As much as people love celebrations, many are hesitant to host a holiday party in their homes as it requires time, effort, and resources. If you’re planning to hold a holiday event in your home, you may have to take on many tasks, such as planning, shopping, organizing, and making other preparations to make it happen.
However, after the festivities, you, as the host, will be left with another task, which can be the most challenging of all: cleaning up the house.
Apart from picking up the dishes, taking down the décor, and clearing the floors, there’s one more challenging task that comes with hosting a party in your home. That task is a garbage disposal.
Waste management after hosting a big party can be a daunting task, especially if you’re unable to make the necessary preparations beforehand. In extreme cases, you may be left with bags of garbage in the driveway or the garage without a clue where to securely store them before the scheduled garbage collection day comes.
This might be a situation that you’d want to avoid, especially when you don’t have a big space to temporarily keep the garbage while you’re waiting for them to be collected.
Keeping large amounts of unsorted garbage in your home may lead to undesirable smells, as well as harbor germs and bacteria that could spread throughout other parts of the house.
With these in mind, it’s important to consider garbage disposal while you’re planning to host a party in your home. There are several steps that you can take to ensure that you’ll be able to manage the amount of trash that’ll be left after the party.
Also, you can consider employing professional waste collection services. To do this, you can look for companies that offer skip bin services, such as Mobile Skips, to help you effectively manage and dispose of garbage.
If you’d like to know more about how you can properly dispose of after-party garbage in your home, the following list discusses the things that you can do at the event so you can carry out such a challenging task smoothly and effectively.
1. Select Commercial Waste Services
As waste management and disposal may be quite challenging after hosting a holiday party, you may need to consider hiring professional help to do it more effectively and conveniently. In this regard, you can do your research for events waste management services available in your area to help you with this task.
Most of these companies have project coordinators who can help you create a plan for waste disposal. Through these services, you can ensure that your holiday garbage will be disposed of safely and efficiently.
Before choosing a waste management service provider, it may be helpful to check what type of materials they accept, and which ones can’t be included in the collection.
In this regard, you may want a provider who can collect garbage items that you expect to dispose of after the event. Some examples would be plastic, flammable materials, glass, etc.
Many waste management companies offer skip bins that can be easily placed in open spaces around your house. At times, these skip bins have designated spaces you can use to separate garbage items per category, such as non-biodegradable, recyclables, etc.
The pricing may depend on the size of the bins and other related services, so it’s important to have an idea beforehand about how big the bins should be and if you would require other types of assistance from the company.
2. Segregate
Before the event, you can prepare separate bins for your garbage so that it’ll be easier to sort them per category later on. To do this, you don’t need to buy big trash cans, which won’t be used after the party and can be quite expensive, too.
Instead, you can use big, old carton boxes for recyclable materials and dry items. This way, you can also dispose of the boxes when the garbage is collected.
Since these garbage items are dry, it may not be necessary to line the old boxes with plastic bags. This way, you’ll avoid using too many plastic bags that’ll ultimately add to the bulk of garbage.
For biodegradable items, such as food waste, you can use old containers with enough space and, ideally, lids. You may need to line these containers with trash bags to help contain leaks, and then place them near the kitchen so that they’ll be easier to access once you start cleaning up.
3. Recycle
Once you’ve segregated the recyclable items in your garbage, you can start sorting them to decide which ones could be reused, donated, resold, or taken to the recycling center in your area, or you could also leave them out for pickup if your neighborhood has a garbage collection service that includes recyclables.
It’s important to make recycling a priority in trash disposal as it not only helps reduce waste and pollution but could also save you money in the long run.
Given the importance of recycling to having a healthy environment, you can think of ways to improve the recycling system in your household. You can also look into how you can minimize waste in your home for it to be more environment-friendly.
4. Turn Food Waste Into Compost
After a big holiday party, there’d usually be a large amount of food waste left both in the dining hall and in the kitchen. There may be some food scraps on the dishes, spoiled food that should be discarded, fruit and vegetable peels, etc.
A large amount of waste may be challenging to manage in itself, but it may even be more difficult to securely dispose of it, especially when they start to spoil and smell.
Food waste can be very damaging to the environment if they’re not disposed of properly. This is because food scraps and other biodegradable kitchen waste emit methane as they decompose, and these gases pollute the air when the decaying materials are left out in the open.
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that’s harmful to the environment. This is why it’s important to reduce and safely dispose of biodegradable items. Your food waste may be picked up by the garbage collectors for safe disposal, but there are also some waste management strategies you can do at home that could be good for the environment.
For instance, you can turn your food waste into compost. Composting is an environment-friendly way to manage decaying waste. To create compost, you’ll have to mix the food scraps with other biodegradable items you have to dispose of, such as dried leaves from your garden, cut grass, shredded paper, etc.
After combining the materials, you can seal them inside an enclosed container and let them decompose for around two to four weeks.
Then, you can check how the disintegration progresses and let the mixture continue to decompose for four to 12 weeks more. Afterward, you can use the compost to enrich the soil for gardening.
5. Dispose Of Dry Garbage And Other Items
After segregating the biodegradable and recyclable items, you can proceed with collecting the remaining garbage into trash bags, if needed.
However, if the items are dry in general, you can also skip the garbage bag altogether and just put the trash directly into the bin.
It may be more convenient to pack everything together in a plastic garbage bag and throw them together, but the garbage bag may be unnecessary in this case and will only add to the trash.
6. Safely Dispose Of Hazardous Waste
It’s quite common for households to make use of hazardous materials as a part of everyday living. Hazardous substances could be found in common household products, such as chemical cleaning agents, liquid clog removers, antifreeze, rust removers, petrol, lead paint, turpentine, and muriatic acid.
These items shouldn’t be stored and disposed of with other garbage items inside the home.
Hazardous wastes should be handled and disposed of with precaution because of the health and safety risks they pose. As such, it’s crucial to monitor the usage, storage, and disposal of these items. Upon disposal of these materials, experts advise against pouring liquids down the drain, on open ground, and on sewers, and, then, combining them with other garbage items in the household. This is because these methods might be dangerous for both human and environmental health.
For instance, community sanitation workers may potentially be hurt or injured when exposed to some of these dangerous chemicals. On the other hand, it’s also possible for hazardous waste poured down sinks or drains to contaminate the water and sewage system.
Here are some tips you could consider when it comes to safe handling of hazardous wastes in your household:
- Read the instructions on product labels to learn about the proper usage and storage of each product. This could protect your family from unnecessary exposure to dangerous compounds in these products, and can also prevent untoward incidents.
- Take note of special precautions you have to take before throwing a product away as disposal instructions may vary for different products. As such, it’s essential to take note of the possible chemical reactions that could happen if the product isn’t handled with care. Some hazardous chemicals are flammable or explosive. Others may be highly toxic, and shouldn’t be touched or inhaled. You should also be careful of possible leaks and chemical reactions when the product gets in contact with other chemicals, such as bleach and ammonia.
- Keep hazardous products in their original containers and keep the labels intact. Also, apply the same precautions needed when handling empty containers. This is important because they may have some residual chemicals left, which could still pose dangers when handled or inhaled.
- Consult with your local waste disposal agency to know about hazardous waste management options in your community.
How To Reduce Waste During Celebrations And Gatherings
On events with large crowds, it may be difficult to keep the trash in check and reduce waste. However, there are some steps you can take before the party to help reduce the items being thrown away.
Here are some suggestions you can consider to help you minimize waste when hosting a gathering:
- Bring Reusable Shopping Bags
When shopping for groceries and party items, you can bring your cloth bags to the shop and instruct the bagging clerk to use them instead of paper or plastic bags. This way, you can avoid bringing home disposable packaging, as well as reduce the amount of trash you’ll have to throw away.
- Buy Items With Minimal Packaging
You’ll be able to achieve this by selecting loose products, such as whole fruits and vegetables instead of sliced and packed options. On the other hand, if you find two similar items, pick the one with less packaging. You can also reuse some of the packaging, such as paper and plastic bags, to avoid throwing them away.
- Recycle Gift Wraps
There are many creative ways you can use recycled or repurposed paper wrappers when it comes to wrapping gifts. Some have also experimented with glossy magazine pages, old newspapers, or old scarves. Apart from being environmentally friendly, recycling materials for gift-wrapping may even make your presentation more interesting and appealing.
- Avoid Single-Use Products
Disposable plates, cups, and utensils became popular for parties because they’re relatively inexpensive and easy to clean up. However, they also add up to the bulk of garbage after the events. Many of them can’t be recycled as well. Instead of single-use items, you can switch to reusable tableware as a more cost-effective and environment-friendly alternative.
Conclusion
As a party host, you may find your to-do list to be overwhelming, especially during the holiday season where you’d have to shuffle between entertaining guests and managing the event.
Given this, it may be reassuring to know that you’ll have an easier time going through the cleanup process after the party if you’ve made the right preparations.
After all, managing waste disposal is an important task that should be planned for and prioritized.
