7 reasons why composting is a great choice

Try to put a container in your kitchen just to put your veggie scraps, fruit scraps, ground tea, coffee and you will realize how soon it fills up. More cooking, cutting, chopping you do at home, the more quickly it fills up. Then you realize how much of the organic waste you are dumping in trash every day, week after week, month after month and for all these years! Now imagine instead of throwing all this in a trash bag, you could leave it to nature to break it down and convert it into a rich organic soil. That’s what composting is - It’s nature’s way of recycling!

 

Here are 7 reasons why composting is a great practice to do!  

1. Reduces Greenhouse Emissions : If you think it’s organic waste and will anyways decompose by itself, unfortunately it's not the case. When organic scraps are thrown in landfills, they decompose under anaerobic conditions and create methane gas. Did you know that Methane is a very potent greenhouse gas, it’s actually 25 times more potent than Carbon-dioxide in trapping heat, thus contributing more to warming the planet.

2. Enriches soil : Your soil will thank you for the rich nutrients it will get with the compost. Compost enhances soil in many ways -  improving soil structure, increasing its water retention, and adding valuable nutrients much needed for plant growth. So, you will get healthier plants and landscapes in your home or community.

3. Reduces use of chemicals and synthetic fertilizers : Now that your soil is healthy with compost, you will automatically need less fertilizers and other chemicals in your soil. This reduces harmful chemicals in the soil, which eventually safeguards the health of our plants, animals, and ourselves.

4. Reduces waste : Now that you are not throwing away your organic waste into a trash can, it just reduces the amount of trash from your home. Reducing trash also means less trash bags, which are mostly plastic. You also reduce plastic packaging waste by buying less fertilizers and chemicals from the stores. 

5. Saves money : It may not be that obvious at a household level. If you compost at home and regularly enrich your soil with compost, you will save money by not buying fertilizers for your garden. At a community level, there is a cost involved in waste disposal. If every household reduces their waste, it puts less burden on the local municipalities for disposing of that waste.

6. Teaches kids : Composting is a great way to teach kids at home as well as at schools the concept of circularity. Something that starts from soil, ends up going back in soil has always been nature’s way of recycling. It’s only since the last few decades that we have started creating too much artificial stuff and piling up our landfills with that.

7. Feels good : Last but not the least, it’s actually very satisfying to see how so much of the organic waste gets broken down into soil like texture by these microbes. It’s fascinating to see where did all those fruit peels, veggie heads go! :-)

I hope this blog may have inspired at least a few people to think about composting. And these days there are several options available for composting based on how much time and space you want to put in.