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Composting 101

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Composting recycles organic matter, like food scraps, into a rich fertilizer for growing plants. Composting at home keeps your organic waste out of landfills, significantly reducing methane and carbon emissions from landfills and redirecting plant matter back into the ecosystem.

Backyard Composting

If you garden at home, you can see the benefits of compost right in your backyard. Spreading a layer of a couple of inches of compost on top of planter beds or mixing it with potting soil can improve the health and resilience of the soil, help it retain moisture and nutrients, and reduce the need for fertilizers and pesticides.

To get started, look at what type of composting will work best for you. This will affect what you are able to put in the compost, and how it is managed. If you’re doing at home composting in your garden, the simplest type is cold composting.

Cold Composting

Your standard compost bin. Can be just a pile in your yard, a diy setup with pallets or chicken wire, or a fancier purchased bin. You can toss in garden waste, uncooked food waste, tea bags, coffee grounds, and soiled paper and cardboard. Avoid meat, cooked food, grease, and fat.

Composting guides generally separate these compostable materials into “browns” and “greens”. “Browns” are essentially dry materials like paper and dry twigs, leaves, and wood chips. “Greens” are wet materials like food scraps and green leaves and grass clippings. You’ll want around twice the amount of browns as greens, and to layer them in the compost bin like lasagna, alternating layers of green and brown. Turn the compost in the pile occasionally to aerate and encourage decomposition. The compost that results should look like moist soil and not be smelly.

A person holding a white bag above a compost bucket inside a green bin

Hot Composting

Hot composters are specialized compost bins that heat the compost inside. They work much the same as cold composting but can also take cooked foods and meat.

Worm Composting

Worms are nature's great composters and while the product of worm composting may sound a bit icky (worm pee and poo), they both make great natural fertilizers. You can diy your own worm composter with two plastic buckets or buy a starter kit for everything you need. The most important thing is to have a tap to drain liquid. The worms can eat small bits of food scraps including cooked foods like bread, but avoid oily or spicy foods as well as meat. You can also add in dog or cat poo. This guide has great details on everything you need to know for worm composting.

A person holding out their hands holding dirt and worms

City Composting

So what do you do if you don’t have a backyard? As city dwellers ourselves, we’ve got some tips. If you’re an indoor gardening superstar, you can set up a full indoor composting system. Otherwise, we advise looking into composting programs in your area, and we’ll give some potential options

A person emptying food scraps into a countertop compost bin

Indoor Composting

Worm composting can be done just as well indoors, just with some selectiveness about what you feed them to avoid smells (worms love melon and squash, but feeding it to them indoors won’t be pleasant).

If you’re looking for a quick, neat, convenient indoor solution, you can buy several kinds of countertop composters online. A bokashi bin ferments the compost, creating a liquid and pre-compost solids that can be added to soil. Unlike traditional composting it works best when isolated from oxygen, and takes much less space and time. It also should be odor-free.

City Composting Initiatives

Here in New York, we have a couple options that you may have as well. Curbside composting pick up goes alongside trash and recycling. Look into your local department of sanitation to see if you have a similar program and what the guidelines are. For us the pickup list contains any food scraps, including cooked food, garden waste, greasy paper plates, and certified compostable products due to the greater capabilities of industrial composting.

Another very cool local initiative is smart composting bins, available for dropoff at all times through the NYC Compost app. These take the same variety of waste as the curbside pickup.

A row of municipal recycling and trash bins

Community Composting

Community gardens, parks, schools, and nonprofit organizations all may offer compost drop off programs, so look into any in your area. Keep in mind that most of these types of efforts will not be able to compost cooked food, oil and grease, or meats.

At Sensible Bakery, composting food waste is part of our initiative to be mindful of our impact and reduce our environmental footprint. We encourage anyone reading this to join us and take this step to make just a bit more of a positive impact on the world.

A compost bin full of vegetable scraps with a knife and peeler nearby

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