Guilt courses through my veins.
That’s probably to be expected considering I am the daughter of a former nun and the product of Catholic education, Jesuit to boot. I’m wracked with conscience-heavy questions, like how to be a better mom, wife or citizen of Atlanta — after all, this city is my new home, and I need to do my part to make it great.
What do I feel bad about lately? Kitchen scraps.
Chuckle all you want, but I feel some serious shame right now, because I’ve got pounds of kitchen scraps and nowhere to go with them. Making use of vegetable peels and egg shells was easy when I had a house with a big compost bin in the backyard and many garden plots to feed on the organic-rich matter. Now that I live in an apartment, it’s so much harder. How can we apartment- and condo-dwellers live sustainably when the only place for our scraps is the garbage disposal?
I’ve been saving spent coffee grounds and scattering them on herbs and hibiscus plants in my patio. That makes me feel halfway OK. But you should see the pile of orange rinds, potato peels and squash skins. They are really adding up, along with the guilt.
So, I’ve been on a hunt for a compact compost bin, something like a Big Green Egg for big green thumbs who live in tiny spaces. Thus far, I’ve made visits to three home and garden stores — Home Depot, Ace Hardware and Pike Nursery. In every instance, I came up short. Worse, I was directed to check out Amazon for options. Shipping from thousands of miles away wasn’t quite what I had in mind.
All that got me thinking that, if I — someone who’s barely cooking for one these days — was having issues with biodegradable trash on a residential level, how are area restaurants dealing with such waste on a massive scale?
MORE:
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