Organic wastes make up a large part of your home’s waste production. Living things like plants, animals and various foods decompose and rejoin the cycle of nutrients. The environmental impact of composting may offer a solution to the planet’s waste woes.
You might think of things in plastic packets and containers as choking up landfills, but the millions of tons of organic materials can create a big problem if not correctly decomposed. Learn how to contribute to a more sustainable world by composting your waste instead of throwing it away.
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What Is Composting?
Composting is the natural process of recycling organic material by breaking down valuable nutrients into functional particles through the action of helpful bacteria. It’s a recipe for successful sustainability, and nothing gets wasted. Plants and animals eventually rejoin the nutrient cycle when they decompose.
Successful composting requires an aerobic or oxygen-rich environment, where waste materials break down through the digestive processes of various microbes and bacteria. The result is decomposed material that looks like fertile soil — dark and loamy.
Why Food Is Harmful in Landfills
Organic wastes from municipal sources account for 58% of landfill emissions produced by materials in landfills. Other materials cover food scraps, creating an oxygen-deficient environment. Since no oxygen is present, decomposition happens because a different set of bacteria digests the organic material in an anaerobic process.
During this process, the decay creates harmful greenhouse gases, including methane, carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide. Composting food wastes at home lets you create an oxygen-rich environment for aerobic decomposition processes that create clean plant-based fertilizer without any of these emissions.
8 Benefits of Composting
Creating your own home nutrient system helps you make fantastic fertilizer for your garden, and it’s an ideal way to look after the environment, too. Composting your kitchen wastes, such as leftover food and coffee grounds that would otherwise clog your drain, has many benefits, as you can compost most organic materials.
Some of the excellent benefits of home composting include:
1. Cuts Waste Production
Sort your day’s garbage into organic and inorganic. Repeat it for the week to see how much food waste can join the natural decomposition process in your home compost heap.
By selecting fresh food in a paper bag without plastic wrap, you help reduce the overall waste production that heads to your local landfill. Even paper bags containing wood fiber can decompose with the rest of your organic waste.
2. Reduces Landfilling
As you can tell, a trend here is reducing how much gets shipped to the landfill. The notion that organic waste won’t stick around for long in a landfill is false. When these foods get covered by plastic and other trash, it cuts off the regular oxygen supply, which means these become toxic and only rot while producing greenhouse gases.
Instead, sort your weekly garbage into recycling, composting, and non-reusable bags. Only the non-reusable bags should go out with the morning garbage truck. Take your recycle bag to a local collection point and add food waste to the scrap pile to create fertile compost.
3. Makes Less Greenhouse Gases
Without the massive amounts of food in landfills, there is less anaerobic decomposition, which means less greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere.
4. Reduces the Need for Chemical Fertilizer
Chemical fertilizers also contribute to greenhouse gases during the chemical reactions that produce them. As much as 74% of the petrochemical industry’s products are fertilizers and plastics, which means that these fertilizers produce a massive chunk of the associated emissions.
5. Creates Better Soil
All soil isn’t created equal. Sometimes, the soil lacks growth value, and plants don’t thrive — the overall nutritional profile changes by adding fertilizer, especially organic fertilizers or compost. Compost makes poor soil rich again, creating a better topsoil layer.
6. Limits Soil Erosion
When soil becomes sandy because it’s deficient in plant matter, it quickly erodes. Adding organic materials like composting to compromised soil improves the soil profile, reducing erosion.
7. Saves Water
Eroded soil doesn’t absorb water well, so water washes away quickly during rainfall. To save water, add compost to the soil, creating more absorbent and water-rich, spongy soil that retains water.
8. Encourages Urban and Organic Gardening
Many city people wonder how they can compost living materials and how to use their composted fertilizers. Yet, even cities have window gardens, city parks and trees, which all thrive when given quality compost from their fellow citizens. Use the compost for organic hydroponic green units that support global food production.
4 Steps to Composting at Home
Are you ready to start your own home composting unit? With these convenient steps, it’s easier than you think.
1. Collect the Equipment
Decide whether you’re going to make a composting bin or a pile. Bins are ideal for helping manage flies and for smaller properties like apartments. Piles or heaps are better for large volumes of waste, and if your neighborhood works together, you can easily create a neighborhood compost heap in a central location.
2. Aim for the Correct Ratio
You must create a home for the bacteria and microorganisms that form the compost from food scraps. For this, you’ll need oxygen, water, nitrogen and carbon.
Add more carbon-rich organic wastes like leaves, twigs and paper than nitrogen-rich foods like food scraps, green plant clippings and coffee grounds. If your mix is slimy, add more dry or brown ingredients, and if it’s dry and not really activating, add more food scraps and green components.
3. Add Air and Water
The mix needs frequent turning, which introduces oxygen and maintains the appropriate temperature. Turning is also perfect when adding water. You don’t want sloppy material. Instead, it should be like a wet sponge, so check your compost to the core before adding more water. Use a yard fork to turn your pile or stir the bin to exchange air and water.
4. Know When It’s Ready
You’re in business when the mix is crumbly, dark and smells like tree roots or forest loam. The original blend shrinks during the process, and you’ll get about a third as much usable compost as the material you decomposed. The temperature also returns to a more normal range as the bacterial processes wind down after digesting all the food scraps.
Grow Organic Today
When you correctly prepare your compost, the environmental impact of composting is negligible. In the presence of oxygen, which you get when you regularly turn your pile, there’s minimal greenhouse gas production and 100% nutritious organic material you can use as a mulch, lawn dressing, vegetable fertilizer and plant dressing.
Do your bit for the environment today.