Bins
Having several bins recycling every kind of household waste is a great way to organize your waste disposal. If you do it right, the garbo will hardly ever have to call on you.
If you have children or dogs around your recycling bins will have to be child-proof and dog-proof. A sprinkling of pepper in the bin will teach most dogs to keep their nose out of your business, but some children need more convincing.
Your recycling container can be something very simple. You can get a plastic bucket from the supermarket for less than a dollar, or you might prefer a pedal bin so that you don’t need a spare hand to open it. Have one for food scraps, and another for waste paper, and another for non-compostable materials such as plastic bags. You can even save on the number of plastic bags by shopping with reusable calico bags.
As an organic gardener I’m very interested in the cheapest recycle containers. For instance, I was walking past a junk sale and noticed two compost bins just as they were packing everything away for the day. I made an offer of $5 for the pair of bins on the condition that they delivered them to my house, which they did immediately, saving me a walk home.
To do proper composting you have to build a heap that is at least one yard cube, to allow enough heating to kill all the weed seeds. However in a compost recycle bin you just throw in some worms and then each day you add your food scraps. If you have a paper shredder you can mix in some shredded paper too, and perhaps a handful of dirt every couple of week to keep the earthworms happy. Seeds are more likely to rot in the damp recycle container than they are to germinate, and the earthworms eat them as soon as they are soft enough.
These bins recycle scraps into very high quality worm-casts, which are great for your best plants. If you have a larger garden you can soak your newspapers and other waste paper and mulch them before mixing them in with high-nitrogen waste to create a hot compost heap instead of bins recycling your compost slowly. However that means working in batches, instead of just adding a little waste every day.