I’m Marisol Ochoa, and in Riverside, my kitchen sink has made one habit hard to shake. As of mid-September 2026, when I peel potatoes, I still have to resist pushing the scraps into the garbage disposal. I used to treat the grinding sound as the end of the problem: if the peels were small enough to go down with the water, I figured they were gone.
That is the reflex in my house, here in California. The peels disappear from the sink, so the drain feels like a reasonable destination. But the question is not whether the machine can chop them. It is what those chopped peels do afterward. City of Riverside Public Works says food waste can clog pipes and should go in the trash. That is a useful rule to remember while the peels are still sitting beside the sink, before the disposal makes the choice feel settled.
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What AnswerLine says
AnswerLine, a university extension service, puts the advice plainly: “Potato peels are one of the foods you should never put down your garbage disposal.” A university medical center warns that potato peels can clog both the disposal and the drain even after they have been ground up. Those are the two parts of the habit I had mixed together. Grinding changes the size of a peel; it does not settle what happens once that peel is in the drain…