Never put electronic items, batteries, fabrics, or any plastic into your household trash. Those items strictly belong to the recycling section, and larger items like tables and mattresses always are a case for your junk removal.
There are quite a few things you cannot put into your household trash bin despite common belief. Should your microwave break down, you are better off scheduling a junk removal collection. Especially, electronic items don’t belong in the trash bin.
Food waste
Teabags, coffee grinds, veggie scraps, leftovers, and meat are completely fine if you dispose of them in your regular trash bin. You could wrap food scraps and leftovers in some newspapers to reduce odors.
If you have compost, veggie scraps would be better off there to create healthy soil for gardening. However, meat and bones should never end up on the compost, or you’re going to attract rats and mice along with a bunch of other unwelcome guests. They will smell the meat and turn your compost into their dinner plate. Furthermore, meat can contain harmful pathogens, which can only be killed off with high temperatures that are set at a commercial composting site. Dairy doesn’t smell nice at all once it’s a runoff, even if your compost is quite far away from your home. It could also attract flies. If you have expired e dairy products, put the solids only into your trash bin and discard the liquids in your drain.
Before you put coffee grinds into your trash bin, place them in your fridge to absorb odors, if you have any. They can also be fantastic to reduce minor blockages in your piping. Just sprinkle some used coffee grinds onto the drain and flush them down with hot water.
Broken glass, ceramic, and mirrors
No, you don’t have to bring your broken glassware to a recycling bin. You can safely dispose of it in your regular trash. Even mirrors are sufficient to be put into the regular trash bin. If they’re still in good shape, consider donating them instead of throwing them out. If they’re broken, they’re best off in the household trash. Just be careful with the sharp edges, or they’ll rip your bin bag.
Did you break your dinner plate? Have you and your partner had a heated discussion and threw plates and other ceramics at each other? Collect the shards of your relationship and your dinnerware and just dispose of them in your household trash. There’s nothing you can do for recycling unless you use the fragments for a creative DIY project, such as decorating the outdoor pizza oven, plant pots, or even your house wall.
Nappies
Could you imagine recycling nappies and having to wait a week longer for that bin to be picked up? You cannot recycle used nappies, and you’re most likely looking forward to having them out of your house as soon as possible.
Suppose you’d like to reduce waste, think about reusable nappies like in the old times. They’re made of absorbent cloth and then washed at high temperatures to eliminate any bacteria, especially the unique smell. It’d be a great option if your baby doesn’t cope well with commercial nappies and has allergic reactions to them. Be aware, it could add some extra hours to your daily routine, and it may take you some time to get used to it. But if the women of the last century could handle it, why shouldn’t you be able to manage?
Pet waste
Pet waste is outstanding to end up in your household trash. However, it can fill up your trash bin faster than if you had no pets. But what would your life be like without your beloved furry or feathered companions? Exactly, it’d be quite dull. Hence, no pet owner minds if the trash bin fills up a little quicker.
Should you also be interested in reducing that waste, you could consider composting even your pet waste. Make sure it’s a different compost than the regular household compost with food scraps. Pets and dogs are carnivores for which their waste can produce harmful bacteria that should never get in touch with food scraps. Just dig a hole a little further away from your house and your edible garden. Remove the bottom of a bin, drill some holes in it, and put the lid on top. Now you can dispose of your pet waste on that special compost. Remember that you should only use cat litter, such as wood, to consider a pet waste compost and have cats. Throw the pet waste down the hole, cover it with some leaves, straw, or newspaper, and after about two years, you’ve got fantastic compost to fertilize your roses, lawn, or perennial garden. Never use this compost for edibles!
Plastic bags
Plastic bags cannot be recycled, who would have thought? Accordingly, regular plastic bags belong in the household trash bin. They are usually made of non-recyclable plastic and have to end up in a landfill, unfortunately. Depending on your garbage collection facilities, they may be recycled with a different processing system, but most don’t have that option.
Firstly, consider switching to reusable bags such as cotton or linen and reducing the plastic bags in your waste. You could also make some bags for bread, rolls, vegetables or fruit yourself with old T-Shirts and bed linen. If you’re good at knitting, you could knit some bags with any wool you like or make your strands interwoven with old T-shirts and jeans. Secondly, just cut the T-Shirt or jeans into even strands, leave one of the sides from which you cut intact. You only have to cut at those ends that still connect the strands like a spine. Finally, you’ll end up with tens of meters of strands to create a ball of string ready to be knitted into anything you’d like.
In the End
Never put electronic items, batteries, fabrics, or any plastic into your household trash. Those items strictly belong to the recycling section, and larger items like tables and mattresses always are a case for your junk removal.
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