When I heard that we were actually going to be able to recycle food waste and packaging in our town, I got a bit excited.

This might be a weird thing to be excited about, but I’ve always been a huge proponent of recycling, and it annoys the heck out of me when I have to throw something in the trash that could theoretically be composted or recycled. At least we’ve always had good glass/paper/plastic options here in Skagit County, unlike some places that won’t let you recycle anything except newspapers and pop cans. If that.

We have a compost bin, of course – a rather awesome setup where we can fling vegetable trimmings and eggshells off the side of the deck into a waiting bin many feet below, with a cool hinged lid on a long rope – but meat scraps and paper food packaging, like pizza boxes and mushroom bags, have always had to go into the trash (for fear of attracting pests – have you ever had to dig mice out of a compost heap? Not nice). Now these things can go into our yard waste bin, which I have previously just used for tree prunings and evil invasive weeds like bindweed, horsetail and buttercup, which would take over the world if left in the regular compost.

The only downside I can think of with this is if you routinely dump chicken carcasses and fat scraps into your bin, especially in hot weather, you’re likely to get maggots if not something worse, like opossums, but our (I think) clever solution to this is to put our bones and scraps in a container in the freezer, where they accumulate all week, and then dump them into the waste bin the day before collection. No smell, no bugs!

Now our weekly garbage pickup, always small, is even more miniscule. It’s probably about as small as it’s likely to get until we find a good place to recycle cat box scoopings.