Our shop is now downtown, and we have to pay per gallon of water and sewer used, and we’re only allowed 6 bags of trash twice a week. Well, a busy florist can easily generate more than what they allow us. So, we either “stuff” the bags til they’re too heavy to lift, or we have to hold some until next trash day. That is, until now.
A neighboring family recently started to compost, and they’ve asked if they could take our fresh trash for use in the compost heap. (I confess to knowing very little about how this all works for them, but apparently one needs certain percentages of dried, fresh materials, etc. to make the perfect compost.) But, we were ecstatic because we had someone to haul away some of our trash.
How cool! They even agreed to separate it. But, as the one who does most of the designing, I’ve found that it’s really easy and efficient for me to do the separating as I go about my day. One big barrel gets all the fresh waste - leaves, stems, thorns, guard petals, broken blooms,etc, and the regular trash bins get everything else. Our neighbors take a couple of barrels on our big processing days, and the girls love processing the flowers this way, as it makes for much easier clean-up for them. 
I can’t begin to tell you how well this has worked out, both for us and for them. We now no longer exceed our number of trash bags per pick-up, and I can go a whole week without having to change the regular trash bags at the work table.
