How many buckets do I need?
A starting number by the kind of business, what moves it, and why the first guess does not have to be right.
A bucket is a lidded 5-gallon pail and holds about 25 lbs when full. The question is how many of them your kitchen fills between collections, and almost nobody knows the answer, because almost nobody has weighed what they throw away.
So answer a few questions and let the scale settle it afterwards.
The calculator
Fill in the number on the left and this works itself out as you type.
Or start from the table
| Business | Buckets | What drives it |
|---|---|---|
| Coffee shop or cafe | 4 to 6 a week | Grounds are most of it, plus pastry and milk waste. |
| Bakery | 5 to 10 a week | Trim, failed bakes and a lot of flour-dusted paper. |
| Full-service restaurant | 8 to 16 a week | Prep trim and plate scrapings in roughly equal measure. |
| Prep-heavy kitchen | 12 to 20 a week | Breaking down whole produce and fish moves this up fast. |
| Juice bar | 10 to 20 a week | Pulp is heavy and it is nearly all of the waste. |
| Grocery or bodega | 15 and up | Produce culls, which are wet and heavy. |
| Commissary or ghost kitchen | 20 and up | Volume prep with no front of house to slow it down. |
| Office pantry | 2 to 4 a week | Grounds, fruit, lunch scraps and paper towels. |
| Building with a cafeteria | 10 to 20 a week | Depends on covers, not on headcount. |
What moves the number up
- Prep from whole ingredients. A kitchen breaking down cases of produce throws away far more than one opening bags.
- Wet waste. Pulp, coffee grounds and produce culls are heavy for their volume, so they fill buckets on weight before they fill them on space.
- Covers, not seats. A sixty-seat room turning three times is a two-hundred-cover night.
- A bar with a fruit station, which is quietly one of the wettest things in the building.
- Paper. Napkins and towels that touched food all go in, and they add up in an office more than in a kitchen.
What moves it down
- Assembly rather than prep, where most of the trim happened somewhere else.
- A tight food-cost operation. Less waste is less waste, and the scale will show it.
- Donating edible surplus first, which is the right order anyway and is what state law asks of large generators.
Check it without guessing
If you want a real number before you start: for two or three service days, put food scraps into their own bin and weigh it, or count the bags and reckon a full kitchen bag at 20 to 30 lbs. Divide by 25 and you have your bucket count for that day.
That is worth doing if you are somewhere between two lines in the table. It is not worth doing otherwise, because of the next part.
The first count does not have to be right
Every bucket is weighed at your door, so within two weeks you have real numbers for your own kitchen rather than an estimate from a table. Change the count any time up to 5pm the day before a pickup, from your account, with no call and no charge for the change.
You are billed for what was actually collected, so a count that turns out to be too high costs you nothing: put out four when you planned six and you pay for four, down to the per-pickup minimum. Put out an extra one after the cutoff and the earth steward still takes it.
One thing worth knowing before you pick a cadence: monthly is available at any count, but above about 4 buckets we would usually suggest bi-weekly, because four weeks of that much food in a bucket can attract pests.
Or tell us your covers and what you cook and we will suggest a count: check your address and there is a box for it.
This describes what the rules say, as best we understand them, and it is not legal advice. Enforcement is the city’s and the state’s, not ours, and nothing we produce certifies anyone’s compliance. Check with DSNY or DEC for anything that turns on a threshold.