Kitchen Compost: Turning Trash into Treasure

One of the most powerful ways to combat global climate instability and environmental degradation is kitchen composting. And it’s right at your fingertips. You can keep food scraps out of the waste stream and instead, give them new life. Because in nature, there’s no such thing as garbage; it’s all recycling.

Think of a tree losing its leaves, which end up on the ground. Little critters use them to stay warm, munch them down, and then poop out rich soil. When the critters die, they get digested by other organisms, and their nutrients get absorbed into the tree roots. Or if they get eaten by birds, they get converted into bird poop, which also feeds the soil under the sycamore the bird was perching on.

When humans rake up and bag the leaves, or for that matter, mow a lawn and remove the grass clippings, they’ve broken the cycle. So, to keep the trees and lawns alive, they may, in turn, replace the missing nutrients with synthetic fertilizer. And they need to find a place to store all the plastic bags full of yard waste.

Similarly, when we don’t return food scraps to gardens and farms, we create two problems that don’t exist in nature: where to put ever-growing heaps of trash, and how to grow food in increasingly depleted soil.

That’s where composting comes in — that is, putting the scraps in a place where nature can do its thing.