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Green Journal - Backyard composting and some observations
September 10, 2007

Even though I knew that in America food waste contributed to 11.7% of landfill (by weight), for the longest time I thought food compost was dirty, stinky, and generally a bug heaven. But early this year, a friend of mine showed me her completed compost and totally changed my mind. It smelled earthy and somewhat sweet. After experiencing the plant rejuvenating quality of compost, I decided to put my food scrap to test.

Six months later, I am so glad that I started composting. It has been easier than I imaged. We eat a huge amount of the fruit and vegetables, compared to an average family, especially in the summer. About 50 pounds of produce a week for our family of 4, seriously. So we generate quite a lot of raw food scrap – peels, rinds, and unwanted leaves or roots.

Through our county compost workshop, I bought a sturdy compost bin.

While I did not want to make the compost bin the centerpiece in our garden, I decided to place it as close to our kitchen as possible, since we would make several trips to the bin every week. For convenience, I also put a bucket (best with a lid) on the kitchen counter. When preparing meals, we simply toss the bits and pieces of vegetables into the bucket. Similarly we put in peels and rinds when cutting fruit. Our bucket fills up every couple of days.

The Easy Home Composting article provides more detail on how to get started and a few practical tips. The speed at which the food scraps and dry leaves turn into humus varies greatly - anywhere from 30 days to 6 months. It depends on how small the scrap pieces are, how often the compost is turned, and several other conditions. I don’t pay much attention to cutting the pieces as small as possible or turning it often, so my compost has been a bit slow. Still I am starting to get a bit of completed compost at the very bottom of the bin. Hurray!

We used to generate 2 bags (13 gallon bags) of trash every week. Ever since we started composting, our trash has gone down to barely 1 bag. Weight-wise, it is 25% of what it used to be. Not only have we produced “black gold” for our plants, we are diverting food waste from landfill as well.

One of the things I have observed since starting compost is how much plastic we use. Without food waste, most of our trash is in some form of non-recyclable plastic, cereal bags, food wrappers, packaging material, etc. Funny how by removing the food waste, the other form of waste becomes so obvious. It seems that I have my next task defined for me.

Extra Upfront Cost: $45 for the compost bin and $15 for the kitchen counter bucket
Extra Effort Spent: 5 minutes every two days to dump the food scrap and 10 minutes once a week to stir the compost, tallying to 30 minutes a week
Resource Spared: at least 50 lbs of compost for our garden
Trash Diverted from Landfill: at least 10 lbs a week, amounting to 520 lbs of trash annually

Selected previous Green Journal entries:
Organic Gardening
Reusing Packing Materials
Bring Your Own Bag
Bring Your Own Cup
Seal, Mail and Recycle Cell Phones

CindyW at Organicpicks

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