Home composting

– good for your garden and good for the earth

Composting your raw vegetable waste at home is a great way to reduce your carbon footprint, improve your garden and be kind to wildlife all at the same time.

Home composting is better for the environment (if done properly) than putting food waste in the green bin, as there are no transport emissions. If everyone home composted, the Council would need fewer bin lorries. You also potentially cut out the emissions you might generate by driving to the garden centre to buy a bag of compost!

And compost heaps are a great habitat for insects, so improve the biodiversity of our gardens, ultimately attracting more birds and other wildlife. They are a fantastic way of getting kids interested in wildlife and understanding how nature recycles – a fab introduction to becoming a ‘wildlife detective’. If you grow your own veggies in soil fed with the home-composted leaves, skins and stalks from your own produce, what better demonstration of a closed-loop recycling system?

Home composting still means the embodied energy in your unused food is wasted. So there’s an environmental cost from home-composted food waste. Even feeding it to pets definitely comes second to using it up in human meals.

The more you can minimise your food waste altogether, the less damaging your impact on the planet.

There are loads of How To guides online but here’s a good one: Recycle Now¹s home composting guide. www.recyclenow.com/reduce-waste/composting