At nearly every public, school and workplace restroom, I’m used to seeing this:

Some sort of container lined with a plastic bag filled with paper towels, each briefly utilized for the sole purpose of drying hands. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for washing and drying hands after using the bathroom. It just always seems to me these paper towels could have some sort of afterlife.

You can imagine my surprise (and delight) when I saw this on the waste receptacle beneath the paper towel dispenser at our local garden center:

It was like a dream come true.

I realize composting paper towels from bathrooms is not as easy as it may seem. Sometimes there is other bathroom trash that you don’t want in a compost pile, so each bathroom would need to have a regular trash bin too. Inevitably, mistakes will be made. This is always the problem when collecting compostables in public settings: trash finds its way in.

Collecting paper towels for composting won’t have many of the drawbacks of collecting other compostables in public settings. There is no food sitting around perhaps a bit too long creating an odor and looking attractive to fruit flies. These paper towels are clean; after all, people are using them after they wash their hands. Finally, unlike bioplastics, paper towels can be composted anywhere. Since they contribute primarily carbon, they are a great addition to compost piles that contain mostly nitrogen-containing materials such as food scraps.

Having a compost bin in public bathrooms will take some getting used to, but we could start making the shift in some more controlled environments. I’m going to start with my kids’ preschool. I have never seen anything else but paper towels in the bathroom waste bins. Preschoolers just don’t have a lot of other trash. Plus, this population really gets it, and isn’t too stuck in their ways of throwing all their waste in the same bin. Other prime locations might be small workplaces where everyone understands the two-bin (trash and compostables) bathroom waste management system

I figure people probably use, on average, 5 paper towels for drying hands per day. That’s 25 paper towels per week and 1200 paper towels per person per year if you figure in vacations and holidays. For a workplace or a school with 100 people, that’s a decent amount of compostables.

We can do better than trapping a bunch of perfectly-good compostables in a plastic bag and considering them trash. The landfill doesn’t need them; our soils do.

Holiday travel can make me weak and yield to the pressure of just-off-the-highway fast food. My kids, who are both four, are already shouting out “Old MacDonalds” (as in the song) when they see the golden arches. How do kids know to do this so early in life?

Usually I resist in favor or a diner or a packed lunch, but this time it was a rushed Christmas Eve and we were traveling with a feline. He’s a well mannered cat, but it isn’t like you can tell him to please use the kitty box before getting into the carrier. Plus, it was cold outside so I caved in to McDonalds as our fastest lunch option in the best interest of the family cat.

When I do land in a fast food restaurant, I try to avoid the toy. It is always some landfill-bound mean-looking guy that gets my boys all revved up. But now they are old enough to really lay on the begging and their father has a soft spot — perhaps for the plastic light-up man, I’m not sure – so the happy meals get ordered while I’m in the ladies room.

Fast food figurines ready for action on a snow-covered wood pile.

Mind you, it is hard enough for me to eat at fast food restaurants because I can’t stop thinking about all the food scraps not being composted and the packaging generated by my own meal. Then I consider the number of people who eat at that McDonalds per day times the number of McDonalds in the country — no, the world — and I just flat out loose my appetite. Now that my children know how to nag my husband into submission, I need to imagine all the kids’ meal toys in landfills too.

The problem with kids’ toys is that kids really love them for about a half hour, then it lives out the rest of its “useful” life on the backseat floor of the car. Perhaps it makes it into the house and serves mostly to clutter the kitchen counter, but they all ultimately end up in the trash.

Why, then, are kids toys made from a material that will last hundreds of years when kids’ interest in the toys is much shorter, by a magnitude of about a million? It would make a lot more sense to make toys that are compostable (ok, my bias) or recyclable. Or, how about if the companies supplying the toys institute a take-back program? They could include a self-addressed envelope in the kids’ meal so that the parents could be rid of the toy when the child looses interest. The community wins too since the local landfill doesn’t have to accept yet another piece of plastic and associated parts like lights and batteries. I might actually seek out a restaurant like that.

Our cat was with us on the way back, so I’m sorry to say that we now have Burger King toys around here too. Neither of the toys are played with now, just a few days later. In fact, the boys didn’t even care when I walked out of the house with the toys in order to snap this photo. They just showed me how they worked and said “Bye, mom”. For all they know, I could have chucked them in the woods. I might have, but I don’t want to see them there each spring when the snow melts for the next several hundred years.