Recycling Articles : Composting & Recycling

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Composting is a brilliant, decentralised, eco-friendly and personally beneficial way to recycle kitchen and garden waste. Creating your own compost bin is surprisingly easy and the results in the beauty of your garden or the yield of your vegetable patch are well worth it.

How Composting Works…

Composting is what happens when you allow organic animal and plant materials to decompose into soil, enriching it with their nutrients. You can get these materials from all sorts of places such as plant trimmings and cuttings, teabags and eggshells. After composting, these eventually become a dark, crumbly sort of organic fertiliser that is packed with nutrients and does your garden no end of good.

The basic steps to composting are these:

1. Add your organic waste to the compost bin.

2. Bacteria and fungi naturally breed and break down the material.

3. This causes the compost heap to gain a little heat and under these conditions the microorganisms flourish.

4. The activity then stops and the pile cools down.

5. Worms and insects naturally enter and break down the tougher materials.

6. After 9 months your compost/fertiliser is ready.

The things that you should add to your compost pile include hair and fur, paper, straw, animal bedding, egg shells, plant matter, teabags and coffee granules, horse manure and leaves.

However, you should under no circumstances add meat or fish, coal ash, animal waste, nappies and other human matter, dairy products, cooked foods, coloured paper, treated wood, diseased plants or weeds.

How to Build a Compost Bin

Step by step instructions on building a compost bin:

1. You could skip all the work and buy one from a DIY or Garden Centre.

2. To build one instead, create a wooden frame with around 300 litres capacity (the size that you want your compost bin to be) and attach it to the ground by posts.

3. Create a wooden lid in order to keep the rain out.

4. Position the bin in a well lit area of the garden with plenty of drainage as well as being out of the wind if possible.

5. Place the compost bin on soil rather than concrete and break the soil beneath it up to allow drainage.

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