This is garbage: One man's quest to cut down trash by composting

I'll admit it: I'm scared of trash.

In 2020, if everything goes according to plan, Saskatoon homeowners will be charged a monthly fee based on the size of their garbage can. At the same time, the city plans to introduce a mandatory composting system, to put a dent in the amount of trash headed to the landfill.

I decided to volunteer my family for two weeks to see if we could cut down on our trash by composting.

I was skeptical.

Day 1: We're going to need a bigger boat

We're a four-person family, with two kids — five and eight years old — and manage to produce garbage in copious volumes.

We recycle like crazy, normally filling our blue bin every two weeks. That's a good thing, considering we normally fill our black garbage bin just as fast.

Still, for some reason, we've never gotten into composting, which means we were starting at square one.

Under the new regime, people will have the option of three garbage bins. The larger it is, the more expensive. 

We aimed to use the medium option. At 64 gallons, it holds about five to six bags. That's roughly two fewer bags than the current system.

I started by reading the current rules on the paid green bin composting system run by the city (which may not be the final rules, but it's what I have to work with).

Here are some of the things you can compost (other than yard waste):

• Fruits and vegetables.
• Bread and noodles.
• Eggs
• Coffee grounds.
• Pizza boxes that are too gross to go into recycling.
• Paper bags.
• Tissue.

Here's what you can't compost:

• Dairy products.
• Cooking oil.
• Meat, seafood and bones.
• Cat litter.
• Gum.
• Paper towels with chemicals on them.
• Q-tips.

I started by using a Tupperware container as our compost 'bin.' It was a little small.

Okay, it was really, really small.

My wife looked at me like I'd suffered a massive head injury.

We upgraded to a garbage can that's a little larger. Much better.

Day 3: What's in the bin?

I, like most people, don't really think about what's going in the trash —​ normally. 

With this challenge, I started to obsess about garbage. I was picking crap out of the garbage can on a regular basis.

I noticed we use a lot of Kleenex. Why do we use so much Kleenex? Nobody's even sick!

And who's been using so many Q-tips? Good lord.

One of the other things I noticed is the catastrophic amount of plastic we go through. It's on bloody everything we buy: bread bags, meat, broccoli.

Composting, obviously, isn't going to get rid of this problem. Neither is recycling, for that matter, after the city removed it from the blue bin program this year.

Plastic is squishy, which is good, considering I'm trying to reduce my garbage volume. But it only squishes so far.

Day 5: Good Lord

When I started this, I thought I was so clever.

"I'm doing this in the middle of December," I thought. "There's nothing happening that would generate a lot of garbage."

That is, except for my child's fifth birthday party.

I'm going to spare you the details of having 12 children rampaging through my house like a horde of Visigoths fuelled by cream soda and youthful optimism. The point is there was a lot of garbage afterward. 

For example, we got a cupcake cake. This is a new cake-based innovation where you take a bunch of cupcakes, cover it in icing and call it a day. It saves on cutting but it does not save on garbage.

I briefly wondered if icing can be composted.

I decided icing can be composted and will fight anyone to the death who disagrees with me.

For another thing, five-year-olds don't tend to eat entire hot dogs. I spent about five minutes scooping half-chewed hot dogs out of buns, because you can recycle buns under the current system but you can't recycle meat.

Day 9: The expert

Feeling desperate, I decided to get some advice from an expert.

Lisa Howse, the compost education co-ordinator at the Saskatchewan Waste Reduction Council, told me around one-third of people in the city currently do some form of composting, while the remaining two-thirds of us don't have much of an excuse.

"It's a very simple process, and it's pretty foolproof as well," she said., "but if you don't have that experience growing up, or if you hadn't had it in your previous households, it can be a little intimidating."

According to Howse, composting programs can seriously knock down the amount of waste generated by a household. According to a 2016 City of Saskatoon study, food waste made up 27 per cent of the garbage headed to the landfill, while yard waste made up 31 per cent.

Worse, organic matter buried in a landfill generates more methane and ammonia than composted food because the lack of air in a landfill means the food can't break down.

Day 13: Did it work?

We managed to fill one-and-a-half black garbage bags with compostable material and four bags of non-recyclable junk. In short, we managed to fulfil our goal of cutting our garbage down enough to fit our trash into the 64-gallon bin.

So, what did I learn? Compost is heavy. And smelly.

I still have no idea why we use so much tissue.

And that composting isn't really that hard ... once you remember what goes in what bin.

If I have one piece of advice, it's this: people will absolutely have to use recycling and composting services religiously to get their garbage down to those new guidelines. Garbage adds up quickly, and without those services, it would be very difficult to reduce waste enough for it to work.