Monday, November 12, 2012

Composting in Urban, Suburban, And Rural Households



 By: Jason Bacot

Composting bins are designed to make the job of household composting easier. Composting is a terrific way to reduce your household's waste, and it also makes soils more fertile, improves plant health and gardening yields, and even helps wildlife indirectly by keeping soil healthy. Composting is a natural process, and it happens to anything that used to be a living organism, as long as the right amounts of moisture and oxygen are present. Other, less flattering terms for the process include decomposition and biodegradation. Composting is helped along by organisms like fungi, bacteria, worms, and insects.

Composting your qualifying household waste is really easy, and plastic compost bins make the job very convenient. Your work basically amounts to throwing kitchen and garden waste into the composter and rotating it regularly. The resulting compost, or humus, enriches soils and can prevent the need for non-organic fertilizers. The key to getting good humus is using a variety of types of waste, and ensuring adequate moisture and air. Rotating the compost, either by digging in the compost bin with a spade, or by using rotating compost bins helps the process along by adding air and separating out compacted layers.

While most of the composting activity takes place at whatever the ambient temperature is, if you have a big enough composter with enough material in it, the microbial activity will really get going, raising the temperature in the core of the compost to around 160 degrees Fahrenheit! This is hot enough to kill off harmful germs as well as weed seeds you don't want to use on your garden.

The more shredded the waste material is, the faster it will compost, because more exposed surface area of waste products allows the decomposition to work faster. The end result of composting is a dark brown substance that has a texture somewhere between that of sawdust and rich soil.

One thing you will notice if you regularly compost household waste is that much of the waste simply disappears. One reason for this is that a lot of kitchen waste has a high water content, and the water either drains off or evaporates. Also, the decomposition process releases some gases which dissipate into the air. Approximately 10 lbs. of kitchen waste are necessary to yield 1 lb. of compost.

But don't think that if you have a small household that it's "not worth it" to bother composting. For one thing, you can get very small compost tumblers, and even though you may only get 1 lb. of compost for 10 lbs. of waste, you're still keeping 10 lbs. of kitchen waste out of the sanitation system. Plus, that 1 lb. of compost can make the difference between anemic houseplants and a lush indoor garden.

You can find compost bins for sale at hardware and home improvement stores, but the largest selection can be found online. It doesn't matter if you grow your own food and have a large household, or if you have a household of one or two and live in an apartment. There is a compost bin that's just the right size for your needs that will help you create amazing, free organic fertilizer and keep plenty of household out of the municipal waste stream.