Kitchen scraps collection

Input

Peelings and parings from vegetable and fruit preparation, egg shells, coffee grounds, leftover scraps from the dining table, toast crusts (!).

Small pieces of paper and cardboard, such as the cardboard liner from a packet of crumpets. I do not separate the little plastic sticker from the skin of fruit. Worms and bacteria ignore it, and it ends up out of sight in my houseplant pots.

A half-litre of bacterial water from the Bacterial Filter System .

Output

About one gallon of pureed vegetable and paper matter. This slurry is strained through a filter (see Bacterial Filter System ) to make a pasty sort of mess. To this is added strained paper slurry.

Description

We maintain a lidded pail of one-gallon capacity on the balcony. We rarely fill this pail during the week. We elect to process its contents once a week. That the contents freeze in winter is not a problem. Freezing helps break down the fibres making digestion easier. I bring the pail inside to thaw for a few hours before pureeing the contents.

The pail starts the week with a two inch layer of bacterial water. This water has been taken from the Bacterial Filter System . The water helps seal the food scraps from some insect pests.

By starting the pail with bacteria-laden water, we are giving a head start to the reproduction of bacteria within the pail. By the end of one week, food scraps are well coated with bacteria and are partially decomposed.

At week end we pass the contents of the kitchen scraps pail through a kitchen blender to render the food scraps into particles smaller than two millimetres. The process takes about five minutes.

About one cup of scraps and two cups of bacterial water produce a pasty slurry.

As each blender load is made, we pour it onto our Bacterial Filter to drain out excess water.

Once the kitchen scraps are reduced, we continue using the blender to pulp Scrap Paper . The quantity of paper is roughly three times the quantity, by volume, of kitchen scraps.

Our bacterial filter receives about two gallons of pureed paper-and-vegetable matter per week.

When all the kitchen scraps and paper are pureed, we pour two inches of bacterial water into the pail, and set it out on the balcony to receive wastes throughout the week.

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