The smell is awful. Real bad like something rotting. The first week, I took out the trash 3 times before I realized it was the frigging compostable bag that smelled less than fresh. I froze in horror when I remembered a friend, a few days before and thrown something in the trash. Did she smell the bag and think why hasn’t Sheila taken the garbage out? One of my fears of aging is losing a sense of smell and people coming to my home and making the squinch face of olfactory malfeasance. I cant stand this smell, I grabbed my messenger bag and the trash bag and headed out. This ends now.
After taking out the trash, I was outside walking to the store. I recalled this video of a beautiful beach. The camera pans to the ocean bottom with vibrantly colored fish in a brilliant blue water. The shot tracks one fish swimming to a surface reflecting sun rays. I thought sold, take me to water. But the last few frames were the fish opening its mouth to feast on a plastic bag. That stopped my trip to the store for new bags and ended in a walk along the shoreline.
Between 2017 and 2019, 33% of the fish sampled contained plastic. By 2050 the ratio of plastic to fish in the ocean is projected to be 1:1. “Plastics.” That was the oft quoted phrase from “The Graduate” released on December 22, 1967. It is still relevant today with an ironic twist.
As a vegetarian, I am not alarmed about eating fish with plastics. Note: if I ate fish, I would be a pescatarian not a vegetarian. But, I digress. Just as I would not serve guests plastic food and call it dinner, I feel responsible not to contribute to the micro-plastic seafood issue. This week, consider plastics, the man made fabric of our lives.
Balancing on Unstable Surfaces 
I love that you can compost in your condo in CA. Not even sure recycling is still happening in Florida.
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It may negate the entire purpose of replacing standard plastic food bags with compostable bags, but unless you want your produce to smell funky, remove it from those “compostable” bags as soon as you get home from a shopping trip, and store your veggies in something else. Like Sheila, I was about to toss some only day-old produce because it smelled odd, but then I discovered that it was the compostable bag. Since then, every compostable bag — whether from major grocery stores, my local market or Trader Joe’s — smell of cat urine.
And, adding insult to insidious odor, according to the signs on the compost bins provided by our municipal recycling service, those bags cannot be disposed of in the compost bins. Go figure. So, in order to comply with at least the beneficial intention of the bags, I keep them for the purpose for which they seem best suited: cat litterbox scoopings!
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