Wake up and smell the compost (joking)

I’m going to talk about the why, where, and how of the box of decomposing food scraps in my kitchen. But first off, Time Out New York Kids, the local parenting magazine, will be running my Wednesday posts on their site as a way to apprise parents of green issues. Welcome, new readers! No Impact Man, if you’re just joining us, is my experiment in trying to adopt as low an environmental impact as possible for my family while living in New York City (read more about the basics here).

As for the issues to do with composting, there’s a lot of talk about products being better if they are biodegradable. You know, like disposable cups made out of corn starch so that when you throw them in the garden they return to the earth in a couple of months and nourish it. And, I’m guessing—and I emphasize guessing (experts please weigh in because I’m still researching all this)—that corn starch disposable cups are environmentally better for a bunch of reasons, including lesser use of petroleum (though I still prefer reusable cups to recyclable).

But unless you have a back yard, say, and that’s where you dispose of your biodegradable waste, it isn’t going to biodegrade. The problem is the design of the modern landfill (which you can read about in Elizabeth Royte’s fascinating Garbage Land). The landfill is not designed to help things to biodegrade, which requires contact with air and water. Instead, landfills hermetically seal their contents away from the environment to protect it from the toxic things in the landfill that aren’t biodegradable (of course, the seal breaks down in 70 years and leaves a toxic mess for our grandchildren to deal with, but that’s another story).

What this means, is that organic things like apple cores and yesterdays newspapers and cornstarch cups, when dumped in the landfill, either don’t break down at all—and certainly don’t end up returning nutrients to the earth—or they break down anaerobically, which means they produce methane, a worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

So…what I’m trying to get to is that the whole point of biodegradable products is moot if they end up in the landfill. For the same reasons, sending kitchen scraps to the landfill is not so good either. This is all a long-winded way of saying why I compost.

Now to the how of my composting, a process one doesn’t usually associate with living in a 750 square foot apartment in the middle of New York City. I do two things. I dump the greatest share of my food scraps in a wooden bin I made where lot of red wriggler worms live in shredded newspaper bedding. They eat it up the veggies, and turn them into worm castings (compost), and the whole process is much faster and less smelly than in a compost pile. Plus, it’s a great science experiment for my two-year-old Isabella.

The other thing I do is I drop off my excess food scraps (a worm can only eat so much, you know) at compost pick up points provided by the Lower East Side Ecology Center. LESEC is also where I got my worms. They provide instructions on “vermiculture” here and say where their drop off points are here. There are a lot of composting resources for New Yorkers here. If you don’t live in New York, you can get worms by mail here.

Of course, if you have a yard, you can start a conventional compost and you can find instructions here. But then you wouldn’t have your kids jumping up and down begging to see “da worms.”

This post also appears in my Green Parenting column for Time Out New York Kids, appearing every Wednesday. For resources on eco-friendly stores and restaurants, or simply to plan a weekend outing, visit them at tonykids.com.