: meat is one good example of a no-no, as is butter, and oil. Successful compost piles consist of three ingredients: water, greens and browns. Water is easy to visualize, but greens, and browns can be less so. Essentially, greens are high in nitrogen, and usually green and moist, and browns are high in carbon, and oftentimes, brown. But coffee is technically a green so when in doubt it’s always best to consult a compostable materials chart.
Additionally it’s always best to double check with wherever you’re taking your scraps to after their stay in your freezer in case they’re an organic only site, or vegan, but in general, vegetable and fruit peelings, egg shells, coffee grounds and tea can be safely stored in your freezer scrap bin for composting.
Prepping Your Scraps
While it’d be great to just toss your scraps in the freezer bin and forget about them until it’s time to get rid of them, you do have to do a little work to get them ready for their second life in the compost heap:
- Remove any stickers from your peels. They’re generally not compostable so it’s best to err on the side of caution, assume they’re not, and remove them.
- Cut up larger scraps. Not only will these leave more room in your drawer, bin, or bag, and in your freezer generally, but larger matter takes longer to break down so you’re also helping usher along the compost process.
Once you’ve done these things you can just toss what you intend to compost in your freezer and let it sit there for however long you feel like.
Taking Your Scraps to the Community Hub or Compost Center
This is where internet access comes into play. The next step in using your freezer to get into composting is finding a place to take your frozen food scraps. When it comes to getting your scraps out of your freezer and into a compost pile, there are a few different options.
- Contact your local community garden and ask if they compost and would accept your scraps.
- If there is a municipal composting program where you live, then you can put your frozen scraps in the bin prior to collection. Unfortunately, not too many US cities have this in place, but several community organizations have stepped in and initiated local composting initiatives.
- Take your scraps to a community composting hub. Most cities have these and they can usually be found by Googling “municipal composting” or “community composting” followed by your location. You can also try searching ShareWaste, which is based in Australia, but has mapped out some composting sites in several countries.
Once you’ve found a place that will take your scraps, it’s a good time to get in touch with them, or check their social media to see if they have any restrictions like they’re vegan only (so don’t compost egg shells), or all organic (so only take organic egg shells, fruit and vegetable scraps), or if they’re not currently collecting scraps, or what days they do have their collection sites open.
Then on the day of your choosing, and/or the compost site’s availability pop out wherever you’ve stored your food scraps from your freezer and transport it to the dropoff point, and add it to the compost heap/bin/wherever it’s being collected.
Rinse and Repeat
After you’ve dropped off your scraps at a composting hub of your choosing, it’s time to feel good about keeping some pounds of food out of landfills! And to rinse out your freezer drawer, or bin and plop it back in your freezer until next time. An added benefit of using your freezer to get into composting is that if you miss a dropoff you’re not going to risk getting fruit flies, or a smelly kitchen, just the space in your freezer until the next time you can get to the dropoff.
Ultimately using your freezer to get into composting is a great way to get used to the methods of saving and prepping food scraps for a second life as compost, learning what materials can be composted, and reducing the amount of food waste going into landfills.
