Take your food scraps to compost at home – turns waste to food!
Welcome to Week 41 of 50 Ways to Reduce Your Waste Line. In the coming 10 weeks, we are taking on the highest level of green action in each category each week. This week, we encourage you to take home your food scraps to compost yourself. When you need to throw out an apple core, banana skin, or the coffee grounds from the kitchenette of your office, rather than placing these organic waste items in the Green bin of the Zero Waste station at your office, you can turn them into useful compost to feed your growing veggies at home!
One Thing You Can Do:
If composting is new to you, below is a brief introduction to help you get started.
Compost is a natural soil builder. It improves the soil of your garden. You can apply it as a natural fertilizer and mulch. It can also be added to potting soil to start seeds indoor.
Some common misconceptions about compost is that it brings a funny smell and it is messy. You can avoid these problems by providing the right materials (green and brown) and maintaining a suitable temperature. The compostable materials include fruit scraps, vegetable scraps, coffee grounds, egg shells, grass and plant clippings, dry leaves, finely chopped wood and bark chips, shredded newspaper, straw, sawdust from untreated wood.
You will need to get a compost bin to collect the compostable materials as listed above. You can either buy one or make your own indoor or outdoor homemade compost bin.
Additional Information:
To create a compost bin in your backyard, you can look at Evergreen’s Backyard Composting Guide and follow the simple 10 steps in the Guide. It also provides some common questions and answers.
The food waste collected in our campus Green bin is being delivered to a power plant in Ontario where the material is processed through anaerobic digestion. Through this process, the material is converted to electricity and put into the grid. Fertilizers are also produced. To learn more about what else goes to Sheridan’s Green bin and other bins, please visit the Mission Zero website.
