Reducing your carbon footprint, living with zero waste, and being ecofriendly are all ideas that a lot of people are getting on board with. But how do you actually achieve those goals and lifestyles. One great way to get started is by recycling much of your garbage right at home. While putting your plastic and carboard in the recycle bin is great, you can take care of organic and food waste by owning a composter!
Through composting you can dispose of and recycle all your food waste right in your backyard. By not tossing these scraps in your regular trash you will significantly reduce the amount of waste your household generates and will set you on a great path towards helping the environment!
Whether you decide to use a compost tumbler, a worm composter, or solar digester effects what you can actually put in your composter. Generally speaking, all of your food scraps from cooking, your leftovers, and even some cardboard and paper can be composted rather than sent away in a garbage truck. We’ll get into the specifics of what you can dispose of where in a bit, let’s talk more about the benefits of composting first!
You might be wondering why it’s better to have food scraps decomposing in your backyard versus a landfill a hundred miles away. The easiest answer is that you will be able to use your compost later in gardening or even lawn maintenance as fertilizer and organic soil. There’s so much more that it can help with though, even if you aren’t a gardener. Having less trash to send to a landfill means having fewer plastic bags filled with trash and fewer garbage trucks burning fossil fuels to get them there. When food waste enters those landfills, it does breakdown and decompose, but in a much less desirable way. Food waste breaking down in a landfill will create methane, a very harmful greenhouse gas. Controlling the decomposition of food waste at home will prevent this.
Now that your food scraps have been successfully composted at home, what can you do with the compost? The best thing you can do with compost is use it to grow more food. Compost is great for using as soil in a vegetable garden and will allow you to completely recycle food scraps into more food, it doesn’t get more sustainable than that! Using extra compost for other flowers and landscaping is great too, and it can even be used to fertilize your lawn. Still have extra? It won’t be hard to find a neighbor or friend who can make use of it!
There are many different types and styles of composters, choosing the best one for your home can take some research. Some are better suited for larger households and gardens and some for smaller. These ones are great for composting in the wintertime.
Compost tumblers are a great way to get lot’s of usable compost and are great for large households. Avoid adding meats and animal products as well as citrus and onion scraps to your compost tumblers, just about anything else organic will compost great!
Worms are a great way to break down food, and they’re hungry! By feeding your food scraps to worms in a contained composter you can harvest the waste they create after consuming the food scraps. Worms will eat almost anything but be carful with citrus and animal products such as meat and cheese!
Using the same method to break down food scraps as normal vermicomposters, these composters sit in your garden beds and allow worms to enter and leave as they wish, this spreads the compost throughout the soil in your garden bed for you!
This is a great way to dispose of everything organic, from meats that can’t go into normal composters and even pet waste! The downside is you can’t harvest compost easily, but organic waste still gets recycled into your yard and garden.
