If you’re looking to cut your landfill waste, undo the effects of erosion, reduce your climate footprint, and fall in love with the regenerative magic of soil, your best first step is a simple one: composting (find out why HERE). But if you’re in an apartment, condo, or townhouse with no land of your own, is this even possible?
Good news – it most definitely is! Small living spaces needn’t pose any obstacle to putting your food waste to good use. The question is – how do you want to go about it?
What’s Your Why?
Depending on your preference, your composting practice can take an investment of mere seconds, minutes, or hours (or, if you’re entrepreneurially minded, it could be the gateway to a new career).
Before you begin, ask yourself: what’s your larger goal – and how up close and personal do you want to be with your kitchen waste? Are you looking to…
- Redirect your food scraps from the landfill with a community composting service?
- Produce small batches of soil amendment using a countertop electric composter?
- Use fermentation to produce pre-compost in an under-sink bokashi system?
- Produce an ongoing supply of rich, living compost and compost tea with an under-sink vermicompost system (worm farm)?
The choices are yours! So let’s take a look at the options…
Outsource Your Output
If you don’t have gardens or house plants to receive your compost, private or municipal community composting services can be the answer. These services usually provide a bucket for your food scraps, so all you need to do is to fill it up and put it out for weekly or biweekly pickup (or drop it off at their collection site). Their staff does all the work of maintaining mega-compost piles, and produces a collective harvest of “black gold” that goes to fertilize farms or is sold to area consumers.
Check out this Community compost cycle graphic from the US Environmental Protection Agency.
These services can be free of cost – or even required – in some progressive cities and communities. Elsewhere, local entrepreneurs or large corporations may provide subscription-based services.
Not finding a program in your area? Community composting is a growing groundswell: think about being the change you seek, and starting a movement for a service in your area! Support systems abound:
- Canada’s Climate Legacy and British Columbia’s Compost Education Centre are just two examples of community composting programs; others are springing up in Ontario, Toronto, St. John’s, Newfoundland, and elsewhere.
- In the U.S., the Environmental Protection Agency and the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, as well as small municipal services, offer loads of resources and support to community organizers.
- The Canada/U.S. corporation Recycle Tracking Systems actively supports startup community composting programs; see their page HERE [link: https://www.rts.com/blog/community-composting-local-solution-to-a-global-issue/]. For ideas and inspiration, check out some stories of local composting business startups HERE.
Composting in Your Kitchen
With just a little reshuffling, you can make your kitchen Compost Central, processing food scraps conveniently next to your work area or under the sink. No garbage disposal required!
Use Smart Waste Processing on Your Countertop
If you’re looking to turn your food waste into a finished compost-like amendment that you can put on your houseplants or container garden, electric composters such as Lomi or Airthereal might be your solution. Sitting tidily on your kitchen counter, they can take in your day’s kitchen snips and turn them into an organic soil nutrient, generally within 24 hours.
While these units offer a quick turnaround and the ability to break down some wastes that the average outdoor composting system can’t, such as meat scraps and soft bones, compostable paper plates, bags, and cups, and some biodegradable plastics, they still have limitations: they won’t handle dairy products or cooking oils, fruit pits, large bones, or similar items. For best results, cut items into small chunks before putting them in the unit.
It’s important to realise that the heated, dehydrated, and ground-up output of these systems generally doesn’t qualify as biologically-active compost, although the Lomi electric composter lets you add enzymes and run the process at a longer, lower-heat setting to protect micro-organisms. Nevertheless, it’s still a good, nutritious amendment for your houseplants or container garden. And if your supply outruns your demand, no worries – bags of your composter’s soil-like output are welcomed by community composting sites, and maybe your family, friends, and neighbours.
Does dehydrated food waste actually help plants? Rob Avis discusses the results of his experimentation.
Ferment Your Scraps into Pre-compost with Bokashi
What on earth is Bokashi, you ask?
It’s a two-stage Japanese system developed in the 1980s that takes a completely different approach to breaking down food waste. Where the conventional composting process uses microorganisms and heat to reduce food scraps to soil, bokashi works by fermentation, and can be conveniently set up in an airtight bucket under your sink. The bokashi approach also allows breakdown of food wastes such as meat, bones, dairy, and cooked foods that are not compostable by some other systems. Best of all, unlike ordinary compost, the bokashi compost process requires no electricity and does not breed flies, attract pests, or off-gas methane or carbon dioxide.
In the first stage, you add food scraps to your bucket, covering each layer with an inoculant of bran treated with molasses and effective microorganisms (EM). Do this just once a day to prevent airflow and let the micro-organisms – lactic acid bacteria, photosynthetic bacteria, and yeast – feed undisturbed. As the fermentation process progresses, you’ll notice a strong pickle-like odour when you open the bucket.
After two weeks of fermentation, while the food scraps will still be recognizable, their cellular structure will have changed, allowing them to break down into compost quickly in the second stage. The micro-organisms are still alive and active – usually in greater numbers than in any other composting system!
At this point, you can give the fermented pre-compost to a community composting service, contribute it to a friend’s outdoor compost as a probiotic activator, or mix it with ordinary garden soil in a large bin to let it complete its second stage of composting. It should decompose completely into rich, dark soil in about a month or two.
You can purchase a bokashi kit (bucket and starter) HERE. For instructions on making your own system, and resources for buying bran, check HERE.
Putting Worms to Work
If you’d like to take part in nature’s process of breaking down food scraps a little more intimately, vermicomposting (worm composting) may be your best option. This is a method that can be scaled from an apartment, to an acreage, to a commercial venture!
Depending on your desired output, you can create a worm farm using small tiered trays, buckets, or wheelbarrow-sized stacked bins. Check these products out from supplier Compost BC.
Verge team members Mitch Rawlyk and Ben Cromwell use the Hungry Bin system on the Avis homestead below:
The Verge blog has an encyclopaedic post on vermicomposting, plus links to lots more resources, HERE, but here are the five key things to know before you begin:
- Start your worms off with a bed of carbohydrates, the more local and natural the better, such as moist, chemical-free straw; dry leaves; dead grass clippings; wet wood chips or bark in moderation. Chemical-free paper products work also: non-coloured, non-glossy newsprint; coconut fibre; shredded office paper; kraft paper or uncoloured, unbleached, no-gloss cardboard; unbleached, chemical-free used paper towels; or toilet paper rolls
- Give your worms roughly 50-100% of their own body weight in food scraps, and wait for them to finish one feeding before you give them another (if you have a pound of worms, figure half-a-pound to a pound of food scraps, roughly every couple of days). This way, you prevent odours and pests.
- The best worm foods are well-chopped, unseasoned leafy greens, squashes and melons, cruciferous vegetables (broccoli, cauliflower, etc.), and non-citrus, low-acid fruits such as apples and pears.
- Avoid giving your worms anything seasoned (this includes salt); anything oily or greasy; animal products (meat, bone, or any dairy products containing milk); acidic fruits and vegetables such as citrus or tomatoes; processed or fast foods; or non-organic products such as plastic, cellophane, or treated wood.
- Keep their environment cool, at 15 – 25 °C (60-80 °F), damp but not soggy (roughly 75% moisture), and slightly acidic (roughly pH 6.5). Be sure to fluff their bedding when you feed them, to give them plenty of oxygen.
Worm compost is true, rich, finished compost, gardeners’ “black gold,” full of beneficial microorganisms…and it comes with an additional bonus. Depending on your system, you may also be able to harvest concentrated, high-nutrient “worm tea” from water that’s drained through the bedding and the worm castings (worm poop) into a bottom tray with a spigot. Dilute this by 50% and use it in watering your houseplants or gardens, and watch them thrive!
Looking to Learn More?
For more information on composting, check out the Verge Permaculture YouTube channel HERE or other blog posts HERE
