Home Composting for dummies

Why wouldn’t you want to turn your free kitchen waste into good quality compost you can use on your plants!?

For those with private gardens or a bit of outdoor space*, composting certainly seems to make a whole lot of sense. However, for me it’s not always gone in one end and come out of the other as a nice dark, crumbly compost like the stuff you buy from the garden centre.

Newly discovered to me, the RecycleNow website however has had a fantastic makeover with some good advice on home composting answering the most common queries such as (I apparently wasn’t aerating enough!):

• What can I put in my bin?
• What to do if it’s too green or too brown
• Can I put this in my compost bin?

Also check out the Royal Horticultural Society’s guide to home composting and the How To Videos from GardenOrganic.org.uk.

* There are some options for those with little or no outdoor space, such as the NatureMill. However the fairly steep price tag might put most off, and for those in rental accomodation a simple counter-top solution (with filters to prevent smells) might be more suitable. Councils will often provide a similar tub to you for free, so it’s worth checking with your local office.

No more cling film!

I’ve been taking sandwiches into the office for a while now, and am always surprised at how expensive it can be to buy a reasonable lunch on the occasions I forget, or run out of bread/filling!

However, to keep those sani’s fresh I have always used cling-film and I have to admit only recently really considered that my consumption of this particularly un-environmentally friendly material was really adding up over time. Cling film is extremely difficult to recycle, and so almost always ends up in landfill where it can take a century or more to degrade.

Although more biodegradable alternatives are possible, they seem slow to have arrived on supermarket shelves.

So what are the other options? Covering the three pillars of any good environmentally friendly approach (Reduce, Reuse & Recycle), Mrs. Green over at ‘My Zero Waste‘ has a really comprehensive guide to reducing your use of cling-film.

I really like the suggestion of re-using other packaging as sandwich bag alternatives, that might otherwise be thrown away. If you put vegetables into those thin plastic bags at supermarkets, why not consider keeping these and using them a few times more? Mrs.Green also suggests inner-bags of cereal packets, though I think these might be a bit too dusty and full of crumbs to easily wash out & reuse.

However, both mine and Mrs.Green’s favourite alternative option is the Onya ‘Wrap n Mat’ bag – a re-usable and washable wrap for food. The wraps are made from PEVA; which is similar to PVC but without the chlorine that partly makes PVC such a bad friend to the environment. (PEVA is also apparently commonly now used in body bags!)

Although incredibly simple, what makes the Onya wrap such a good option is that they come in a range of designs and, similar to other Onya products, encourage us to change our bad habits through good looking and well designed alternatives.

Although the Wrap-n-Mat is by no means expensive, at just over £4, this is unfortunately (another) one of those ocassions where the alternative option is financially at a disadvantage – cling-film currently remains the much cheaper choice. However the environmental benefits of the Onya Wrap-n-Mat I believe make it an excellent way to help reduce or eliminate your usage of cling-film.

UPDATE - I’ve recently taken delivery of my Wrap-n-Mat, & while I’m pleased to say Onya’s packaging is minimal & biodegradable, I was disappointed to see the Wrap-n-Mat itself housed in it’s very own plastic wrap! Sigh! The producers clearly haven’t twigged the irony of this yet, but I hope Onya can put some pressure on their suppliers to be more sensible!

Standard Cling-Film	Onya Wrap-n-Mat
c.£1.80 from Asda – or around 3p per metre, 1p per sandwich	c.£4.25 exlcuding P&P from Onya
Yuk! High environmental cost due to extremely long lifespan of material and impact on wildlife	Environmental savings – washable & reusable so reduces plastic waste going to landfill

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Thanks to My Zero Waste for the great post on this – it’s also worth checking out these tips on how to reduce packaging and waste in packed lunches more generally.