h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Alternatively you could buy a chicken. These do not require electricity, they do produce eggs and they aren't blocked by celery.

It sounds as if the waste disposal unit is a mechanism for turning useful recyclable kitchen scraps into waste by the application of electricity.

It is

As for keeping a chicken... that would be a violation of my lease, and I suspect would be impractical for almost everyone who lives in an urban environment. It certainly would have been impossible for me when I lived in a bedsit.

I do however have friends living in more rural surroundings who keep chickens and feed them their scraps.

Hi Gosho,
Does all this ground up food just go down into the sewerage system? If so you must have the worlds biggest & fattest rats, no wonder you have stories about alligators in the sewers of New York. Why don't you use dustbins or don't you have refuse collection in the US?
Regards, Mike.

Hi Gosho,
Does all this ground up food just go down into the sewerage system? If so you must have the worlds biggest & fattest rats, no wonder you have stories about alligators in the sewers of New York. Why don't you use dustbins or don't you have refuse collection in the US?
Regards, Mike.

I've often wondered the same thing myself concerning the nutritional value of this waste. I can only assume that whatever proportion of it gets through to the sewage works helps to make the resulting sludge into extremely good fertiliser.

Of course there is a waste collection service - Americans could hardly put all their rubbish down the sink. A waste disposal couldn't deal with, for instance, a worn-out of blue jeans or an empty milk carton.

If the jeans fit down the waste disposal though, you'd just do it. Years ago people used to tour the neighbourhood collecting rags for recycling. The fibres in natural textiles are useful in paper making as an example.
The plasticised cardboard tube for holding milk should never have been made in the first place.

Yes, I remember those. There were at least two rag and bone men who used to come down our street when I was a kid, both on horse-drawn carts. They'd take almost anything. One doesn't see them these days - a pity.

I've occasionally seen a couple of blokes in a flat-bed Transit driving up and down, but they only seem to want scrap metal. Some of the local council recycling centres I've been to will take old worn-out clothes though, and I know that there's a good trade in cutting them up and selling them for use as wiping rags.

Hi Gosho, I think the sylicon based lifeform hit the nail on the head when he said "natural fibres", most modern clothing has some man-made fibres in them which makes them useless to the linen paper industry.
Regards, Mike.

But not to the wiping rag industry - there's a brisk trade in taking old clothes, sheets, etc and cutting them for sale to mechanics, printing companies, or any type of business which needs rags for their employees to wipe their hands on.

If you put the stuff you'd grind into the garbage (and you can't recycle it in your garden, and happen not to have any chickens) then it goes to a landfill, where it stays: forever!, or gets dumped into the ocean, where it helps poison things along with the garbage.

If you grind it, it gets treated and eaten-by-microbes at the sewage plant, so as an option, it is a much less harmful to the environment.

Besides, sewers are where the alligators are *supposed* to be.