Compost — Blog — Healy Chen

Can't I eat first?

This past Saturday I went to the farmers market at the Ferry Building plaza for lunch. Of the multitudes of food options there, I chose a place serving Korean food. The chicken rice bowl I got came with a compostable spoon. And upon the first scoop into the deliciousness, said spoon snapped right in half. It’s so eco-friendly that I can’t even use it! Right to the compost bin it goes.

I went back to the food tent to get a pair of wooden chopsticks. You certainly can’t beat 5,000 years of Asian culture.

I’m all for saving and preserving this planet. But these compostable eating utensils are pretty horrible. Certain boba drink places actually give you two paper straws, because the first one would disintegrate about halfway through the drink. I guess it’s still worth it to save one plastic straw from the landfills, though I do think there is much room for improvement.

The spoon that broke before I can even use it once was the last straw. Horrible pun intended.

I am however a big fan of compostable bowls and plates. In San Francisco we have to separate our garage, so it’s super easy to dump compostable containers right along with the food scraps. Good news is I’ve yet to encounter one of those where it’s so fragile that it breaks down before you’re finished eating. I guess we have take-out culture to thank for that: the bowl or dish would have to withstand a car ride as well, however lengthy.

But we’ve got to work on those utensils!

Garbage out

Back when I used to live with my parents, I never understood why so many households on our block would come to dump their garbage in our apartment complex’s large communal bins. What’s so inadequate about their own garbage disposal arrangement? Admittedly it’s easier to simply dump it all into a giant bin, but to willingly take a walk outside of your own home to dump garbage is not something I can comprehend. Why not use your own? You’ve certainly paid for it.

Now that I’ve moved out of the house and into a situation where we have the same three bins - compost, recycle, and garbage - that most households have in San Francisco, I finally understand what’s going on. The reason people dump their garbage in our communal bin is because the standard-issue bins are too small to accommodate the trash output of a typical home. The place where I am renting consist of three persons, including me, and our garbage output easily overwhelms the absolutely tiny 16-gallon black bin. Without alternative disposal methods, there is no way we could fit a week’s worth of trash into it.

Luckily, the blue-colored recycling bin is a decent size, though you’re always one large purchase away from having too much cardboard to throw away in one collection. With the ease of shopping on Amazon these days, which household doesn’t have mountains of shipping boxes to throw away on a weekly basis?

No wonder the communal bin at my parents’ apartment is so damn popular.

The one bin we can’t hope to fill up ever during a regular week is the green compost bin. Being the same size as the recycling bin, a household would have to be consuming an absurd amount of food to have that much food-waste to throw out as compost. I guess the great imbalance between the volume of the general garbage bin and the compost and recycling bins is to create an incentive towards being eco-friendly. It certainly works: very few of us are so fortunate to live close to a communal bin where we can toss out the extra load with impunity.