by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Residents of the London Borough of Islington are being urged to recycle their food waste, and this message should be headed by people everywhere.
Islington Council highlighted that it costs £40 to compost a tonne of food waste, but the price of sending this same amount of rubbish to landfill is double at £80.
In addition to that having food rot in landfills serves no purpose and creates methane gas, a GHG that is many times more dangerous to our Planet than is CO2. The compost that is created when food waste is being recycled, on the other hand, is a valuable resource for gardeners growing food.
Councillor Paul Smith, Islington Council's executive member for environment, thanked those who already recycle food waste and said that he would like to help everyone in the area to get involved.
“Recycling food waste helps save our community valuable money to spend on vital services and makes great compost we can use to keep our parks and gardens green,” he added.
Information being sent to those living in flats to rent in the London borough of Islington explains that meat, fish, teabags, coffee grounds and scrap food from plates can all be recycled, along with vegetables, fruit and old pasta and rice.
It must be noted that, while meat can be composted in the commercial composting units that are used by municipalities, it does not always work too well in domestic compost heaps and composters and is, by some “experts” also regarded as outright wrong for home composting.
On the other hand, I hasten to add that I do add meat, fish, etc., waste into the composter with no ill effect.
Come on folks: get to either composting food waste yourself – after reducing as much as possible – and if that does not work then send it for recycling via the curbside recycling schemes. There is just no excuse.
© 2011
