Just because Rome wasn’t built in a day, doesn’t mean you don’t have it in you to accomplish enormous home improvement feats. Your perpetually smelly kitchen garbage can actually be cured! Follow these simple steps and say goodbye to your trash can blues.
Divide and Conquer
One of the main reasons kitchen garbage stinks is because there’s no cleaning and sorting system in place. Empty milk cartons and tuna cans should be rinsed and recycled, and kitchen scraps like egg shells and seafood should be composted right away. Consequently, things that can’t be recycled like dry cereal packaging won’t smell if they’re on their own.
Around the Clock
If you live in a condo or apartment building, keeping garbage, compost and recycling out of sight is easy with handy disposal chutes. Home dwellers, however, are at the mercy of weekly curbside pick up. To keep your kitchen’s waste collection odour free, sort it into the corresponding outdoor containers every few days.
Healthy Hacks
If you Google ‘odour absorber images’, one of the top pictures that shows up is a box of baking soda. This all-natural, time-tested workhorse is mostly associated with keeping fridges smelling fresh. But it can do double-duty! Sprinkle some into each new garbage bag you put out, or stand a whole open box of baking soda in the bottom of your garbage bin. Alternate things you can drop into each new garbage bag are a sprinkle of cocoa or a cotton ball dabbed with your favourite essential oils or vanilla extract.
Rethink, Reuse, Recycle
Another simple step to minimizing garbage odour is to minimize the amount of non-compostable, non-recyclable, actual garbage we produce. Single-use plastic bags for produce get slimy and smelly; styrofoam trays and plastic wrap for meat and seafood are messy and stinky; and many containers for dairy products and cheese can’t be recycled. Rethinking where we shop, and how those shops package up our food will go a long way to keeping our kitchen garbage fresh and clean.
Photo by Jakub Kapusnak
