Upcycled ice bucket to food scrap container.
Vancouver is aiming to be the world’s “greenest city” by 2020. The tagline “Greenest City 2020” is plastered all over the place, including on our trash cans. We basically have 3 trash cans – a traditional bin, a green bin and a recycling bin (plus a few yellow bags for paper). The traditional bin takes everything you can’t recycle and everything that isn’t food or yard scraps. The food and yard scraps go in the green bin and everything else is recycled. The green bin system is new to me and we don’t have a garbage disposal/garburator, so I’ve had to learn some tricks for disposing of food scraps.
Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson demonstrates the green bin program for the press. Notice the ugly container in his hand.
The city provides you with a small green container to keep in your kitchen and fill with food scraps which you are then supposed to empty into your green bin at the street. The problem is that this small container is ugly, and because it doesn’t seal, the scraps inside attract fruit flies. In order to keep fruit flies out of our kitchen, we have to keep our container on our back patio.
The ugly ice bucket before and our interim food scrap bowl.
Rather than going outside every time we need to scrape away some food scraps, we have a holding container in the kitchen. I hacked it out of an ugly, old ice bucket from Value Village. It seals great and is easy to open and close with one hand.
Our sleek new food scrap container.
With a little paint it looks great. We keep it on the counter by the sink, we have no fruit flies in our kitchen and all our food scraps are going in the green bin.
Soaking in Simple Green over night to get the grime off before painting.
Drying in the sun before painting.
Appliance epoxy spray paint to give it an enamel finish.