Waste food

Last week's Southwark News had an item under the heading "Bin strike could mean smelly summer". And we've had concerns expressed about the possibility of less frequent rubbish collections, and that report about a third of food being thrown away.

But whatever food you throw away, if you throw it into a compost bin you don't have to worry about a smelly dustbin. Even the smallest garden can accommodate one of those nice plastic beehives which you can buy at a subsidized price of a few pounds.

On the other hand, composting remains resolutely unpopular. I was brought up to it and have always taken it for granted. But I suspect that for many people there is a quasi religious objection, religious not in the sense of any particular religion's doctrine but in a more primitive sense of taboo, of dirtiness, which may affect people who are fairly rational in other areas of their lives.

There is also the issue of what you can compost. The answer is almost anything: raw food, cooked food, meat, orange peel, teabags, nappies of the right kind, cotton clothes, woollen clothes, feathers from old pillows or duvets and of course all non-woody garden waste. Just bung it all in, and in a year or so you have a dark brown to black material, looking a bit like a mixture of dry coffee grounds and chopped straw, with no smell whatsoever.

Of course the books are full of don'ts, raising fears of rats and heaven knows what else. But the nice plastic beehive has a lid and I guess is pretty well rat proof. We have three and have never seen sign of rat in ten years. The rats will be more interested in the dustbins round the front with fresh supplies weekly of uncomposted waste.

Rats themselves of course are very much on the taboo, dirty side of the line - oddly unlike pigeons, which on any objective assessment are less desirable but which manage to seem "clean" so you can feed them in Trafalgar Square.