Food Scrap Smoothies and Other Ways to Skip the Landfill Without Composting

Say you're a green-minded apartment dweller, dorm resident, or otherwise yardless greenie. You don't have room for a worm bin, or maybe you're a bit scoleciphobic. The idea of keeping a bucket of fermenting food around doesn't exactly excite you, either. So, you have no way to compost your kitchen scraps, and you really feel guilty about it. You know you should compost them. You would if you could. But you can't.

So, how to avoid sending all of those fruit and vegetable peels, coffee grounds, and tea bags to the landfill? Here are a few ideas:

• Ask around at your local farmer's market. Some farmers will happily take kitchen scraps off of your hands to add to their own piles. Save the scraps in a plastic bag or other container (adding shredded newspaper each time you add something wet---this will prevent mold and anaerobic stench) and drop them off with your favorite farmer.


• Is there a community garden nearby? Chances are, they will happily accept your food scraps for their own compost piles.


• Used coffee grounds can easily (and inconspicuously) be added to nearby planting beds and lawn areas.


• Make a "food scrap smoothie" and do a little guerilla fertilizing. Say you have a few handfuls of fruit and veggie scraps. Use your blender to liquefy them, adding enough water so that the mixture is fairly thin and easily pourable. Take your concoction to a planting bed or lawn area, and dump it out. The plants will appreciate the nutrition! This works better if you can pull off looking like you're supposed to be pouring liquefied food scraps in the planting beds.


• Do you have a relative with a yard who will maybe, just maybe, let you do a little composting? See if you can work out a deal in which you maintain the pile, and offer them the finished compost as "payment." I wish someone would offer to do this in my yard, actually.

So it's not as simple as just tossing the banana peels into a compost pile or worm bin. But if you really, really want to prevent those food scraps from ending up in the landfill you can definitely figure out a way. It might require a little planning and detective work, and maybe even some sneakiness on your part, but you can do it!

More About Composting in our Organic Gardening Feature.

More about Gardening
75 Things You Can Compost, But Thought You Couldn't
How to Make Hot Compost
Bokashi + Worm Bin = Easy Indoor Composting

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