Let Us Compost Offers Home Pickup Service to the Eco-Minded in Athens, Ga.

Planning a big Christmas dinner? Worried about what to do with the mountains of vegetable peelings? Or the vat of turkey juice? Maybe bones from a standing rib roast are your worry? Or shells from all those shrimp?

And what are you going to do with your denuded Christmas tree?

There's an alternative to simply dumping all this stuff in the trash can, says Kristen Baskin. She's the owner of Let Us Compost, and she wants to relieve you of all that yucky kitchen refuse. (And for $5, she will pick up the used evergreen and take it to the chipper.)

For $8 to $15 a month, she'll give you a lidded container, sized to keep in the fridge, that you can fill to the brim with compostable matter. For this service, the compostable category includes even chicken bones, rank cottage cheese and bacon grease--items you definitely don't want to put in your home composter. Unless you want rats hanging around. 

Baskin picks up the containers from clients every Monday--though she would come more often if there's a need--empties them and takes the material to Wilbro's Organic Recovery in Taccoa, a commercial composting facility licensed by the EPD. The piles of compostables there are so hot they can handle bones and other backyard no-no's.

In addition, Let Us Compost offers waste-free weddings (for $100) and waste-free birthday parties (for $25 each). The event may feature compostable plates and forks, which can be recycled only in a commercial facility. Baskin recycles everything that can be recycled and then composts the rest, leaving nothing behind. 

The business partners with the ACC Recycling Division on different projects. And for $10, it provides home delivery of a 5-gallon bucket of compost from local Back to the Garden compost. That company's compost can help you create your own tiny piece of Iowa, right here in Georgia.

For more information about Let Us Compost, click here.