1000 Flowers for the Planet - #586 Ditch the Insinkerator

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #586 Ditch the Insinkerator

I just watched an advert for an insinkerator that told me it was environmentally friendly. Somehow I wasn’t convinced. Keeping food waste out of landfill completely is definitely what we should be aiming for but flushing food waste down into the sewerage system is not the best way of handling the problem. There are better steps we can take for dealing with food waste, the first of which is to dramatically reduce our food waste in the first instance. We do this by eating smaller portions to prevent leftovers and managing leftovers well by storing properly overnight and consuming them the next day. However, this doesn’t deal with things like fruit and vegetable peels or fish and chicken bones, for example. These are food waste items we cannot avoid, but there are better ways of dealing with them. Fruit and veggie scraps are good food for chickens if you have a few of those magnificent creatures in your back yard. The scraps can also go into compost where they become good food for your garden. Bones can be buried in your garden where they will break down and return to the earth as they were meant to.

Shoving your food waste down a hole in your sink is like putting a blindfold on to pretend you’re doing the right thing by not creating landfill, but this food waste is going into the water system where all the nutrients from that very same food waste can create the growth of algae which uses the oxygen in the water and harms marine life. These nutrients should be put to better use.

The only way I’d own an insinkerator is if the waste was crushed up and liquefied, then transferred to a holding tank, which contained the nutrient-rich water that I could then use on my garden – it would be like a type of fertiliser, but all natural – no chemicals.

Until they produce a better solution, ditch the insinkerator.