For your kitchen scraps bucket, you can use anything. I use a plastic gallon milk jug with the top cut off (just enough to create a wider opening, but leaving the handle in place). - John (bird whisperer)

I compost fruit and vegetable scraps, coffee grounds, egg shells, and tea bags. I think meat scraps can be composted, but they also attract vermin, so I don't include those. The combination of composting and thorough recycling means I throw very little in the trash every week. - John (bird whisperer)

I'd echo the recommendation about meat - if you want to compost it, you might want to do that separately, someplace you can keep vermin out. It can get pretty bad pretty fast. When we had one when I was younger, the cats in our neighborhood left it alone, but they had lots of other options to go digging in. (My city composts now, so I just throw food scraps into the yard waste bin.) - Jennifer Dittrich

The composting rule we plan to use is "Does it come from a plant?" There are so many cats around here it would be much more costly to have a well protected compost (the pallets were free). I think we're going to use a big empty plastic coffee can, I just hope the hollow handle doesn't make it tricky to clean. - Heather

The nice thing about reusing something like a milk jug or coffee can as a kitchen scraps bin is that if it starts to smell, it's easy to toss that one in the recycling bin and replace it. Also, you'll want to cover the kitchen scraps bin to keep the fruit flies from breeding in there. I put a plastic produce bag over the top of the milk container (cause I'm classy like that). - John (bird whisperer)

I've been using paper bags in a bucket if I have them, and then toss that stuff every evening. (I don't really cook in the morning, so it rarely has any sort of time to sit, or my cats would try to get into it.) The paper bags, if they have food on them, are accepted as compost. - Jennifer Dittrich

Meat can be composted with a bokashi composter (which actually pickles it, then it can be buried and it'll break down but the vermin won't mess with it). I used bokashi for meat, cheese, bread and other things that it wasn't good to throw into regular compost or worm compost. The basics of compost is making sure that it's not too dry and not too wet and that it's got roughly equal amounts of greens (nitrogen) and browns (carbon). Turning the compost pile frequently will result in a faster and hotter composting process. For daily compost collection, I'd just toss the stuff onto a plate and scrape the plate into the compost each evening. Wash the plate - no muss, no fuss. - Spidra Webster