This week in Community Care magazine I have a column about Britain's favourite hobby, gardening. An essential part of any garden is making compost, and this is my favourite pastime, so much so that my wife says I have 'OCD', Obsessive Composting Disorder'. I've been obsessed by it and related subjects since childhood... I used to put food items in glass jars and watch the various bacteria and moulds develop over days and weeks, and I've always liked mushrooms and creepy crawlies. Since coming out as a 'green' in my early 20's I've known that home composting is the best way to recycle all of the stuff which goes smelly in your dustbin, to save energy with reduced bin-lorry weight, to reduce landfill space, to reduce pollution from landfills, to help biodiversity by creating habitat and food, to help trap carbon in soils, to help fertilise soils to grow healthier plants, to reduce the need for peat which should stay in peat bogs, to reduce the need for fertilisers which use fossil fuels in their manufacture, to help reduce rainwater evapotation from soils and not need irrigation.... I could go on and frequently do. I even did my dissertation on composting!
So, armed with all those reasons to have a home compost heap or wormery, here's my 'short guide'. Good compost needs three things, the right mix of materials, the right amount of air and the right amount of moisture. That's all. Get those right and biodegredation WILL happen! Biodegradable materials are any which have come from living things recently, any plant materials or animal materials and their products. There are a few exceptions, including rubber which has been vulcanised with sulphur (tyres and inner tubes don't rot, although natural latex rubber like balloons and marigold gloves do, eventually) and some plastics made from oil now have an additive which allows them to 'oxo-biodegrade'. Rotting is the natural breakdown of complex materials into simpler ones (water, carbon dioxide, humus) by the action of bacteria, fungi, and other organisms such as worms. I find the whole process almost magical!
As home composting is so beneficial and saves the local authority lots of money in landfill charges, most councils are subsidising compost bins, many with WRAP as their partner, and this website also has a good section on composting, one of many guides available. So get a cheap compost bin, or make an enclosure using pallets, or just have an untidy pile in one corner of your garden. Throw on a mixture of green/sappy/moist/'nitrogen rich' materials and brown/dry/'carbon rich' materials and wait. Rainwater will help keep it moist, the browns will help it keep aerated, and turning it over and mixing it will help speed the process. Your compost is finished when the materials look nothing like what you put in... it ia a brown, crumbly soil-like material. This can be 'top-dressed' on soil to suppress weeds and conserve moisture as a mulch, or riddled and used to add to potting composts; I mix it with leafmold and loam to grow my tomatoes and cucumbers.
Many websites and books advise on not composting cooked food, meat etc, but this is just because rodents find these foods even more delicious and may find their way into heaps containing them. It is possible though to make your heap rodent proof, or to process these materials using Bokashi or a wormery so they can be recycled too. Search the web for many suppliers of composting products, or for designs for home-made versions.
For those of you who really get into composting and want to spread the word, there are a number of Master Composter groups which can train you up to be a composting advisor in your community. I started York Rotters with this aim, and we now give out lots of advice and help to new and existing composters... it's amazing how many people don't know that cardboard is really good on compost heaps, and that the coloured printing is biodegradable as well!
So home composting is a really great way to reduce your impact and to live more lightly on the planet. If you can, make sure you have a compost pile, and if you can't, lobby your local authority for a food waste collection service, which will be professionally 'in vessel' composted.