Composting

Food scraps make up 13.9% of trash in the United States. For many people, reducing, reusing and recycling works perfectly well- with the exception of food scraps. There is a solution to this! It is called composting. You can’t compost everything, but you can compost a lot of the fresh produce that you use while cooking. The soil that you make from composting can then be used to create or add to your own garden. The best part of composting is that it mitigates the waste you are sending to landfills, and it creates nutrient rich soil.

How do you start composting, is it hard, and is it expensive?

There are a ton of tutorials of step-by-step how to compost, which I will link at the end of the post, but it really all depends on how you want it to work. I’ll first start by giving a lost of what you can compost. I’ve said this before, but you can’t compost everything! If you put something into your compost that isn’t biodegradable then it will look the exact same a year after as it did when you first put it there.

Items you can Compost

• Fruit and vegetable scraps
• Eggshells
• Coffee grinds
• Coffee filters
• Tea bags / tea leaves
• Non-dairy milk
• Cardboard pizza boxes
• Paper bags
• Crumbs
• Cooked pasta
• Cooked rice
• Leaves
• Grass clippings
• Lawn and garden weeds
• Straw or hay
• Pine needles
• Wood ash
• Animal manure
• Newspaper
• Shredded paper
• Corn cobs
• Dryer lint
• Stale bread, chips
• Tomato sauce / paste
• Paper towel rolls
• Crackers, cereal
• Tofu, tempeh
• Seaweed
• Popcorn kernels
• Cardboard egg cartons
• Avocado pits

 

To simplify this, you can memorize three kinds of ingredients. Browns: Dead, leaves, branches, and twigs. Greens: Grass clippings, vegetable and fruit waste, other food waste. Water: Having the right amount of water is important. Too little water, and the soil won’t be nutrient dense. Too much water, plants don’t get enough oxygen they need, and they can die similarly to having too little water.

Be sure that the material you are composting is organic and all-natural, so that no preservatives or additives were added to it. It will change the chemistry of your soil and may affect your plants that you use the composted soil to help grow.

Now, how do we start to compost?

I will link some tutorials on how to compost, because there are many different ways to. The best part of composting is that you can do it to your own convenience, meaning that you can keep a little compost bin in your kitchen, and every few days bring it out to your compost in your yard, or you can just put all your food scraps directly into your compost as soon as you make them. You can make it however you want.

Composting is the best way to get rid of food scraps. We are sending so many food scraps to landfills that don’t have to be there. They breakdown and decompose much slower in landfills as well, because the lack of oxygen makes it hard for them to. It also releases methane gas and other dangers that I talked about in my “What is Zero Waste?” tab.

Links:

Composting at Home- EPA

What is Composting?- Recycleworks

Composting Guru- Planet Natural

Guide to Compost- Earth Easy

“It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.” -Eleanor Roosevelt.