Benefits of Composting
The good news about recycling is large amounts of aluminum, plastic and glass are not entering our overburdened landfills. The bad news is that paper and food — the two largest contributors — account for more than half of all landfill waste. Worse yet, buried food scraps become essentially embalmed, producing methane gas for up to 30 years. Methane is a greenhouse gas that has a warming effect 23 times as potent as carbon dioxide.
Fortunately, food and paper are biodegradable and are perfect for composting. Composting is the most efficient type of recycling. Composting requires a mix of green nitrogen-rich organic materials (e.g., vegetable scraps, grass clippings, green leaves) and brown carbon-rich organic materials (e.g., newspaper, cardboard, dry leaves). The correct combination of these materials (roughly one-third green and two-thirds brown), along with the proper moisture, oxygen and heat, allows beneficial microscopic organisms to thrive and subsequently breakdown the organic material for plant use.
The end result of composting is an entirely organic fertilizer, as opposed to chemical fertilizers that can contaminate drinking water and kill worms, frogs and fish, among others. And, aside from reducing landfill and providing nutrients for plants, composting is beneficial to the environment in many other ways as well: it introduces beneficial microbes to the soil, helps sandy soil retain moisture and lets wet clay soil drain better. Composting is also used to remediate, or cleanup, contaminated soil.
Composting can take various forms from a pile of debris rotated with a pitchfork to plastic bins, tumblers that are rolled around the yard to facilitate aeration and off-the-ground tumblers that are rotated by hand. There are also worm bins that employ the assistance of Red Wiggler earthworms to generate compost. This is known as vermicomposting. New indoor composters that automatically mix, heat and aerate can accommodate all waste foods and reduce the traditional composting time by 90%.
