Composter, Garbage Disposal or Trash Can?
How should you get rid of orange peels anyway?
Got food scraps? Me too. In this post, I'll tell you where to put em!
Trash can
Obviously trash is no good, but let's break it down. When you send food waste to a landfill, it is likely going to get buried with a whole lot of trash before it can fully biodegrade. This means that that food can't get enough oxygen to be broken down by aerobic digestion. Instead, it needs to be broken down with anaerobic digestion, which is a process that naturally produces methane (read: a supes bad GHG). These methane emissions make food waste in landfills much worse than food waste anywhere else.
Garbage Disposal
This is a tricky one because garbage disposal sustainability varies depending on where you live. If your local wastewater reclamation center recycles biosolids (the nutrient-rich stuff that you put down the drain) by giving them to local farmers to use as fertilizer, this is great because it means that your drain scraps are essentially composted. Filtering out these good good biosolids from the other nasty stuff that goes down the drain uses more energy than throwing the scraps in a personal composter, but recycled disposal scraps are still more sustainable than landfill scraps.
However, if your local wastewater reclamation center does not turn its biosolids into compost or fertilizers, those biosolids will likely end up in a landfill. In this case, throwing your food scraps down the disposal is no better than throwing it in the garbage. To find out if your wastewater reclamation center turns biosolids into fertilizer, try looking on their website. Just search the interwebs for "water reclamation center" plus your location, do a little searching and you'll find it in no time. If the website doesn't say where the biosolids end up, just call the water treatment plant and ask what they do with biosolids (aka treated sludge) after it's filtered out of the water.
Compost
I'm sure this isn’t a shocker, but composting in a personal composter is your most sustainable option when it comes to food scraps (besides not creating scraps at all). When you compost, your food scraps don't need to use energy to get from one place to another, and they aren't forced to release methane while being strangled under a pile of garbage. Composting gives your scraps the air they need to be decomposed without emitting too many nasty GHGs from travel or anaerobic digestion.