kitchenplay

it's okay to play with your food

Thursday, February 19, 2009

The Compost Revolution

Today's NYT includes an article on urban composting, highlighting worm composting in particular. I considered worm composting, but was slightly overwhelmed by the idea of inviting 1,000 pets into my home. But a lot of people love the method, for both its ease and efficiency. The article brings up some good stats:

  • 13% of the nation's trash is from food waste

  • Recycling one ton of mixed paper is 4x more effective in reducing green house emissions than producing one ton of compost

  • BUT keeping food waste out of landfills specifically is 2x more beneficial in reducing methane gas production

As someone who cooks a lot, and primarily with fresh vegetables, I know that I'm making some sort of small impact by composting my food waste. It's also really fun, albeit in a super nerdy way. My housemates and I have shared some very cute, very silly compost-love moments.

Since we're still mid-winter, there hasn't been too much action going on in our bin. It is starting to get rather heavy. I did start prepping my planter this past weekend, and transferred some of that dirt into the bin, which I think is supposed to help expedite things.

Has anyone out there tried worm composting?


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I saw that article too and told myself I'd write a blog post about it... I haven't tried it the kind they talk about in the article. I don know that once it warms up, if you get a tub of worms from a bait store (probably not too many around South Philly), you can dump it into your composter and they'll go right to work. I find shredded brown paper bags work better than newspaper, unless you happen to know the newspaper isn't chemical-laden.

Anonymous said...

Wow. Maybe they should add spell-checking to the comment box... :)