Please Don’t Put These Things in the Trash Can.
Garbage collection is designed to withstand a lot of abuse, but far from what some people put it through . As magical as they seem, these powerful machines have their limits – and if misused, you can do just as much damage to your plumbing as you would without.
Everyone knows that some things are not suitable for garbage disposal, but it is surprisingly difficult to get a direct answer about what exactly it is. The easiest way to separate things that can and cannot be recycled is to have a basic understanding of how they work. Many people think that trash cans have rotating blades like a blender, but they are actually closer to a flat-burnt coffee grinder. As the engine spins, it pushes food particles into the main disposal chamber through a series of holes around the perimeter, breaking them into tiny particles. From there, the food flows into the sewer pipe and cheerfully continues on its way:
After all, the chute is just a fancy front door to the kitchen sink : whatever you put it in ends up in your pipes, only in much smaller pieces. In order for a piece of food to pass from the chute to the wastewater treatment plant without significant detours along the way, it must be soft enough to pass through the shredding holes, and water-soluble enough not to clog. This applies to most foods you would eat, but as always, there are some notable exceptions.
Non-food products
This should be obvious, but never throw away anything other than food. It is designed to destroy things that are soft enough to chew – not glass, metal, or even paper. The first two are easy enough to avoid, but remember to remove stickers and labels from food or new kitchen gadgets and throw them in the trash. While one or two won’t do much damage, they can build up over the years.
Anything really complicated
Your chute is a powerful sander, but that doesn’t mean it can handle everything you feed it. Truly heavy things – like fruit pits , bones, raw meat, fruit, or nutshells – won’t break at all. Instead, it will just bounce around the room, getting more and more bumps, until you admit defeat and throw it in the trash can or compost where it should be. If it’s too hard to chew, it’s too hard to grind.
Of course, the fact that you can grind something at your disposal does not mean that it should be. Eggshells are a great example of this: most waste eventually breaks down, but it poses a greater danger to your pipes than landfill itself. The shards do not dissolve in water, so over time they tend to build up and even clog your pipes.
Known clogging risks
Therefore, it is extremely important to avoid the contamination of your disposal with potential contaminants. These are the worst offenders:
- Grease and Oil: Never pour large amounts of oil down any drain, even if it has been thrown away. Cooking grease floats on top of the waste water, sticks to the walls of your pipes, and traps particulate matter until it forms a massive plug . Let the cooking oil cool and discard it in the trash can, or strain and reuse.
- Coffee grounds: Where fat floats, coffee grounds sink. Even if they do not get into the accumulated fat deposits, they can accumulate at the bottom of the pipes, eventually completely shutting off the water flow. Throw them away, compost them, or save them to fertilize your garden.
- Anything that can absorb a lot of water: cooked or uncooked rice, bread, pasta, cereals, flour and starch, which are too water-absorbing to pass safely through pipes.
Anything that can get stuck in the pipe is sure to get stuck. When in doubt, consider what happens if you leave this thing in a bowl of water indefinitely. If it dissolves on its own, that’s probably okay; if not, don’t risk it.
Fibrous or viscous substances
Thanks to good old common sense, most people know enough not to throw chicken bones in the trash can, but they may not even think about throwing a stalk of celery. Unfortunately, some fruits and vegetables are so fibrous that their surprisingly strong structures do not always break when discarded. Over time, the fibrous fibers in foods such as celery, corn husks, pineapple, onion and garlic rind, asparagus and artichokes can become tangled, putting unnecessary stress on the engine and shortening engine life.
Too many things
As is often the case when it comes to garbage disposal, the dose creates poison. Even innocuous foods like carrot peels can cause problems if you fill your trash with it and then turn on the engine. Always turn on the tap, serve food slowly, keep the pieces small, and throw away anything that makes you pause or makes a lot of noise.
With that said, the opposite is somewhat true. A tablespoon of frozen bacon fat or a handful of chopped celery won’t spoil your pipes or trash right away, but over time, bad habits will return and bite your ass. Good contact with the garbage disposal – and time to time clean it – and it will take you for years to come.