Composting
By Chris Tilley
Matt & Steph emptying their worm composter. Just imaging the veggies grown in that wonderful dirt.
8. Compost
Throwing compostable material in the garbage just speeds up the need for new and costly landfills. Garbage disposals waste both electricity and water. Composting, on the other hand, is nature’s time-honoured way of returning valuable nutrients to the soil to be reused. Start a compost bin and do your plants - and your planet - a favour!
Personally my composting consists of a backyard composter. It’s simple, cheap and very effective but I can’t put anything like meat or table scraps as those would attract the coyotes. Its also not usable for those that don’t have backyards. In reading about Matt and Steph’s experiment with a vermicompost or worm composter I started wondering about composting in places like apartments.(source)
The first up is the worm composter that Matt and Steph are using on the tour. It was provided by Transform Composting. They provide kits with everything you need to get started including a container and tray, worms bedding and the book “Worms Eat My Garbage” by Mary Appelhof. City farmer also has instructions on how to set up you own worm composter. They recommend having these out on a porch but some people have small ones set up on the kitchen counter. The smell is apparently like a forest just after a rain. That sound pretty good to me. These will eat anything although they recommend against meat products as they will smell.(source) The amount of material these can handle varies depending on the size and the number of worms. The City Farmer site explains how to figure out what you need.
The second is NatureMill Electric Composter. These will compost anything including meat, table scraps and cat litter. They are capable of composting 120 pounds of material a month and you can add stuff at any time. It takes 5 kwh per month to operate. This has to be balanced against the need truck that waste to a landfill where the all those nutrients do nobody any good.
Landfilled material also produces methane because it is oxygen starved, composting doesn’t have this problem. Any sort of composting reduces the amount that needs to be transported to the landfill and therefore saves carbon dioxide. It also provides valuable nutritious dirt for you garden or potted plants. One set of numbers that I cam across has the breakdown of waste:
- 52 Percent Organic and there for compostable
- 37 Percent Recyclable
- 11 Percent Actual waste that needs to be landfilled(source)
Transform Compost also designs, equips and builds industrial scale compost facilities. These facilities compost on a huge scale and take material from a number of sources including the residential and commercial waste streams. More on the industrial aspects of composting next week.
