Food Scrap Overload!

by Jacquie Anderson, Customer Service and Office Manager

We all have weeks when we wonder “What in the world did we eat this week that my compost bin is overflowing?”  Have you ever found yourself in this predicament?  Having additional food scraps periodically is par for the course.  Sometimes we have family or friends over to share a meal.  These days, many of us are at home more because of COVID-19.  And in the summertime, the wonderful fresh produce like watermelons & sweet corn from local farms definitely puts some bigger food scraps in people’s bins!

For those of you who find yourselves in this position regularly, we’d encourage you to upgrade to a 12-gallon bin.  The larger bin gives you more than double the capacity of the five-gallon bin, and costs an additional $4/month.  You can always change back to the five-gallon bin if you find you’re producing fewer food scraps after the summer.

If it’s just an occasional thing, we have a plan for that, too.  Please reach out to our customer service team and notify them a few days in advance of your pick-up that you’ll have extra food scraps.  Put the extras in a closed container and mark it so that our driver knows to collect that in addition to your regular bin.  We’ll add a one-time $5.00 fee to your account for up to five gallons of extra food scraps.  If you don’t alert us, there’s a good chance your additional food scraps will be left behind, which no one wants.

The Compost Crew team plans our routes carefully to make sure we have enough capacity in the trucks to serve all of our customers.  By choosing a larger bin or alerting us when you have overflow, it allows us to serve all of our customers without running out of space.  Lots of unplanned extra food scraps can result in our truck making a trip to the composting facility mid-route, which means your fellow customers’ service will be delayed.

Thanks for your help in making sure no watermelon rind or corn cob gets left behind!