If you have a wooded area near you, wild animals would enjoy those scraps, especially when it's -9 and sunny.

We compost as much as we can and meat scraps and bones are taken out to the edge of our property which is pretty far from the house and left there for the animals and the birds to scavenge. It's about 1/4 mile away.

Socks, for me, trash is dry stuff; garbage is wet or damp stuff. Let's not get into a long discussion about garbage disposals; we've had those over and over. Like you when I have garbage I freeze it until trash pickup day. Then I wrap in newspapers or use empty cereal boxes or glass jars, etc. Here trash and garbage all goes into the same large can which is put out and picked up twice a week. Composting is great but not in my circumstances.
Sue

Yikes! Our town has enough trouble with rats without anyone feeding them. We also have coyotes and the odd bobcat. Rat control in our ravines is a constant struggle.

Our town has separate pickups: Twice a week for garbage (which I consider excessive outside of a tropical climate); once a week for recycling.

We put our little can of garbage out once a week; could do it once a month in winter. The recycling bin is four or five times as big and it goes out alternate weeks.

We use 13 gallon tie bags (from Costco) to line our under-sink can, and take it out when full. The outside can has a very secure lid, no trouble with animals getting into it. Trash pickup is weekly, with a separate can for recyclables. I only use the disposal for soupy stuff. Even tho we live in the country, I cannot imagine putting garbage out around the property.

Chisue, it was actually your garbage disposal discussion which made me think there is some clever way to put bones, etc. into the trash without it being so messy. I guess I'm on the right track bundling it up, freezing, and putting out on trash day.

I would not put scraps out for animals. I feel sorry for them as wildlife stuck in the suburbs, but they are problematic and I don't want to attract them.

I compost vegetable scraps. If I eat chicken, it's usually skinless/boneless breasts. I trim the fat and cook it, along with whatever chicken meat gets cut off with it, and freeze it for the dogs at the animal shelter. I do the same with cooked egg yolks. Makes a nice "homestyle" treat in their dinners.

I have a 4-can garbage service that I share with my son. Only one service is available in our rural area, and they do not deal with recycling. Therefore, every few weeks or so I drive all my recycling, and my son's family's, to a recycling center about 30 miles away. It's not far from some stores I like, so it isn't *that* much of a nuisance. But I wish I could put it out by the road in a recycling bin.

It bothers me that recycling isn't more convenient for more people. I guarantee that most of the residents in my area do not load up their cars with recycling and make the trip. Instead, they're filling up the landfills with plastic and everything else. Makes me mad. Recycling is important, and I don't know why garbage services aren't mandated to handle it.

Our garbage is sorted into separate containers so that newspapers get their own bag, cardboard get their own bag, tin cans/plastics get their own containers, general garbage gets its own container and then compostable items get put into grass clippings containers and are picked up separately.

We put the compostable items into a special paper bag and then just put it into our second fridge and then put it out the day of pick up. Because of bears, raccoons and coyotes we're not allowed to keep our garbage cans out at all and they can't go out until 7 am on the day of pick up.

Within the next 2-3 years garbage disposals will not be allowed in new construction.

The number of rules we have wrt to garbage disposal is ever growing..

Starting March 1 if they can prove that more than 50% (I think that's the number) is compostable items we will be fined. Not sure how they'll track that but I guess we'll find out.

The food doesn't attract the wild animals, they are already there, living in the wooded area, feeding on prey. My denying them won't starve them out.

If I have a carcass or bones a'plenty, they go for a ride with DH. He's in the woods (and I don't mean at the edge of one's property, I mean well out away from civilization) 4 days a week. He'll leave scraps on a stump, usually it is crows or eagles that fly in to eat. Four footed things don't seem to come out while he's there but I'm sure they do if birds have left anything, coyotes, raccoons etc.

Our garbage man has commented on how nice our can is compared to most. I buy the contractor drum liners at Home Depot and line my garbage can. We have the big 64 gal type on wheels collected weekly.

Recycle is separate pickup and can and rules for recycling items pretty strict. Nothing dirty, juicy, sugary, greasy goes in there and they won't take glass either.....anything glass has to be delivered to the recycling center. Recyle pickup is every other week.

We don't produce enough garbage for weekly pickup (not even close), but I pay that rate anyway, I don't want garbage here any longer than that even in my mild cooler climate. On the other hand, my former elderly neighbor on a limited income opts for the once a month pickup to save money, and she does freeze her garbage, takes it out to her can the night before her scheduled pickup day.

Our town gives a container for recyclables and a container for trash, both are heavy and critter proof (which is good, there seems to be a chronic problem with rats in the area). So I bag my trash and put it in the trash container. I don't find that there is any problem with odors even though my trash is only picked up once a week.

Regular trash is in trash bags and recycling is in plastic bins. The only thing we tape up is broken glass, which is taped up in a box and labeled. They don't offer curbside glass recycling, but the guys appreciate knowing any broken glass is separated from the regular trash.

Our town gives the homeowners 3 trash cans--garden waste, recyclables, and garbage. I used to fill the recyclables all the way up, but not so much any more. We have tall, wheeled cans that the garbage truck arm can pick up automatically once a week, all on the same day, 3 different trucks.

Our service is like Sheilajoyce's except the garden waste is optional,we can place garden waste in the street.

I couldn't live without my disposal. Everything goes down it with the exception of uncooked rice/pasta, large quantities of artichoke leaves or corn husks. A single serving of those is fine. Bones that are apt to splinter (like rib bones and some poultry bones) and jam the disposal are frozen until the evening before garbage pick-up day. Other bones get ground up and flushed away.

I put it down the disposal. If it is something that I can't put there I put it in the freezer until trash day.

I am assuming you mean food stuff. I replied to another thread like this and someone came back with, "you put your trash in the freezer".

Since Woody cleans fish almost every day, I have no problems with him putting the heads, guts and bones out in the woods. Our nearest neighbor is a mile away. Eagles, vultures, foxes, crows, they clean it all up.

Our garbage and sewage companies offer free compost once or twice a year. Otherwise, it is used in parks and on pathways. So grinding up garbage in our disposal gets it recycled too.

We also live in a wooded area and have put bones and freezer burned meats out in the woods. Most of it just goes into a zip lock bag and into the regular trash pickup.

Trash goes into a plastic trash bag, recyclables go in the recycling can, paper goes into a paper grocery bag for recycling and the messiest garbage goes in the garbage disposal. Less messy garbage goes in with the trash. I usually have one bag of trash per week.

Compost goes to the garden, recyclables to the mobile bins the county supplies, the rest is bagged up and put in our large bin that we haul to the county garbage dump when it is full.

We also burn some things, like empty mineral bags, personal documents, when needed. Being in the country allows us to do that. It bothers no one but us.

Meat scraps, bones, we feed to the dog and cat.

We recycle what can be recycled (cans, jars, paper, plastic) and put them in our blue bins for pickup. The rest goes into the garbage. We do try to compost most vegetable scraps. The city is thinking of adding yet another bin for pickup just for vegetable scraps. We have the blue bin for recycling, black bin for garbage and may get a green bin for composting. Some weeks, we have so little garbage we don't bring the bin to the back alley for pickup. We wait until they're full.

Yes, Emma, by "garbage" I meant food items. (It didn't occur to me that people would think of all trash as garbage.)

I have waste baskets in every room. I generally pick up once a day, vegetable waste goes in the garden, dry bread to the birds, rest goes in "Mint-X"' big black plastic rodent-proof bags. My town picks up trash twice a week, plus one day a week they have "Single-stream Recycling", which is paper, cardboard, glass and metal. It's been hard this winter due to snow and ice in my yard, driveway, and snowbanks at the streets. (I am in Long Island New York.)

Can you imagine your freezer full of 'trash'.................

I, too, have separate wheeled bins for garbage, recyclables and garden clippings. We usually have only one bag of garbage per week and it's usually not full. I dump the contents from the bathroom trash cans into the kitchen bag before taking it out to the big bin. When I make a bone-in turkey or chicken, I will freeze the bones until garbage pick-up day. I have a tiny freezer, though, so I've been known to double-bag a turkey carcass and drop it into a public trash receptacle.

I have a friend living in San Francisco where they require composting. She threw away the remains of a purchased, prepared salad in her home garbage and was assessed a fine.

Emma, people who say they are putting garbage in the freezer (like me), are referring to kitchen scraps bundled up in newspaper or other packaging and retained in the freezer until trash day. People who live in areas where it does not get very cold have issues with spoilage as food items sit the trash over a few days and begin to smell and attraction to rats and other animals.

We had temps in the 80's last week; under those conditions, it's best to hold food-garbage in the freezer until trash day. We don't have those automated trucks which lift the cans. A man removes the lid and lifts the can, so I try to keep the trash as unstinky as possible.

OK, Emma?

We compost anything of benefit to the garden, including shredded paper, some cardboard. Honestly, not much in the way of food scraps to dispose of. We put recyclables in the blue bin, they'll take stacked cardboard, too. Glass gets delivered to a special receptacle once a month.

The garbage, which is often filled with fish guts and shrimp skins, absolutely gets wrapped in newspaper, and slipped into a plastic bag that stays in the freezer until trash day. We also have one of the large cans that gets picked up by a mechanical arm.

No way can we bury such items.....I'm not crazy about feeding possums, racoons, rats, skunks, or crows.

I wish I could compost again, I have a perfectly good composter but we have problems with skunks around here so everything goes into the garbage and out to the curb. The city even passed a by-law where all our trash has to go into hard sided bins, no plastic bags at the curb to help stop the skunk problem. When they tore some old buildings down along the riverfront the rats started moving up into the neighbourhoods. My neighbour 2 yards over killed 9 rats in one day, the rats got as far as the yard next door. The city rat inspector came in and said there were no burrows in my yard but he said they were next door so he laid bait along the fence line. He said I was fortunate I did not have a pool or a vegetable garden and my composter was dry at the time since I was only putting dryer lint and tea bags in it In the County some areas have green bins with curb side pick up for kitchen waste. I wish we could have that.

When I bury kitchen scraps (no meat of any kind), local wildlife are not interested in digging them up. But once I buried a turkey carcass thinking it would be too "dirty" to be of interest, but that wasn't the case.

I remember reading about the way New York City residents got rid of their garbage during one of the garbage/sanitation worker strikes of several weeks' duration. Mounds of garbage lined the sidewalks everywhere. One suggestion came from someone who in desperation wrapped his wet garbage into a gift box, tied a festive ribbon on it, and left it visible in his apparently unlocked car. Someone always stole it.

NYC still seems to have bags of trash/garbage sitting out on sidewalks.

It's fixed. I'm typing on my computer again!

Growing up in the country, we had a compost pile. Everything went into it including meat scraps. Scraps from cleaning fish were buried in the garden to fertilize the plants. I know we had plenty of wildlife there. Rats, possums, etc., were never a nuisance. That's only a problem I've had living in the city.

I've heard from more than a few vets (friends/fam) that it's not a good idea, and sometimes dangerous, to give human food waste and beef bones to dogs.

I put garbage in the garbage can. I'm somewhat surprised to hear all the other practices. To bury or scatter it anywhere near the house seems a short-sighted practice.

Garbage in a closed "garbage bag" emits no odor.