Or how composting can save you a few euros a year.
In my minimalist / zero waste / living with less but better / protecting my planet journey, I have started to composting.
I grew up in a family for which composting is one of the fundamentals. Long time before we started talking about recycling and that zero waste became fashionable, my mother composted our organic waste at the back of her garden, so that she could always have fresh soil to enrich the soil in her vegetable garden. But I also suspect that there was an eco-consumption approach behind it that allowed her to reduce her expenses related to household waste in one way or another.
Organic waste accounts for 30 to 40% of our garbage!
No matter where you live, you must undoubtedly pay for your garbage cans to be collected by the public waste recycling service. In Brussels, we have to pay for waste bags (plastic) specific to a specific sorting (PMC recycling, organic waste recycling, cardboard recycling and waste bag for the unclassifiable). Or, if, like me, you live in a complex of several apartments, you pay to put your garbage in containers.
Garbage bag versus neighbourhood compost / apartment vermicomposter / at the back of the garden
In Brussels, these garbage bags vary between 0.10 cents and 0.20 cents per piece for several litres of waste... As a result, reducing your garbage also means reducing your garbage bag costs. And as if to say: there are no small profits, especially if it can also protect our planet!
I discovered with horror that in Brussels, the sorting of organic waste is not yet fully developed. At least for the time being. The special organic waste bin truck travels hundreds of kilometres with our waste and then composts it or transforms it into energy or fertilizer through the process of biomethanization.
So, instead of paying for a garbage bag for your garbage and taking it across the country, I invite you to try to find an alternative closer to home:
- or in your garden if possible;
- or in your local compost.
Keep your waste before throwing it in the compost bin
What often makes city dwellers reluctant to keep their organic waste is the smell and mosquitoes that may occur through the decomposition process. Especially in summer. And this, even if you have a great pedal bin....
For my part, I had to go to the neighbourhood compost every week if I didn't want to be bothered by flies and smells... Since then, I have found a great alternative that allows me to go only once a month.
It's to put my garbage in one of the bins in my freezer! The idea is excellent, and it comes from Bea Johnson if I remember correctly. Honestly, I wonder how I couldn't think of it myself!
Olivier and I were in a zero waste mode at all levels, we didn't really have a chance to fill our freezer anymore. Here's a good trick to start using it again!
In addition, it seems that freezing organic waste makes it easier to decompose it in compost because the gel makes it easier to break and tear peels.... !
Organic and selection of what is thrown into the compost
One last important info in my opinion, it is to throw in your compost only your organic peels, just to keep in your future compost, only good things and not all pesticides and unhealthy things.
And before you start composting, be sure to check out what you can and cannot throw into your compost. Depending on the type of composter you have chosen, you will not be able to put everything and anything in it. In my country, for example, they accept citrus fruits but do not accept food that has been cooked (and of course fish and meat).