Think Twice Before Throwing Fruit Scraps Outside

Walk a food-motivated dog around your neighborhood, and you'll realize how many edible scraps are tossed to the ground outside. It's tempting to think that tossing fruit scraps like apple cores and orange peels is harmless or even beneficial, but it does have consequences. These bits and pieces don't end up decomposing before they attract animals.

It's true, your one banana peel is not going to upset the environment by itself. If you were the only person doing it, the effect on nature would be minimal. The problem is that when many people toss their food scraps into the outdoors, animals start to see places populated by people as food sources. Wild animals should not learn to find their meals around trails full of people. Not only does it create potential for unsafe interactions, but it also leads to unhealthy diets lacking in the necessary variety of foods.

Even worse is tossing scraps out the car window. One of the leading causes of accidents involving cars hitting wild animals is food on the side of the road. Next time you are eating a mandarin in the wilderness, save the peel for your garden to make your tomatoes extra delicious in the summer.

If you're out and about and you find yourself with a peach pit to dispose of, you have better options than tossing it out the window or on the side of the trail. If you head out the door packed with any food that leaves anything behind, take along an extra ziplock bag to use for garbage. Even better, if you have a dog, you hopefully have easy access to dog poop bags. While the biodegradability claims of these bags are only true if your city allows you to put the bags full of dog poop in the city's compost bin, a biodegradable dog poop bag full of apple cores and banana peels is a better bet. No matter what food you bring on a hike, you should always remember that if you pack it in, pack it out.

While driving, it helps to keep a small trash bag accessible. Reusing an old grocery bag or small waste basket-sized trash bags is good for this. You don't want to leave anything in the car too long, especially in the summer, so the smaller the better. Hopefully, with these tips, we can all be better about saving our scraps for our own gardens instead of laying traps for wild animals along the side of the road!