son's French mama is staying with us for a spell and remarked when i was running the garbage disposal

"we don't have those in France"

I was incredulous - in truth i had never seen one in any of the dozens of middle class houses i had been in over the years but just would not believe that some French have garbage disposals - i mean is this some kind of third-world country or what?

So i said that i thought some French must have garbage disposals and she assured me that not even one French person has a garbage disposal

I'm still not buying that - how prevalent are garbage disposals in France.

(Posting in Europe forum because more French read this than the Lounge)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_disposal

Illegal in most EU member states, including France.

Great post, Cowboy1968.

The Hungarian call it " kitchen pig " !

Didn't know that about France. But ours is just about the least used gadget in the house.

The last few coffee grounds from a cafetiere after most of them have gone into the compost bin - but it's a struggle to think of anything else. The wormery, the dog, tomorrow's lunch or the compost heap gets just about everything we used to chuck down the sink.

Just got a note from our local water utility telling us to not worry about grinding up organic material in the disposal as it actually HELPS the sewage process - said some kind of microbes needed organic matter to work best

so am perplexed by EU ban.

At every Green Fair i always ask the experts: Is it more green to put garbage down disposal or in the trash?

Of course they all say it's best to compost it but i have no yard

and no one has ever been able to say which is more green - disposal or dump?

at the sewage plant they take out the matter and ship it off to farms

in the dump it turns to methane which currently is wasted but could be bottled, etc.

Will have to read Cowboy's Wiki thing better to see why EU bans them in many countries - certainly does waste water and energy and maybe Europeans burn more of their garbage than use landfills?

I'd say they're pretty rare in the UK, and have never used one myself. My local council - Greenwich - likes to think itself very green, and provides me with no less than three types of bin bags for my household waste, including a 'kitchen caddy' with compostable bags to put all my food waste into. They collect food/garden waste and recycable waste (paper/plastic/metals) once a week. Anything else only gets collected once a fortnight, which, let me tell you, when you live in a flat and have nowhere to store rubbish it is a HUGE incentive to recycle.

I once spoke with a city water department engineer who said that the banning of disposals in many parts of the world is based on junk science.


There may have been a reason just after WWII when many parts of Europe had marginal infrastructure, but now it is mainly opposed for non-scientific reasons and by anti-technology Greens.

Wiki's sloppily written, and Cowboy's misunderstood it.

What Wiki says - incorrectly - is "The European Union does not authorize food waste disposals per EN 12056-1, § 4.6".

The EN concerned doesn't ban waste disposal units. It merely fails to provide a European standard for them - for the very good reason than their use is a matter for national legislation.

Common sense, of course, says the only sensible national legislation has to be to leave the matter to local authorities: there are places where the sewage system would make a sensible authority ban them, places where their use ought to be encouraged, and places where it's no damn business of anyone's.

In theory, that's what happens in France, where their use is a matter for Department health authorities. Whether, in practice, that turns into "what's not specifically authorised is banned", as so often on the Continent, I don't know.

But what on earth happens in cities like Paris where practically everyone lives in flats?

As ever, though, Wiki should never be trusted without checking against prime sources.

Oh, and another thing.

ENs aren't produced by - or even on behalf of - the EU, and aren't systems for banning things. They're simply standards produced by a grouping of states (including non-EU members like Turkey) that agree to use ENs - so that, for example, Turkish drainpipes are compatible with Norwegian gutters.

Whenever you read the EU's banned something it's always a reasonable assumption whoever's saying so's got it wrong. There are enough serious things the EU messes up without needing to invent completely spurious examples of misguided meddling.

Should the EU ban bloviating?

What's sophisticated about flushing organic matter down the waste pipe?

Well, it might usefully start by banning ill-founded claims about what it's banned.

But slagging off the EU - like bloviating - is a pretty fundamental human right. One of the ways you know you're back in Europe is there aren't any "EU: love it or leave it" bumper stickers. Banning expressions of opinions is something they do SO much better on the other side of the Atlantic.

I had one when I lived in a flat, but the damned thing had a habit of trying to eat my favourite kitchen knives.
Now, everything goes into compost.
My son's local authority in London has a weekly collection of kitchen waste.
I assume that it goes somewhere to be composted. Perhaps they have a similar system in France.

I'm another that could easily do without a garbage disposal. We don't have one at our cabin and it's just as easy to dump what's left in the sink stopper into the garbage. I usually scrape plates into the garbage (and then let my dog "rinse" them) because it's faster, no water running, no electricity to run the disposal, and less stuff in my pipes means less likely to get a clog.

Both lipid and carbohydrate based waste have a tendancy to block pipes - especially in countries with old sewerage sytems using narrow gauge pipes.

Raleigh, NC recently outlawed disposers, but my brother who lives there told me that law was withdrawn.

Put in a disposer a couple of weeks ago. The plumber chuckled that he would be back to fix it. He wouldn't have one in his house except his wife insists.

God knows what it did to some of my silver! I mean the sterling. Sheesh...thank goodness for Replacements.com

I've never seen one in any of the apartments I've rented in Paris nor in any of my friends' apartments. The garbage there is divided into recycling, dry waste and "dirty" waste, i.e. food scraps, etc.

In most of France, we have 3 different garbage cans. One of them is for organic waste. In some places, it becomes biofuel for power plants.

My garbage disposal system for a lot of food waste is called the dog.