Why we should be composting

Written by: Georgia Dossis

By now you’ll have seen all the headlines and David Attenborough documentaries that hit us with the hard truths about becoming carbon neutral before 2030. There are so many ways to do this, whether it be using green energy to power your house, recycling, cutting down on your journeys in the car or even driving an electric vehicle, the list is endless.

But one really easy way in which we can reduce our carbon footprint is composting.

Composting is the natural process of recycling organic matter, such as food waste, teabags, leaves and food peelings.

What we don’t think about is that when you throw food waste away it ends up in landfills. Every 100 pounds of food waste that goes into landfills produces 8.3 pounds of methane, which in turn releases methane into the atmosphere trapping in heat and contributing to global warming.

This makes up for 8% of greenhouse gas emissions. It’s said that if every household in the UK composted their food waste rather than throwing it away it would have the same effect on greenhouse gases as planting 640,000 trees.

I won’t lie when I hear composting, I hear green thumb, gardener, or farmer. But you can do this in every environment whether you have a big garden, small garden, farm, yard or flat. Little kitchen compost bins are easily attainable and easy to use to turn your food to mulch and if you don’t have an arboretum to use this on, you can share it with neighbor’s or local farms through app’s like ShareWaste, which find people around you that you can give your compost to so that they can use it for fertilizer.

Whether you keep the little bin in the kitchen or outside is completely at your discretion but for such an easy way to reduce your carbon footprint, it’s definitely worth thinking about!