Did you prepare any produce today? Make coffee? Peel a banana?
Plenty of waste to go a(g)round Chances are you have plenty of organic waste produced at home, including yard and garden waste, much of which could have a place in a composting bin or pile. While we will discuss a little about how you could do some composting here, most people have a pretty good idea of what composting is: you either have a pile or bin of organic material that breaks down, rots, decomposes, by thriving worms, bacteria, fungi, and insects who feed on the pile.
Never composted? If you never have composted before, you are going to love how cheap the process can be (for free, if you want), easy it can be if you do not mind waiting for nature to do its thing, and how great this is for the environment. For those who are impatient, managed compost bins can produce finished product in as little as three to four weeks. But am I going to go into the nitty-gritty, the germy-wormy, the slimey — oh, blimey…? Thankfully, no, that will be the subject of future articles.
And, the reasons are… Today, we will be discussing the reasons for why you should compost — one of the easiest daily habits 
you could carry out to improve your envirohuman impact! Near the end, we’ll share some resources detailing the ways you can go out and actually do some composting in your own backyard. But before then, let’s take a look at why you ought to putting your biodegradable items outside your home on the ground (or in a bin) rather than having it hauled off to be buried in the ground.
- Wasting a resource: Having organic material hauled away as garbage is a systematic way of taking good, reusable organic matter to a large hole in the ground, where it is mixed with a host of inorganic, toxic substances and debris, such as plastic items, styrofoam, battery acid, leftover chemical detergents, and heavy metals, like lead and mercury. Hands down, getting that organic material back is extremely difficult to impossible.
- Causing extra fuel consumption: Hauling away that organic matter takes a lot of fuel to haul away to landfills. According to CompostGuide.com, “The average household produces more than 200 pounds of kitchen waste every year,” and that does not include yard and garden waste, which is obviously a lot more. So, let’s say that the average is only 200 pounds. At that rate, every ten families is having a ton hauled away to landfills every year, contributing to global warming and particulate matter in our air by having trucks haul even more away to be buried.
- Filling up limited landfill space: Organic matter takes a lot of space in landfills and the space is limited. Granted, the concept of landfills needs a major overhaul — we need to send much less material to be buried, and recycle more. But the point is that we’re limited on spaces where all of that “junk” can be buried, and we don’t need to inflate it with hundreds of millions of tons of compostable waste every year.
- Robbing nutrients: We’re literally robbing our soil of a rich natural resource that provides necessary carbon, nitrogen, and other nutrients. We already have erosion and soil fatigue to fight, we do not need to compound the situation by taking excess organic matter and shipping it far from where we need it — wherever we want and need to grow trees, shrubbery, and gardens. The solution is not to go out to your local home improvement store or nursery to buy organic matter, manure, mulch, and often, chemical fertilizers. According to CompostGuide.com, “Using compost improves soil structure, texture, and aeration and increases the soil’s water-holding capacity.” Even if you do not garden, help keep your land’s resources fertile by composting.
- Squandering an opportunity for which we and the environment already have paid: Much of our produce is imported from far away — we are paying for that transportation cost financially and the environment pays in that it takes fossil fuels, most of the time, to move that food from plot to table, meaning more dirty emissions and more greenhouse gases. Having had the environment already pay (and we’ve used our dollars), are we seriously going to throw away that banana peel, those coffee grounds, that avacado peel and pit, and your (now dead, whoops!) African violets, into a pit full of toxic trash, when we could use it to enrich our soils? Seriously? Even if it’s not imported, it likely travelled a thousand or more miles to your home — and our soils around our homes could use the nutrients as local growing of produce gains popularity.
- Composting is an (easy) sustainable practice: Our potential future sustainability will sit upon sustainable practices. It’s sustainable to compost our organic matter where it falls, meaning, where you dump it right outside. When done right, it can be done with no lingering odors or pest problems, and this practice can play a huge role in replace our dependence upon synthetic fertilizers.
- Compost helps dilute toxic substances in our soil: As air and water pollution also pollute our soils, adding clean (or relatively clean) organic matter to our topsoil will over time help reduce the proportion of toxic materials, like lead and mercury, to organic matter, by diluting the toxins in a soil of organic material. This also helps our soils to deal with future pollution and to remain fertile and to not be toxic for foods and trees to grow.
These are some of the main reasons for why you should begin composting in order to do your part to impove your envirohuman impact. Need more information? A great place to start, with explanations and links to other articles on the subject, as linked to in this story, is www.CompostGuide.com. But if you are looking for a good peer reviewed article, check out Wikipedia’s on the subject. Bottom line is, the soil in your backyard could make great use of your coffee grounds!
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July 14th, 2008 at 3:57 am
Hi Matthew & Wesley.
Excellent post and thank you so much for submitting it to the Carnival of Trash. The first issue has been published today and can be found at
http://therubbishdiet.blogspot.com/2008/07/carnival-of-trash-1.html
I agree that composting is so important to keeping waste down…so much so…I’ve taken delivery of my second compost bin today.
July 14th, 2008 at 11:21 am
Thanks for the info.
Composting is such a no brainer – sending less to the landfill while enriching your local soil. I’ve been composting for a few years, with just a bit of chicken wire to enclose the pile. No need to buy anything or work too hard. You could call it lazy environmentalism.
July 14th, 2008 at 10:48 pm
[...] Philip presents Why Composting is So Important for the Environment posted at [...]
July 17th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
We had a compost pile split out between many small jars and bottles and pales at our house, but someone threw it out thinking it was trash! Aargh!
I’ve yet to pick up a compost bin to replace the mini bins I had scattered about. We own a three family house so we produce a fair amount of compostable goods, any advice on where to buy a good medium to large sized compost bin or better yet how to make one from scratch?
Also, I usually don’t feel too bad when throwing organic material out because of what you said in point # 7 “Compost helps dilute toxic substances in our soil”. My reasoning is that if some of my trash is organic it’ll help the landfill process all my trash and keep toxic chemicals out of the soil. Doesn’t it stand to reason that the more organic materials we mix in with our trash the quicker that landfill can be converted into usable and safe land?
July 17th, 2008 at 10:10 pm
Adam, I’m sorry to hear about your loss of organic matter to the landfills! My girlfriend recently did the same to some plant trimmings I had put aside for composting — but I could hardly complain about her taking the garbage out!
You could choose any number of online stores or a home improvement store for a composting bin. Try Google searching for such a product, or consider using materials that you may have around your home — an old drawer or wooden box, perhaps some strong wire fencing and stakes. You should consider typical composting or composting using worms, which are referenced in the link in the article above. I would say that your best bet is to do plenty of reading on the subject.
I’m personally new to composting, so your best bet is to look at the reference above and other online tutorials regarding composting methods. I use an area blocked off by some bricks for my composting.
I used to have a similar idea to yours about having that organic matter in the landfills to dilute toxic substances there. But all that does is dilute the organic matter with toxic substances. Really, all you accomplish in that case is making organic matter toxic by mixing it with lead, mercury, and a host of chemicals dumped into landfills. We need that organic matter right now where people live for growing foods and other plants.
We should worry about landfills to the degree that we can stop dumping stuff into them — recycling materials rather than having landfills at all would be the ideal, so don’t worry about that landfill being able to be converted in a couple hundred years; worry about minimizing the waste sent to landfills and the idea of keeping organic matter concentrated together where it can help people immediately.
The reference to dilution I am making above is to toxins found in our rainwater, for instance, that land into our soils — diluting them with organic matter should help our soil from becoming overtly toxic. I understand, but disagree with the sentiment you state regarding landfills. The ultimate solution would be to not have landfills and bottom line is, we need organic matter where people are living and not in our landfills.
August 27th, 2008 at 10:17 pm
[...] solid feces and worm eggs to settle, possibly reducing bacterial content in the residual water. Composting, in which heat kills much of the bacteria, is another option, according to the [...]
September 7th, 2008 at 6:46 pm
[...] Well, sure, there will be times when composting doesn’t happen for whatever reason. But composting is a big deal considering that synthetic fertlizers are used to replinish our lands of necessary nutrients when [...]
October 7th, 2008 at 10:55 am
Composting is a great idea to save landfills getting filled up too quickly. Everyone should have a composter in their garden as this would have a big positive impact on the enviroment. In a lot of places within the UK waste is already being seperated for recycling and a few places have a compositing bin which is collected weekly. For those people who don’t already have a compositing bin in your garden, this is the best quick garden composter I have found.
January 15th, 2009 at 11:39 pm
One important thing to keep in mind is that organic material that should compost easily often does not. Check out the University of Arizona’s “The Garbage Project”, where they found organic matter like carrots that had mummified instead of decomposed.
The same will be true, presumably, for all the new bio-plastics, so compost those yourself too!
March 2nd, 2009 at 10:38 pm
[...] It seems as if this is an age-old practice that has been passed down over time (and has somehow been preserved as common practice) and, well, why not? The husks are otherwise going to be tossed and this way they get another use before making their way back into nature — with their fully biodegradeable goodness! [...]
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April 19th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
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July 26th, 2009 at 10:24 am
I want to have a compost pile, but fear attracting animals, bugs and snakes closely to where my children play. I live next to a very wooded area. Any suggestions?
July 28th, 2009 at 9:57 pm
I haven’t had this type of problem personally, and there are several guides online for composting, as well as books to guide you through.
That said, I might be able to suggest you purchase a compost barrel. Some are mounted for turning them, which you could buy or try to make yourself. Another option would be a type of semi-open pit built with planks of wood, potentially chicken wire, and use of leaves, straw, or wooden debris to bury anything that might smell until it can break down.
Twenty minutes looking at a guide at your local bookstore would give you the general idea. Here are examples of some that you could buy, however I am mostly against plastic composting systems — I prefer wood. If you opt for plastic, however, try to find a system that is made of recycled plastic.
December 10th, 2009 at 9:37 am
I think composting is really good for the environment. I think that creating a composting pile would be fun but it attracts bugs and insects. But my friends wouldn’t like it because the bugs would be attacting them.
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