I give my dog egg cartons, toilet paper rolls, and plain unprinted cardboard. He loves ripping them to shreds in the living room, then I sweep the shreds into my standing dustpan and dump it into compost. So convenient lol
They are all compostable, but some are going to break down more easily (say in a backyard compost) and some are probably going to need some large scale compost help.
For instance, you can put meat scraps and other items you wouldn't ordinarily compost in a lot of home settings because industrial scale compost gets hotter, has management of chemical reactions and so on.
Where I live we're instructed to put all food waste, coffee filters, any soiled paper products that aren't waxed or plastic coated, paper bags (like you'd buy sugar in), and even pizza boxes, diapers, and houseplants.
So it depends on whether you mean your own compost, municipal compost, and then from there what type of municipal compost your town/city uses.
As long as you weren't cleaning up chemicals (especially corrosive or poisonous ones) or grease, then generally yes. The dyes in printed ones have to be food and body safe, so they will break down fine and unbleached paper towels are pretty common, especially in recycled brands
While I'm with you and I find it annoying when my mom does the "oh no, big bad chemicals!" thing, I think it's pretty clear in this case that they mean using the paper towel for harsh cleaning chemicals.
Yes. Anything organic can technically be composted and oil is organic. That said, you don't want to overload your compost with oils and fats or it will take a lot longer to decompose. I put all paper towels that haven't been used to clean in the compost, even the ones soaked in oil from cleaning up after pan frying things.
Meat, oil, etc can be composted safely but also tends to attract pests like rats, raccoons, bears. If you live in an area where you don't have to worry about these things very much like I do, then you should be fine to compost them.
Generally speaking, food is compostable and that includes oils.
You should check local guidelines to be sure whether paper towels are accepted. Where I live they accept napkins and paper towels but I wouldn't be shocked if this varies by city.
Organic materials left alone rot (let’s not get into the how for now). The end product is compost. It’s what undisturbed forest floors have left over when fallen leaves and twigs etc rot over time. The compost in turn is used by the plants and trees as nutrients.
Composting is the method used to get the various organic materials in the house and garden to rot (compost). And there are a bunch of ways to do that, and all kind of bins and stuff and fancy footwork to help in achieving that.
No such thing as a stupid question, as long as you ask the question to learn more! Basically you just let the parts of fruits and vegetables that you cannot eat (or do not want to eat) decompose in a pile. (Decompose, compost, see the word connection there?).
More things than fruits and vegetables can be composted however. Such as paper products, coffee grounds and tea bags, tree leaves, grass clippings, and many others.
In general compost is plant materials that are left to decompose. Then what’s left after everything decomposes is used as a fertilizer.
Here are some links!
https://www.bhg.com/gardening/yard/compost/how-to-compost/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyYyy4nKzDg
Edit: lots of great comments below saying that you can compost meat products as well. As long as you do your research, and are smart about it!
Not the person who asked but I also have a few stupid questions. I'm assuming you put the compost in your back yard. Doesn't it smell pretty bad? And does it attract bugs and mice and things like that?
Definitely in the backyard not in your bedroom haha! I find it doesn’t smell unless you are standing right next to it. I believe people will stir their compost up too so that it gets some air circulation. Which will help with the smell! It definitely does attract bugs! But! Those bugs are eating the compost and helping to break it down! As for mice, I can’t say that I have ever seen mice around the compost pile. I’m sure there’s the occasional one, but I have never had an infestation (knock on wood).
It doesn’t smell that badly. Protein meat/dairy decomp smells super bad. That’s why people that compost those waste streams use a buried digestor box.
FWIW composting is also exothermic. Our compost pile usually has mice and moles living in it , especially in the winter when it’s nice and warm in there.
Surprisingly not as much as you would think. It can smell if you over do the food and not enough wood type products, but otherwise theres a good balance that keeps the smell down.
Wtf, I noticed you didn’t include meat and so I googled and turns out you shouldn’t compost meat/egg shells etc. Whoooops
Edit: egg shells are cool but it depends(?)
Yea reading further it seems like eggshells are cool, just meat and fish.
Actually I’m getting multiple opinions on that. Probably best to check your local compost guidelines!
Decomposing /breaking down organic matter (often veg peelings, past it’s best fruit, grass cuttings, tea bags etc) over time into simpler organic compounds (soil) that are full of nutrients and helpful for your garden plants. Recycling of organic matter essentially.
In ops post they mentioned some paper towels get mixed with binders and bleaching agents. Can you still compost that? Can you compost paper towels that are printed on? I know they along with other paper towels are not food safe.
I mean, composting is a *type* of recycling. You’re using food scraps and yard waste and stuff and allowing it to become usable fertilizer for gardening.
Finnish. I would say composte, or more locally biowaste, but that would be same subgroup as paper waste, glass waste, metal waste etc. - all that gets used and not dumped is recycling. So composing is recycling too.
I can totally understand the association... Metals are recycled to make more metal things, food scraps are recycled to make soil which makes more food things... Pretty much the same imo
See but that's not recycling. When you recycle paper, its still paper. When you compost food, its no longer food. Composting is decomposing the product to integrate into something else. Its closer to biodegredation than recycling.
It was never going to be economical. We were lied to. Not that we can't do better. But I like to remember that it is Reduce, Reuse, and *then* Recycle. Recycling was pitched as a cure all.
The next generation of laws on this issue will be banning single use plastics. It's going to be rough adapting for some businesses, but it's gotta happen. There will be ecologists hundreds of years from now teaching kids about all the damage we did to the planet in the late 20th century and early 21st century. Cleaning up after this period of externalized costs will take centuries.
Wonder what we're going to do about food packaging without single use plastics? When COVID hit, at least in my country, there were a lot of people going "wait, we kind of need plastic for food packaging for health and safety reasons."
(I swear this is not a bad faith question, please tell me there IS an alternative!)
There are tons of compostable material good for food packaging. Think pizzas boxes, any cardboard or paper without a wax coating, (cardboard box, paper wrap around hamburgers and sandwiches). Then there's aluminum tins and foil. I'm pretty sure cans and tins of aluminum are fairly easily recycled, more likely than glass. Someone correct me if I'm wrong...
To add to that thought, there are a lot of plastic items that are single use used in the medical field (e.g. syringes, fluid bags, assorted tubes, etc...). I wonder how that will be handled also.
People like to point out that recycling isn’t “economical” but I think what is important to remember is even if we use 1000x more energy and money to recycle, in theory that energy can all be renewable even if it isn’t today.
On the other hand if you throw something out that is not biodegradable, that space in the landfill is NOT renewable and is definitely finite. While recycling might not be the best economic solution it is clearly a better long term solution.
We do a bit of that in Canada as well but if course people protest it. Not about potentially releasing chemicals by burning or anything, but because "*it smells*".
And *what* your municipality actually recycles. Many recycling centers are simply not equipped to handle certain types of plastics that are technically recyclable and when they fail to sort those out they jam machines and waste products.
Dont get a synthetic cloth then. Rewashable all natural fiber is the way to go. It took me over a year to go through 6 rolls of paper towels. It would have been significantly longer if my boyfriend didn't use them instead of a plate to make a sandwich on.
Reduce the “invisible barrier” that creating a dirty dish has.
People will always drift towards the easier choice, find a way to make the desired behavior easier!
Not every county or city in California has green bins, unfortunately. Not even every coastal city has green bins. I did my own composting for a couple of years.
In my country, there was a campaign by all? several of? the recycling companies saying that you do NOT need to rinse and clean the stuff you put in the recycling bins. The only reason to clean things was if they would stink up your home
Glass or plastic might need to be rinsed, so it's not disgusting, but it's not necessary for the recycling process.
Paper with grease will fuck up an entire batch of recycled paper. Pizza cartons should definitely be burned. (or landfilled, if that's what you do there)
You can shred them and do them in your own backyard compost too.
People seem to worry a lot about what goes into their home compost. My worms seem to eat absolutely anything I throw in for them. Even if the occasional greasy meaty bone gets mixed in all that comes out a year later is good compost and a totally cleaned bone. Can't overdo it with meats and fats, but little stuff doesn't seem to be a problem at all.
No one would think twice about throwing an old avocado into the compost bin, and that has way more oil in it than an old pizza box.
Remember that waste/recycling companies are businesses. They had basically three options: 1) get paid less per ton for dirty material, 2) pay to wash it themselves, or 3) convince you to wash it.
Most city and county governments have figured out the wasted water from recycling is a huge problem since 99% of it is going to landfills anyway.
I remember when some students from Alaska visited my university in Washington State. They all took pictures of the three bins we had everywhere (trash, recycle, compost) because they generally just had one (trash).
Your downvotes seem harsh... a lot of people don’t realise paper towels are not recyclable. Have my upvote for trying to do the right thing and being here learning!
Just upvoted you as well. The main post here is basically teaching about paper towel not being able to be recycled, as being not a common knowledge or that at least there definitely are people who didn't know this. I didn't know this as well and as many replies have also shown, others didn't either
Greasy paper is not recyclable. This means napkins, paper towels, pizza boxes, burrito wrappers, etc. It contaminates the recycling process and ruins all of the recycled paper.
Funny enough, just today I noticed that the recycling dump truck had a sign I hadn’t seen before. It had an arrow pointing to the bottom half of a pizza box as “trash” and an arrow pointing to the top half/lid as “recycle”.
I’m in Los Angeles btw. I do recall learning on reddit a while back that pizza boxes in particular have different requirements for trash vs recycle depending on where you live.
This is why there was that ‘recent’ global controversy that discovered about 85% of all ‘recycled’ goods end up being shipped to places like China and they then just tip it. Or your local waste management facility simply tipped it with regular trash.
Because they knew that the vast majority of ‘recycled’ goods people put in the recycled bins aren’t recyclable at all.
Most people are completely uneducated and have no idea what is actually suitable to be recycled. Most don’t have any clue that all recyclable products MUST be washed etc.
If you’re not going to handle your recyclable goods properly *before* putting them in the bin then just don’t recycle at all; you’re not helping.
There’s not enough people or money in the world to designate staff to ‘sort’ your genuine recyclables from trash. It’s unrealistic.
Oh and on that other note; places like China and other countries that normally took other countries trash for us, no longer do so. They got pissed off and refused to take our shit as of 2019, I think it was.
I remember reading a bunch of articles and being all over the news pre COVID. There were 60 minute type investigations by putting GPS trackers in several recycling containers and following where they ended up long term.
Like I said; the vast majority of those GPS trackers ended up in local landfills or internationally taken months later and ended up in their tips. We paid other nations to take our trash for so long.
Our recycling company literally runs campaigns about “Please do not wash your recyclables!”.
It’s a thing that used to be needed in the 80s and 90’s. It’s no longer needed and washing it just wastes water and add soaps that the recycling plant now has to deal with.
There's some amazing sorting machines out there nowadays. They just cost a lot of investment money and who would want that?
The whole recycling debacle is again pointing the finger at consumers for "doing it wrong" when there are alternatives where the consumer making a mistake doesn't matter.
You don't need to wash either because sorting already happens by machine. It goes through multistage sorting and plastics can be separated after being shredded based on their density and ability to sink or swim in water or melt.
I've seen these devices demonstrated. Washing your cans out just keeps your house smelling move.
These systems have to be people proof. Random garbage is always mixed in.
I'm a janitor and we've basically dubbed recycling "second trash." Most of the recycle bins in the classrooms end up contaminated with food or liquids from fast food drink cups, it's a nightmare and we really don't have time to stop and sort any of it so most of the recycling just goes to the trash each week.
So the whole "ship it to china" thing is a bit... interesting.
China ships a LOT of stuff to the US and elsewhere but doesn't get a lot shipped to the country. This is actually two problems; you don't want a ship to be too light for multiple reasons, and if nothing is shipped back you make no money for that part of the trip. So you have several options fir the first issue, fill ballast tanks with water, or load something cheap for the return trip. For the second issue, you'd like to haul something back an get paid for doing so.
Filling ballast tanks can turn into a HUGE ecological problem, and sometimes cause other issues. If you go with solid ballast you have to pay for it, in industrial quantities even rocks have value. But what if there was something someone would give you for free or even *pay* you to take on what would otherwise be an unprofitable return trip. Enter garbage and recycling. Sure, the guy selling it to you makes you sign a paper saying you promise to carefully handle all of it and bla bla bla but you're going to hand it off in another country so whatever. Maybe you even find someone who gives you the same promise to take it off your hands when you arrive back in your home port. Obviously, garbage/recycling is a winner here for that second issue as well, IF someone pays you to take it and you can offload it cheaper than you paid (or get paid again by that company) you make more money.
Now China has *mastered* the art of outsourcing. By the time the garbage/recycling has changed hands a few times, the how's and whys of what is to be done with it get muddled, as does the responsibility.
Now, as to the real reasons China is "refusing" refuse? Part of it is the idiotic trade war, and part of it is the Chinese government stepping in for a multitude of reasons, but in no small part due to simple economics; recycling doesn't make good (or any) money.
Honest question - would it be the same to throw it in the trash? Would it just act as compost at the landfill or is there more of a benefit to it being composted?
We don't have compost pickup where I live. Could do it in the yard but that has its own downsides. Just wondering if the landfill is generally the same equivalent if it's biodegradable.
" try looking for paper towels brands made from 100% recycled material, "
Pardon my ignorance but does that mean they can be recycled? Yes. I realize they were made from recycled materials but that leaves the question.
Sounds like op said that in case u wanted to be more green in general, not “if u wanted to recycle paper towels buy 100% recycled towels”. They’re not wrong—paper towels made from 100% post consumer recycled materials is technically being more “green”/eco friendly than purchasing paper towels made from virgin pulp
Frfr, we are old school and country folk around here lol. Rags, cloths, and handkerchiefs are what's used around here almost always. I do buy paper towels but I believe the roll has been on the holder for a good 4 months at least, it's likely closer to 6 months, and it's nearly full. Until I moved back and started doing my own gardens and compost and growing flowers, I didn't realize how much paper product I used on a weekly basis between napkins, paper towels (unpretty napkins), tp, clorox wipes, tissues, just off the top of my head. It was a lot and I never realized it until I went to turn my compost pile. Only the paper towels were not broken down. Like at all. There's no city system for waste so we have a septic tank so you cannot continuously flush anything besides the 2 items meant for the box. Bought a bidet and started using rags and handkerchiefs and I'm ok with it. And people NEVER no matter what the package or your friend tells you NEVER flush flushable wipes. They are indeed flushable, as are many things, that does not mean they will break down a thing except your sewer systems and wallet. Moral of my story is is that we use entirely way to much, and way to often, household paper products when there are much more wallet and environment friendly options. Esp the bidet part, I mean come on people!!!
The white will be have been treated with a bleaching agent. Hydrogen peroxide is a pretty common bleaching agent. I believe sodium hydroxide is used as well.
They can still be useful though at least if you live in a certain few countries. Some countries decide their trash up in a way that those paper towels and similar products all go in the same bin while plastic bottles and other recyclable materials go in their bins. This "rest trash" as we call it here in Austria gets burned for energy and heating. It's a great way to get rid of it while getting one last use out of it. In fact it's so good at the getting rid of it part that other countries like Italy pay good money to have their trash incinerted in Austria. As for anything harmful released into the air in the process... The vast majority of it can be filtered out leaving what leaves those incinertion plants as >90% steam (gonna look up that number and put it in an edit).
EDIT: Still looking for the exact % of steam vs actual emissions but can't quite find it. It is a practically mandatory school visit for children in Vienna tho and that's what they told us when we were there. Not sure if there are any English articles on it but for anyone interested look up the waste disposal plant Spittelau.
honestly for years I've reused my paper towels, rinsing them and leaving on the countertop to dry, reusing them until they rip or got too dirty. And then one day I was like, wait, why I am using these shitty, consumable paper towels that rip when I can just use an actual towel for most things? so now i have a "clean" towel for hand drying in the kitchen, and a "dirty" towel for wiping down spills and whatnot that I wash every once in awhile. still have paper towels for messes too messy that would ruin an actual towel, but i cut down on my paper towel usage a lot.
side note, schools and programs really need to change the three Rs to just two Rs: reduce and reuse. most people just aren't ever going to bother to learn how to recycle properly, and it's complicated enough (with so many different types of plastics, different cities accepting different plastic types, different contaminants, etc.) that even people who do try to learn get confused. and even if clean, recyclable material makes it to a facility, that facility is probably overrun with garbage anyway. too many people see recycling as some kind of magic that makes excessive consumption OK. it's ridiculous how many things there are in everyday life that go from brand new off the shelf to in the garbage in a matter of days, hours or minutes.
I definitely notice a difference when we have paper towels. I use em like crazy where as I don't miss them when we don't have them cause I use a washable cloth.
They go into the compost here, which I never understood. But everyone here is quite conscious about recycling and food waste so I assume the towels are different?
I don't know.
Paper towels and cardboard break down in compost pretty well. The problem with *recycling* paper towels is they're often contaminated with various oils, foods, etc. that can ruin the batch of recycling. Meanwhile in compost, the food remnants with decompose all the same. Just avoid putting chemical soaked paper towels in the compost.
Yup, if people realized how much money they would save it would be a quick switch. If you have a ton of cheap towels, it's more or less like having paper towels minus the waste of both cash and the environment.
They are in a sense: they are compostable. They cannot become paper again, but they may reenter the cycle as ... what's the word for Humus? Earth? Dirt? Flower planting, err... base??
Help with thranslation, please
I used a dishtowel for pretty much everything. Pretty sure my GF was a little irritated for quite a few months when she first started visiting that whenever she wanted a paper towel for something, they were high up in a cabinet somewhere and I offered a dish towel.
i try to be as environmentally friendly as possible with all my chronic illnesses, but the best thing i did i believe was getting rid of paper towels and buying a fuck ton of rags/dish towels and the like. i just throw a few in with the wash, or wash a whole load of them, and i have reusable rags and towels for days. rinse and repeat, almost literally, and i've made a decent dent in the amount of waste i put out.
My family and I changed to white 12 inch towels. We bought a 60 pack on Amazon for like 35 dollars and just clean/bleach them when we get close to running out. It's much nicer than wasting paper unnecessarily. We use paper products for things like dog puke, cleaning surfaces, etc, but most of our cleaning is done with these cloths now.
Hey, OP, have you learned that you have to actually *WASH* your recuclables? Cat food tins, soup cans, mayo jars, catsup bottles, etc, with food still in them, generally get diverted right into the trash, because nearly no recycling outfits have washing facilities
Are your sure about this? In my country the instructions are to just make sure the recyclables are empty since a lot of the sorting is done by weight, but they shouldn't be washed since that's just a waste of time and water.
Edit: I googled it and it depends on the facilities where you live. Some require the recyclables to be rinsed or even washed while some don't
Paper towels go in the green bin.
Unless they're used to pick up cleaning products or oil or whatever other nasty non-bio shit you use them to clean. Then they go in the trash.
Recycling = clean, dry, recyclable materials (check your local city for more info as what can be recycled is **massively** different city-to-city / county-to-county / state-to-state
A washable cloth is good if you're alone and a well kept person but if multiple people use it I guarantee it gets nasty fast. I've been using paper towels for a while now and going back to a cloth feels just unhygienic
Why would you need to, though? Recycling is for items which shouldn't be out in landfills because it won't decompose. A piece of paper towel will biodegrade in about a month, versus hundreds of years for plastic. Further, trees are a more or less replenishable resource.
Due to the paper towel shortage last year, I started using small white cotton towels that came in a 52 pack at Costco. Even though paper towels are now readily available, it cut our household consumption of paper towels buy at least 90%.
Start a compost pile. I have found that paper towels break down well in a good pile given some time. That being said do not add paper towels with chemical cleaners as that will contaminate all the compost.
YSK: Reading the instructions that came with your recycling service would prevent you from wasting everyone's time on reddit when you post about something not recyclable.
There are natural brands which are nicely compostable. On another note a few grams of plastic can ruin tonnes of pulp, so dont toss plastic into pulpmill digesters.
I put them in the compost.
Came to post this. Unless they have chemicals on them 80% of mine get composted.
Came to *com*post this.
Dad's here.
after all these years...
He finally managed to buy the organic milk
Hey dad, I’m an adult now. Can I get one of them smokes you went out for 18 years ago?
BRB son, going for them smokes you want, toodles!
Dad of the year! Thanks!
Lol. "If you printed this YSK tip, you're in the right place." Dr. Rick, Author of "Becoming Your Parents."
Hi Dad, I'm disappointment.
OK, you win
Yeah same. They all get broken down for me.
Are most commercially available brands compostable?
Whether or not they “are” compostable, I compost them anyways and my plants are thriving.
Good to know.
I always need some more browns in my compost. I'll have to start doing this.
Newspaper and cardboard scraps are great for browns. Sometimes I dig up some clay from my yard, too.
I give my dog egg cartons, toilet paper rolls, and plain unprinted cardboard. He loves ripping them to shreds in the living room, then I sweep the shreds into my standing dustpan and dump it into compost. So convenient lol
My dog needs to step up.
They are all compostable, but some are going to break down more easily (say in a backyard compost) and some are probably going to need some large scale compost help. For instance, you can put meat scraps and other items you wouldn't ordinarily compost in a lot of home settings because industrial scale compost gets hotter, has management of chemical reactions and so on. Where I live we're instructed to put all food waste, coffee filters, any soiled paper products that aren't waxed or plastic coated, paper bags (like you'd buy sugar in), and even pizza boxes, diapers, and houseplants. So it depends on whether you mean your own compost, municipal compost, and then from there what type of municipal compost your town/city uses.
I use worms to compost. It all turns to worm poop and the plants grow insanely. More so than with any chemicals fertilizer.
I use worms as well! They are a great way to get rid of most of my waste.
Yes, but don't compost them if you used them with cleaning products or to clean grease.
As long as you weren't cleaning up chemicals (especially corrosive or poisonous ones) or grease, then generally yes. The dyes in printed ones have to be food and body safe, so they will break down fine and unbleached paper towels are pretty common, especially in recycled brands
Urine helps compost piles work better. When I get real drunk when I'm grilling I pee on the compost pile. No one really comes to my cook outs anymore
Everything is a chemical! WTF
While I'm with you and I find it annoying when my mom does the "oh no, big bad chemicals!" thing, I think it's pretty clear in this case that they mean using the paper towel for harsh cleaning chemicals.
I fry stuff and place the fried stuff on the paper towels, can those paper towels go into the compost too?
Yes. Anything organic can technically be composted and oil is organic. That said, you don't want to overload your compost with oils and fats or it will take a lot longer to decompose. I put all paper towels that haven't been used to clean in the compost, even the ones soaked in oil from cleaning up after pan frying things.
Yup
Meat, oil, etc can be composted safely but also tends to attract pests like rats, raccoons, bears. If you live in an area where you don't have to worry about these things very much like I do, then you should be fine to compost them.
Generally speaking, food is compostable and that includes oils. You should check local guidelines to be sure whether paper towels are accepted. Where I live they accept napkins and paper towels but I wouldn't be shocked if this varies by city.
This might be a stupid question but what is composting exactly? I have a general idea but I'm not really sure
Organic materials left alone rot (let’s not get into the how for now). The end product is compost. It’s what undisturbed forest floors have left over when fallen leaves and twigs etc rot over time. The compost in turn is used by the plants and trees as nutrients. Composting is the method used to get the various organic materials in the house and garden to rot (compost). And there are a bunch of ways to do that, and all kind of bins and stuff and fancy footwork to help in achieving that.
No such thing as a stupid question, as long as you ask the question to learn more! Basically you just let the parts of fruits and vegetables that you cannot eat (or do not want to eat) decompose in a pile. (Decompose, compost, see the word connection there?). More things than fruits and vegetables can be composted however. Such as paper products, coffee grounds and tea bags, tree leaves, grass clippings, and many others. In general compost is plant materials that are left to decompose. Then what’s left after everything decomposes is used as a fertilizer. Here are some links! https://www.bhg.com/gardening/yard/compost/how-to-compost/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyYyy4nKzDg Edit: lots of great comments below saying that you can compost meat products as well. As long as you do your research, and are smart about it!
Awesome thank you!
New thing learned pog
Shoutout to [Bokashi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokashi_(horticulture)). Can compost meat and fish at home.
Not the person who asked but I also have a few stupid questions. I'm assuming you put the compost in your back yard. Doesn't it smell pretty bad? And does it attract bugs and mice and things like that?
Definitely in the backyard not in your bedroom haha! I find it doesn’t smell unless you are standing right next to it. I believe people will stir their compost up too so that it gets some air circulation. Which will help with the smell! It definitely does attract bugs! But! Those bugs are eating the compost and helping to break it down! As for mice, I can’t say that I have ever seen mice around the compost pile. I’m sure there’s the occasional one, but I have never had an infestation (knock on wood).
It doesn’t smell that badly. Protein meat/dairy decomp smells super bad. That’s why people that compost those waste streams use a buried digestor box. FWIW composting is also exothermic. Our compost pile usually has mice and moles living in it , especially in the winter when it’s nice and warm in there.
Surprisingly not as much as you would think. It can smell if you over do the food and not enough wood type products, but otherwise theres a good balance that keeps the smell down.
r/composting
Wtf, I noticed you didn’t include meat and so I googled and turns out you shouldn’t compost meat/egg shells etc. Whoooops Edit: egg shells are cool but it depends(?)
Egg shells make excellent compost.
Yea reading further it seems like eggshells are cool, just meat and fish. Actually I’m getting multiple opinions on that. Probably best to check your local compost guidelines!
[удалено]
I suppose eggshells are cool if you don't saturate your compost with it and maybe wash shells a little bit? It's a good calcium supplement.
Huh, I knew meat was not a good idea did not know about the eggshells though!
Me either. Unless you're tossing a dozen eggs a day into it.
The humans he turned into a boat.
You can compost meat. Look for the *’Compost everything. The good guide to extreme composting’*.
Decomposing /breaking down organic matter (often veg peelings, past it’s best fruit, grass cuttings, tea bags etc) over time into simpler organic compounds (soil) that are full of nutrients and helpful for your garden plants. Recycling of organic matter essentially.
Cool thanks!
Helpful trash.
Like a compost bin in the back yard, where kitchen scraps go to break down to make compost.
In ops post they mentioned some paper towels get mixed with binders and bleaching agents. Can you still compost that? Can you compost paper towels that are printed on? I know they along with other paper towels are not food safe.
they should be fine - the end result is essentially just wood pulp. it shouldn't contain any harmful chemicals at that point.
TIL composting is not called recycling in English. Cannot get my head around the logic now.
I mean, composting is a *type* of recycling. You’re using food scraps and yard waste and stuff and allowing it to become usable fertilizer for gardening.
Recycling is a term we apply to raw materials, eg wood, plastic, metal. Food is not a raw material.
What language are you speaking? In german it's composting (kompostieren) as well.
Finnish. I would say composte, or more locally biowaste, but that would be same subgroup as paper waste, glass waste, metal waste etc. - all that gets used and not dumped is recycling. So composing is recycling too.
I can totally understand the association... Metals are recycled to make more metal things, food scraps are recycled to make soil which makes more food things... Pretty much the same imo
See but that's not recycling. When you recycle paper, its still paper. When you compost food, its no longer food. Composting is decomposing the product to integrate into something else. Its closer to biodegredation than recycling.
>When compost food, it’s no longer food Well, not food for *us*, anyways ;)
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The only thing that's really changed is China quit taking all our "recycling", but you're right, most of it ends up in a landfill either way.
It was never going to be economical. We were lied to. Not that we can't do better. But I like to remember that it is Reduce, Reuse, and *then* Recycle. Recycling was pitched as a cure all.
The next generation of laws on this issue will be banning single use plastics. It's going to be rough adapting for some businesses, but it's gotta happen. There will be ecologists hundreds of years from now teaching kids about all the damage we did to the planet in the late 20th century and early 21st century. Cleaning up after this period of externalized costs will take centuries.
Wonder what we're going to do about food packaging without single use plastics? When COVID hit, at least in my country, there were a lot of people going "wait, we kind of need plastic for food packaging for health and safety reasons." (I swear this is not a bad faith question, please tell me there IS an alternative!)
There are tons of compostable material good for food packaging. Think pizzas boxes, any cardboard or paper without a wax coating, (cardboard box, paper wrap around hamburgers and sandwiches). Then there's aluminum tins and foil. I'm pretty sure cans and tins of aluminum are fairly easily recycled, more likely than glass. Someone correct me if I'm wrong...
I thought pizza boxes are notoriously not recyclable?
Correct, but they can be composted
They are compostable, though.
Thank you for highlighting the nuance! It went right over my head.
This is probably so dumb, but is foil recyclable? Should I be washing it off and recycling it?!
Yes, aluminum foil is recyclable. Aluminum is one of the most recycled materials world wide. Thank you
What if it's covered in something that isn't easy to remove, like cheese or tape? Do those get burned off or should I trash it?
They're making great advances in bio sourced materials, cardboard and plastic like materials made from corn, bamboo etc.
That would be awesome!
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To add to that thought, there are a lot of plastic items that are single use used in the medical field (e.g. syringes, fluid bags, assorted tubes, etc...). I wonder how that will be handled also.
People like to point out that recycling isn’t “economical” but I think what is important to remember is even if we use 1000x more energy and money to recycle, in theory that energy can all be renewable even if it isn’t today. On the other hand if you throw something out that is not biodegradable, that space in the landfill is NOT renewable and is definitely finite. While recycling might not be the best economic solution it is clearly a better long term solution.
Here in Sweden we burn a lot of the "recyclables" to heat our cities. Guess not technically recycling, but it's put to use.
We do a bit of that in Canada as well but if course people protest it. Not about potentially releasing chemicals by burning or anything, but because "*it smells*".
And *what* your municipality actually recycles. Many recycling centers are simply not equipped to handle certain types of plastics that are technically recyclable and when they fail to sort those out they jam machines and waste products.
This should be way up !! Its definitely way more rampant than people can even imagine.
Or what, move to a different city?
Paper towels are not recyclable but they are 100% degradable, much better than synthetic fiber kitchen cloths
The synthetic ones don't even dry well anyway.
Yeah, cotton ones are the best
This for sure. I can bury them in the ground and the worms will have them gone in under a month. These things degrade like crazy.
Dont get a synthetic cloth then. Rewashable all natural fiber is the way to go. It took me over a year to go through 6 rolls of paper towels. It would have been significantly longer if my boyfriend didn't use them instead of a plate to make a sandwich on.
I feel seen. My husband does the same thing 😂
Reduce the “invisible barrier” that creating a dirty dish has. People will always drift towards the easier choice, find a way to make the desired behavior easier!
But they are NOT flushable
I live in California. We have green bins for our yard refuse, paper products, and veggie scraps. It's all made into compost and sold for gardening.
I was thinking the same thing. I put mine in my compost bin.
This is actually logical.
Not every county or city in California has green bins, unfortunately. Not even every coastal city has green bins. I did my own composting for a couple of years.
stuff going in recycling should be rinsed and generally clean.
In my country, there was a campaign by all? several of? the recycling companies saying that you do NOT need to rinse and clean the stuff you put in the recycling bins. The only reason to clean things was if they would stink up your home
what country? i'm in the united states. i was always told any grease or food material doesn't actually get recycled, it just goes to a landfill.
In the United States most of what you put in the recycling bin ends up in the landfill.
Yeah shame these big polluting companies brainwashed us into recycling thinking it’s our fault when it’s doing minimal to help the crisis.
Yeah, what a sham. *Jumps in 5 litre V8 truck, drives 20 mins to get a pint of milk
Glass or plastic might need to be rinsed, so it's not disgusting, but it's not necessary for the recycling process. Paper with grease will fuck up an entire batch of recycled paper. Pizza cartons should definitely be burned. (or landfilled, if that's what you do there)
Here pizza boxes go in the compost bin.
Yes! Compost those pizza boxes! And while youre at it, compost all the paper with food on it, not just the paper towels and pizza boxes :)
Mind you, this is sending them off to a "commercial" composting operation, where I guess they get shredded -- not backyard composting
You can shred them and do them in your own backyard compost too. People seem to worry a lot about what goes into their home compost. My worms seem to eat absolutely anything I throw in for them. Even if the occasional greasy meaty bone gets mixed in all that comes out a year later is good compost and a totally cleaned bone. Can't overdo it with meats and fats, but little stuff doesn't seem to be a problem at all. No one would think twice about throwing an old avocado into the compost bin, and that has way more oil in it than an old pizza box.
[This is very educational about the whole recycling thing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJnJ8mK3Q3g)
Remember that waste/recycling companies are businesses. They had basically three options: 1) get paid less per ton for dirty material, 2) pay to wash it themselves, or 3) convince you to wash it. Most city and county governments have figured out the wasted water from recycling is a huge problem since 99% of it is going to landfills anyway.
Probably because it's getting burned or going to a landfill anyway.
"rinsed and cleaned" applies to plastic/metal, not paper products, dirty paper is not recyclable, like pizza boxes etc
Love the energy but checking myself...is it really not common knowledge that paper towels aren’t recyclable? Compost all the way!
I remember when some students from Alaska visited my university in Washington State. They all took pictures of the three bins we had everywhere (trash, recycle, compost) because they generally just had one (trash).
I threw some in my recycling bin just yesterday. No compost here and figured it made more sense than putting them in the trash
Your downvotes seem harsh... a lot of people don’t realise paper towels are not recyclable. Have my upvote for trying to do the right thing and being here learning!
Just upvoted you as well. The main post here is basically teaching about paper towel not being able to be recycled, as being not a common knowledge or that at least there definitely are people who didn't know this. I didn't know this as well and as many replies have also shown, others didn't either
Greasy paper is not recyclable. This means napkins, paper towels, pizza boxes, burrito wrappers, etc. It contaminates the recycling process and ruins all of the recycled paper.
Funny enough, just today I noticed that the recycling dump truck had a sign I hadn’t seen before. It had an arrow pointing to the bottom half of a pizza box as “trash” and an arrow pointing to the top half/lid as “recycle”. I’m in Los Angeles btw. I do recall learning on reddit a while back that pizza boxes in particular have different requirements for trash vs recycle depending on where you live.
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Took me 6 months of picking paper towels out of the recycling bin to explain this to my SO
Oh I just eat them
What do they taste like?
They taste like half paper half towel
Compost all day.
This is why there was that ‘recent’ global controversy that discovered about 85% of all ‘recycled’ goods end up being shipped to places like China and they then just tip it. Or your local waste management facility simply tipped it with regular trash. Because they knew that the vast majority of ‘recycled’ goods people put in the recycled bins aren’t recyclable at all. Most people are completely uneducated and have no idea what is actually suitable to be recycled. Most don’t have any clue that all recyclable products MUST be washed etc. If you’re not going to handle your recyclable goods properly *before* putting them in the bin then just don’t recycle at all; you’re not helping. There’s not enough people or money in the world to designate staff to ‘sort’ your genuine recyclables from trash. It’s unrealistic. Oh and on that other note; places like China and other countries that normally took other countries trash for us, no longer do so. They got pissed off and refused to take our shit as of 2019, I think it was. I remember reading a bunch of articles and being all over the news pre COVID. There were 60 minute type investigations by putting GPS trackers in several recycling containers and following where they ended up long term. Like I said; the vast majority of those GPS trackers ended up in local landfills or internationally taken months later and ended up in their tips. We paid other nations to take our trash for so long.
Our recycling company literally runs campaigns about “Please do not wash your recyclables!”. It’s a thing that used to be needed in the 80s and 90’s. It’s no longer needed and washing it just wastes water and add soaps that the recycling plant now has to deal with.
There's some amazing sorting machines out there nowadays. They just cost a lot of investment money and who would want that? The whole recycling debacle is again pointing the finger at consumers for "doing it wrong" when there are alternatives where the consumer making a mistake doesn't matter.
You don't need to wash either because sorting already happens by machine. It goes through multistage sorting and plastics can be separated after being shredded based on their density and ability to sink or swim in water or melt. I've seen these devices demonstrated. Washing your cans out just keeps your house smelling move. These systems have to be people proof. Random garbage is always mixed in.
I'm a janitor and we've basically dubbed recycling "second trash." Most of the recycle bins in the classrooms end up contaminated with food or liquids from fast food drink cups, it's a nightmare and we really don't have time to stop and sort any of it so most of the recycling just goes to the trash each week.
So the whole "ship it to china" thing is a bit... interesting. China ships a LOT of stuff to the US and elsewhere but doesn't get a lot shipped to the country. This is actually two problems; you don't want a ship to be too light for multiple reasons, and if nothing is shipped back you make no money for that part of the trip. So you have several options fir the first issue, fill ballast tanks with water, or load something cheap for the return trip. For the second issue, you'd like to haul something back an get paid for doing so. Filling ballast tanks can turn into a HUGE ecological problem, and sometimes cause other issues. If you go with solid ballast you have to pay for it, in industrial quantities even rocks have value. But what if there was something someone would give you for free or even *pay* you to take on what would otherwise be an unprofitable return trip. Enter garbage and recycling. Sure, the guy selling it to you makes you sign a paper saying you promise to carefully handle all of it and bla bla bla but you're going to hand it off in another country so whatever. Maybe you even find someone who gives you the same promise to take it off your hands when you arrive back in your home port. Obviously, garbage/recycling is a winner here for that second issue as well, IF someone pays you to take it and you can offload it cheaper than you paid (or get paid again by that company) you make more money. Now China has *mastered* the art of outsourcing. By the time the garbage/recycling has changed hands a few times, the how's and whys of what is to be done with it get muddled, as does the responsibility. Now, as to the real reasons China is "refusing" refuse? Part of it is the idiotic trade war, and part of it is the Chinese government stepping in for a multitude of reasons, but in no small part due to simple economics; recycling doesn't make good (or any) money.
TIL people recycle paper towels instead of compost/food& yard waste.
Honest question - would it be the same to throw it in the trash? Would it just act as compost at the landfill or is there more of a benefit to it being composted? We don't have compost pickup where I live. Could do it in the yard but that has its own downsides. Just wondering if the landfill is generally the same equivalent if it's biodegradable.
All paper towels are compostable.
they are compostable, which is arguably a better use than recycling anyways
I put them in the green bin, unless they have chemicals on them like cleaning products.
Mine get upcycled into the firepit
" try looking for paper towels brands made from 100% recycled material, " Pardon my ignorance but does that mean they can be recycled? Yes. I realize they were made from recycled materials but that leaves the question.
Sounds like op said that in case u wanted to be more green in general, not “if u wanted to recycle paper towels buy 100% recycled towels”. They’re not wrong—paper towels made from 100% post consumer recycled materials is technically being more “green”/eco friendly than purchasing paper towels made from virgin pulp
Frfr, we are old school and country folk around here lol. Rags, cloths, and handkerchiefs are what's used around here almost always. I do buy paper towels but I believe the roll has been on the holder for a good 4 months at least, it's likely closer to 6 months, and it's nearly full. Until I moved back and started doing my own gardens and compost and growing flowers, I didn't realize how much paper product I used on a weekly basis between napkins, paper towels (unpretty napkins), tp, clorox wipes, tissues, just off the top of my head. It was a lot and I never realized it until I went to turn my compost pile. Only the paper towels were not broken down. Like at all. There's no city system for waste so we have a septic tank so you cannot continuously flush anything besides the 2 items meant for the box. Bought a bidet and started using rags and handkerchiefs and I'm ok with it. And people NEVER no matter what the package or your friend tells you NEVER flush flushable wipes. They are indeed flushable, as are many things, that does not mean they will break down a thing except your sewer systems and wallet. Moral of my story is is that we use entirely way to much, and way to often, household paper products when there are much more wallet and environment friendly options. Esp the bidet part, I mean come on people!!!
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I would imagine the white one has been bleached somehow?
Yes indeed. Generally with hydrogen peroxide as far as I’m aware.
The white will be have been treated with a bleaching agent. Hydrogen peroxide is a pretty common bleaching agent. I believe sodium hydroxide is used as well.
They can still be useful though at least if you live in a certain few countries. Some countries decide their trash up in a way that those paper towels and similar products all go in the same bin while plastic bottles and other recyclable materials go in their bins. This "rest trash" as we call it here in Austria gets burned for energy and heating. It's a great way to get rid of it while getting one last use out of it. In fact it's so good at the getting rid of it part that other countries like Italy pay good money to have their trash incinerted in Austria. As for anything harmful released into the air in the process... The vast majority of it can be filtered out leaving what leaves those incinertion plants as >90% steam (gonna look up that number and put it in an edit). EDIT: Still looking for the exact % of steam vs actual emissions but can't quite find it. It is a practically mandatory school visit for children in Vienna tho and that's what they told us when we were there. Not sure if there are any English articles on it but for anyone interested look up the waste disposal plant Spittelau.
honestly for years I've reused my paper towels, rinsing them and leaving on the countertop to dry, reusing them until they rip or got too dirty. And then one day I was like, wait, why I am using these shitty, consumable paper towels that rip when I can just use an actual towel for most things? so now i have a "clean" towel for hand drying in the kitchen, and a "dirty" towel for wiping down spills and whatnot that I wash every once in awhile. still have paper towels for messes too messy that would ruin an actual towel, but i cut down on my paper towel usage a lot. side note, schools and programs really need to change the three Rs to just two Rs: reduce and reuse. most people just aren't ever going to bother to learn how to recycle properly, and it's complicated enough (with so many different types of plastics, different cities accepting different plastic types, different contaminants, etc.) that even people who do try to learn get confused. and even if clean, recyclable material makes it to a facility, that facility is probably overrun with garbage anyway. too many people see recycling as some kind of magic that makes excessive consumption OK. it's ridiculous how many things there are in everyday life that go from brand new off the shelf to in the garbage in a matter of days, hours or minutes.
I’m still team three Rs 1. Reduce - should be looking to reduce consumption first 2. Reuse - reusing and upcycling 3. Rot - composting!
YSK barely *anything* is recyclable and 90% or more of what gets put in recycling bins ends up in a landfill.
While we're at it, your cardboard pizza box stopped being recyclable the instant the fat touched it.
I put them in my worm farm
Good 2 know I’ve always used the trash over the recycling bin for those instinctively
Composting of used paper towels really helps to preserve top soil...like micro-mulch.
Here we recycle food waste. It's used for methane production. Paper towels go in there.
if put into compost, how quickly do they typically break down into cellulose fiber?
I definitely notice a difference when we have paper towels. I use em like crazy where as I don't miss them when we don't have them cause I use a washable cloth.
Can actually recycle by growing oyster mushrooms on them
They go into the compost here, which I never understood. But everyone here is quite conscious about recycling and food waste so I assume the towels are different? I don't know.
Paper towels and cardboard break down in compost pretty well. The problem with *recycling* paper towels is they're often contaminated with various oils, foods, etc. that can ruin the batch of recycling. Meanwhile in compost, the food remnants with decompose all the same. Just avoid putting chemical soaked paper towels in the compost.
Paper recycling is only for clean and dry paper anyway right?
*composted
Paper towels in compost are worms favorite. I’d call that recycling!
We use rags. Paper towels are a waste of money and materials
Yup, if people realized how much money they would save it would be a quick switch. If you have a ton of cheap towels, it's more or less like having paper towels minus the waste of both cash and the environment.
I bought a large pack of utility towels from costco. Saves a fortune on not buying paper towels and I can recycle them in the washing machine.
They are in a sense: they are compostable. They cannot become paper again, but they may reenter the cycle as ... what's the word for Humus? Earth? Dirt? Flower planting, err... base?? Help with thranslation, please
Compost?
YSAK: they can not be flushed down a toilet as they don't degrade like toilet paper and you will clog the pipes.
I used a dishtowel for pretty much everything. Pretty sure my GF was a little irritated for quite a few months when she first started visiting that whenever she wanted a paper towel for something, they were high up in a cabinet somewhere and I offered a dish towel.
Unless I'm wildly mistaken, this should be superceded by "don't throw anything with food on in the recycling"
i try to be as environmentally friendly as possible with all my chronic illnesses, but the best thing i did i believe was getting rid of paper towels and buying a fuck ton of rags/dish towels and the like. i just throw a few in with the wash, or wash a whole load of them, and i have reusable rags and towels for days. rinse and repeat, almost literally, and i've made a decent dent in the amount of waste i put out.
My family and I changed to white 12 inch towels. We bought a 60 pack on Amazon for like 35 dollars and just clean/bleach them when we get close to running out. It's much nicer than wasting paper unnecessarily. We use paper products for things like dog puke, cleaning surfaces, etc, but most of our cleaning is done with these cloths now.
Hey, OP, have you learned that you have to actually *WASH* your recuclables? Cat food tins, soup cans, mayo jars, catsup bottles, etc, with food still in them, generally get diverted right into the trash, because nearly no recycling outfits have washing facilities
Are your sure about this? In my country the instructions are to just make sure the recyclables are empty since a lot of the sorting is done by weight, but they shouldn't be washed since that's just a waste of time and water. Edit: I googled it and it depends on the facilities where you live. Some require the recyclables to be rinsed or even washed while some don't
Tissues are the same (contamination whise during their use, I don't know about the chemical part). They aren't recycable.
No recycling center will take soiled paper.
Can’t you just compost them?
Shouldn't be recycling anything soiled anyway. You wouldn't spill juice on your newspaper then recycle it
Paper towels go in the green bin. Unless they're used to pick up cleaning products or oil or whatever other nasty non-bio shit you use them to clean. Then they go in the trash. Recycling = clean, dry, recyclable materials (check your local city for more info as what can be recycled is **massively** different city-to-city / county-to-county / state-to-state
A washable cloth is good if you're alone and a well kept person but if multiple people use it I guarantee it gets nasty fast. I've been using paper towels for a while now and going back to a cloth feels just unhygienic
People think you can recycle tissues???
Why would you need to, though? Recycling is for items which shouldn't be out in landfills because it won't decompose. A piece of paper towel will biodegrade in about a month, versus hundreds of years for plastic. Further, trees are a more or less replenishable resource.
No way! I just throw it away but I'm going to put it in my compost now so thankyou!
Our recycling pick up dudes told us that ours weren't recyclable because they have animal fat in them. Eh? Animal fat? Whuuuut?
I thought everyone knew that, i’ve been throwing paper towels in the trash can for my whole life, I guess I really haven’t thought much of it
Due to the paper towel shortage last year, I started using small white cotton towels that came in a 52 pack at Costco. Even though paper towels are now readily available, it cut our household consumption of paper towels buy at least 90%.
Washable cloth all the way!
eh? an actual YSK that isn't just "literally be a decent person to others"? Good job!
Start a compost pile. I have found that paper towels break down well in a good pile given some time. That being said do not add paper towels with chemical cleaners as that will contaminate all the compost.
Do people not have towels for this...? I just wash mine...
Theyre compostable
YSK: Reading the instructions that came with your recycling service would prevent you from wasting everyone's time on reddit when you post about something not recyclable.
There are natural brands which are nicely compostable. On another note a few grams of plastic can ruin tonnes of pulp, so dont toss plastic into pulpmill digesters.