Keep Composting Kitchen Scraps

December's Sustainable Living Tip

Set up an indoor composting system to make it easy to compost kitchen scraps all winter long. With the right tools and a little thought, you can keep food waste from going to waste all year long--even in the dead of winter.

Cold Weather Composting Facts

1. According to the US Department of Agriculture, Americans throw away more than 25 percent of the food we prepare, about 96 billion pounds per year.
2. As a nation, we spend about $1 billion per year to dispose of our food waste.
   
3. Less than three percent of our food waste is diverted from the solid waste stream; each year we send 31 million tons of food waste to landfills and incinerators.
4. The three largest solid waste streams are yard waste, paper waste and food waste. All three could be diverted from the solid waste stream and composted instead. Turning garbage into compost would replenish our soils instead of polluting our water and air.
   
5. A goal of composting 100% of your food and paper waste all year round is reasonable as long as you have an outdoor area for storing materials. Indoor options can process quite a bit of material, but you'll probably find from time to time that you have some waste that needs to go outside.
   
6. You can add food scraps to an outdoor composter all winter. Scraps will freeze during cold weather and begin decomposing in the spring. You can also store kitchen scraps in five-gallon buckets for the winter. Some people find it convenient to have buckets on their porch or in their garage, saving them the hassle of getting to their composter in the snow. Just leave a little room at the top to allow material in the bucket to freeze. In the spring, once the path is clear, you can dump your buckets in your compost pile.
7. Insulated outdoor composters can extend your composting season. The tumbling Jora composer, for example, features dual chambers and several inches of insulation for hotter composting. Not only does this heat-trapping design allow for composting later in the fall and earlier in the spring, but it also makes it possible to compost meat and fish which are problematic at low temperatures.
   
8. Having a compost pail in the kitchen is a handy way to store food scraps for a few days, allowing you to plan your treks to your outdoor composter. Look for pails with activated charcoal filters in the lid to eliminate odors.
9. Many people find that a compost pail in the kitchen and their regular compost pile in the yard is all they need to keep composting all winter long. They simply put on their boots and beat a path to the composter.
10. Other people prefer to set up a system for handling food waste indoors. Bokashi buckets, worm bins and automatic composters are three popular options.
    
11. A bokashi bucket lets you collect and store food scraps for several weeks inside. These buckets feature a tight seal and promote anaerobic decomposition of food scraps. Once the bokashi bucket is full, you can transfer the contents to an outdoor composter, or in warmer weather bury the material directly into garden soil, where it completes the decomposition process.
12. You sprinkle bokashi, a dry powder containing dormant microbes, on each layer of waste you add to the bucket. This will innoculate your food scraps with fermenting microbes, preventing unpleasant odors from developing. When opened, a bokashi bucket has a distinctive pickled smell. There should be no odor at all when the bucket is closed.
13. Every so often, drain liquid from your bokashi bucket. This liquid can be diluted and used for watering plants, or it can be poured down your drain. Bokashi liquid can be especially beneficial if you are on a septic, since the microbes living in your bokashi bucket are the same types as those found in a healthy septic system.
    
14. Worm bins are another convenient method for composting indoors. Composting worms completely digest food scraps, producing solid castings which can be used as a soil enrichment for houseplants, lawns or gardens.
    
15. Plastic totes make convenient worm bins. If you make your own, be sure to provide a reservoir for liquid and a way to drain the bin. Tray systems like the Can O Worms are a step up from home-made worm bins, making it much easier to harvest the castings when the worms have finished eating all your food scraps. Holes in each tray allow worms to crawl up to find fresh food in the upper trays, leaving the trays on the bottom full of castings.
16. As with a bokashi bucket, drain liquid from your worm bin every so often. This "worm tea" makes a great liquid fertilizer when diluted with ten parts water to one part worm tea.
    
17. Meat, cheese, and highly acidic foods like pineapple and lemon rinds can cause problems in small worm bins. These food wastes are best handled indoors by bokashi buckets or outdoors in enclosed compost bins like the Jora composter. In general, the larger the worm bin or compost pile, the more variety of materials you can successfully compost. Vegetables, fruits that are not acidic, coffee grounds, and tissue paper are the easiest materials to compost in worm bins. Shredded paper or leaves should be added as a top layer and replaced as necessary.
    
18. Automatic composting machines such as the NatureMill work like waterless garbage disposals. Simply plug them in, toss in kitchen scraps and sawdust pellets, then let them heat and aerate the mixture to produce finished compost every two weeks.
19. NatureMills feature a thick layer of insulation and a small heater, so they can work equally well in heated and unheated spaces. The kitchen may be the most convenient location in terms of adding material to the unit, but a basement or garage may be more convenient in terms of space availability.
20. NatureMills use about 17 watts of electricity, about the same as four strands of energy-efficient LED holiday lights and much less than one strand of inefficient incandescent holiday lights.
21. Besides keeping unnecessary materials out of our landfills and incinerators, winter composting is a great way to get ready for gardening season. Worm castings in particular are great to have on hand when starting seeds. If you plan to start your own seedlings, you can't beat a mix of equal parts potting soil and worm castings to give your plants a healthy start on life.
22. Between four and five gallons of wet kitchen waste produce about one gallon of dry compost in my experience. Assuming you produce one gallon of kitchen scraps every three days, composting for six months would turn 60 gallons of garbage into about 12 gallons of compost. Once you start composting and using compost on your yard and garden, you'll discover that you can always use more. To produce one yard of dry compost, you'd need to start with at least 5,600 pounds of wet kitchen scraps!