What do you do about maggots in your green bin

This is a question I’ve been getting a ton lately.

With both New York and California having recently introduced organics recycling mandates, a lot of city-dwellers are suddenly having to deal with their waste a little more head on. They’re being asked to separate food scraps, load them in a special bin, and leave that bin at the curb—sometimes for a week at a time.

The result?

If you know about compost, it’s exactly what you’d expect. Maggots. Like, I’m talking a ton of maggots. (People are sending me photos of their green bins that I refuse to include here, for fear of decimating my subscriber count.)

Maggots proliferate in moist, dark environments where they have access to a steady food supply, so as you can probably imagine—they’re loving our green bins. This is leaving folks desperate, grossed out, and confused. They think the maggots are a sign that things are going “wrong.” They want a fix and they want it now. For those with that view, I have some bad news:

The maggots are fine.

Maggots are meant to show up where food waste is rotting. They make stuff break down faster, which—under the circumstances—could even be viewed as helpful. When people come to me seeking to eliminate maggots from their green bin, my honest advice is to get over it versus get rid of them. In my view, learning to collaborate with maggots is a very small price to pay in service of the broader view, which is us taking structural responsibility for the reality of our own waste. Anything we do that moves us away from “landfills” (ugly, unsustainable, polluting) and toward “regeneration,” right now, is an extraordinary necessity.

However, I’m also aware that a big part of compost work is treading the line between “what is the good thing” and “what is the thing people are willing to put up with.” Not everybody is ready for maggots in their green bin. If you are one of those people, your best bet is to avoid inadvertently creating the ideal conditions for their rampant expansion, which means making sure that your bin isn’t always composed entirely of food waste.

Mix in yard waste. Mix in saw dust or wood chips, even if you have to purchase them. Find any high carbon material and make sure that you’re blending it with your food scraps. Keep an eye on overall moisture. Maggots love dampness. You could also try deliberately adding the type of food waste that insects don’t love, like coffee grounds and citrus peels. (Personally, I know that I definitely drink enough coffee to utilize in this way.)

You could consider purchasing lime from a garden store and adding a handful to the green bin in order to raise the overall pH of its contents, but this may also increase the level of odorous gas released by your food scraps as they break down. Life is full of complicated trade-offs!

Some folks I know have taken to freezing their food scraps until collection day. They only bin their food waste on the same day that they put the bin to the curb, ensuring quick emptying and removal. There simply isn’t time for insects to lay eggs or maggots to develop. Others recommend rinsing and drying out your green bin between uses. These both seem like tidy solutions to me.

Wrapping your food scraps in some way—whether that’s with newspaper or inside compostable bags—is recommended by the city. So is “rinsing your bin with a mixture of hot water and vinegar.” Some municipalities recommend bleach. I’m iffy on bleach for these purposes, but it’s really up to whomever owns the green bin. Who am I to judge.

This Quora thread had some interesting tips, like boiling water and/or baking soda, but none have yet been road-tested by me:

In general, keeping things rinsed and aired out and frequently changed-over will help deter the extended habituation of maggots. You can carefully choose and balance your inputs, keep the lid tightly sealed, wash and dry the bin every week… but….

…nothing, and I mean nothing, is ever going to be cheaper and easier than just learning not to care. So, in conclusion, from my (love him) absolutely insane (I swear, I love him) friend Adam:

Have you had maggots in your green bin? Leave me a comment and let me know how you’ve handled it (or not), would love to hear from folks.

Love,

Cass