If you live in an apartment building where they collect greenwaste, you can use any old container at all. I use a stainless steel bowl and just dump it when I finish the dishes or, more realistically, when it gets fruit flies or gets full. I don't notice a smell and haven't had any comments from guests so it must be frequent enough. (I know it's not my guests being polite, one of them is my sister.)

Hello, That were some good pointers towards composting. this is something that I've been doing for a while but on a daily basis which gets a bit laborious. I always thought composting in a bin was a bit smelly, I didn't know about filters obviously until now.
My question is other than the available compost bins, is there any way of composting, like in a plastic jar and adding some other elements to reduce the smell? I don't want to spend extra on compost material, hence this question also I have so many empty containers and I certainly don't want to add more junk. Going green I believe!
The other thing I do is, I plant the seeds from the discarded portions of veggies and also some string vegs like beans, just the string part. They grow like crazy, and gives me fresh veggies without having to spend more on seeds. I hope this helps someone atleast.
Thanks for the advice.

My solution is free! I use a 2-gallon bucket that I got from the donut place (free!) and keep a plate on top of it. Never stinks (we dump it out in the compost pile every couple of days) and did I mention it was FREE?

Sirisha: you'll want to be careful of planting seeds from veggies bought at the grocery store. Many may be genetically modified (and technically illegal to plant) or hybrids, which won't produce nearly as much as if you'd bought seeds.

I only save seeds from sources I know, mostly my backyard garden. Even then, many of them are hybrid and shouldn't be reseeded.

We just use a stainless steel bowl (one of many that we use for various kitchen tasks). It's small, but super easy to clean and we always have one.

Granted, we dump ours up to twice a day because we use the scraps to feed our chickens...

I collect my scraps in a plastic ice cream bucket and keep the bucket in my fridge, which totally eliminates smells in the kitchen. Luckily I have the room - we have a huge fridge and there are only two of us, so we keep the bucket in the second crisper drawer. And using an ice cream bucket means I had an excuse to buy a a whole bucket of ice cream before I started composting!

I have one of those greenones pictured above with the hinged lid for scraps that go out to our home composter (no meat) and then i use the one the city gives all households to hold the stuff that goes on the road. Not fancy - but functional!

I am a little confused by your use of "compost." None of these appear to be actual composters. They all appear to be scrap holders to take to your compost pile or composter. Correct?

I use an ice cream bucket, too! I put the lid over the top of the container without snapping it down and never have an odor (though put a lot of coffee grounds in there every day, which may help). I take it out to the composter every three days or so.

We have the ceramic crock pictured. Even with the lid and filter it gathered tiny fruit flies in the summer - gross.

We started lining the crock with compostable bio bags that we twist at the top between uses. When the bag is full we just dump that in our compost cone.

i use a plastic produce sack from the grocery store and chop up my scraps before i put them inside. i store the scraps in the refrigerator until it's full and then bury the contents in the garden. compost bins just super saturate the ground below with rich teas and attract critters or flies. burying the compost helps fertilize the garden, aerate the soil from the deep digging and evenly distribute the rich compost tea. my garden grows amazingly large crops each year from the kitchen scraps.

Another good source for composting and gardening tools is Lee Valley. They sell similar compost pails to the ones mentioned above. They have a pail very similar to Williams-Sonoma's for $39.50 vs $49.95.
Here is a link to their composting items for sale:
http://www.leevalley.com/garden/page.aspx?c=2&cat=2&p=33140

I have the 'Cadillac' and like it, but it does provide many a nook and cranny for fruit fly breeding.

I got lazy over the winter and just started throwing scraps out the front door into the planting beds.

I agree with JudiAU, this is a scrap collecter, not a "composter"

I use the green bucket from Gaiam and it's great. It has a carbon filter, I never smell anything. We use a biobag for a liner, and when its full, we take it to the community compost heap.

I use a simple, plastic food storage container, like this one. Has a lid, so it doesn't smell, is easy to clean, and stores under the sink. Oh, and it was cheap too - $5 or $6.

I had small, charming compost buckets for a brief time but I finally settled on the very large and un-charming plastic bucket that cat litter comes in. A well fitting lid and a strong handle makes it an ideal container. I try to compost everything possible and it holds a lot.

I have a stainless steel insert from a steam table which I bought on sale at a restaurant supply store at least 20 years ago. It is totally indestructible, holds a lot, has a tight-fitting lid. It is now installed neatly into a kitchen drawer so that it is out of the way and just the right height for peeling carrots into.

@violet222: Thanks for that advice. You may be right, coz the plants that grow from the seeds never really produce much, they just remain for one season at the most and then they die. Probably purchasing seeds from a store is a better option. Thank you.

most seeds from genetically modified fruits/vegetables won't re-germinate anyway -- part of the modification includes a termination gene that does not allow seeds from the original plant to grow.

the large seed manufacturers do this so that farmers have to re-buy their expensive GM seeds every year rather than collecting seeds from their own harvest and replanting.

We use the large coffee "cans" from Trader Joe's because about as often as they get stinky, we go through 2 lbs. of coffee. Since the cans aren't recyclable, this is a way to get a little extra life out of them before sending them into the trash. They have a tight fitting lid and they hold a good amount of scraps--we're vegetarians and seem to peel, chop, what-have-you an unfathomable quantity of produce.

I picked up a bin at Marshalls for 5 bucks. Its lime green, looks similar to the stainelss steel one above and rocks. It doesnt smell either. I dump it evey couple days into my "composter"- a large storage container.

I use a Rubbermaid container (a square one about 8x8x4"), and keep it in the freezer. This totally eliminates any smell, and keeps compost from dominating any space in my teeny fridge. I'm not sure if the freezing makes any difference to the composting process, but I do find my compost pile is pretty fast, and I'm a bit of a lazy composter.

But the real reason I do it this way is that my partner is totally grossed out by the idea of keeping the compost collecting container on the counter, as my family did when I was growing up. In those days, we used a 1 gallon Nancy's yogurt tub (that's an Oregon brand, but I think you can get it elsewhere these days, really fabulous yogurt, by the bye!).

I just got a stainless one, because I don't want to go outside to my new compost pile every time I have some scraps. it's not that I'm lazy, there are birds nesting in my back door awning--and the poor mother has to fly off every time I open the door.
I probably could have just kept it all in a plastic bag in the fridge, but I expect the filter to be helpful.

in the warmer (ie fruit fly) months, we keep the compost bin in the freezer. when taken out to the large compost bin, it just rolls out like a rock! minimal clean up.

paper milk cartons work too, and are compostable by many municipal green waste collectors.