Common Home Composting Materials
When you’re ready to start composting you’ll quickly find you don’t need to look far for materials to add to your compost pile. That’s actually one of the great things about composting: It doesn’t matter where you are or what your lifestyle is like, you’ll soon discover great composting materials are all around you.
Composting at home is the easiest approach to take of course, since this is where you freqently cook, eat, and clean. One of the best ways to tackle new composting efforts is to try and sort the different parts of your home, then take stock of what each area can offer to your compost bin. This helps you know where the most active composting materials are when you need them, and you’ll get ideas for neutralizing materials to control odor as well. So let’s step through each of the common areas of a home…
1. Kitchen - This is where the bulk of your composting materials will come from, particularly materials which help activate the compost pile and make it decompose more quickly. The kitchen will give you rich organic material from fruits and vegetable scraps, used coffee and tea grounds, shredded paper wrappings, and even old paper or burlap bags too. When you’re cleaning the kitchen rest assured that you can toss your dust and even lint from behind the refrigerator can be put into the compost pile too. In fact, old food such as ketchup and mustard, wilted lettuce and rotten tomatoes can go in too.
2. Dining Room - Left over food from meals can be added to your compost bin, as can paper napkins and paper towels. Don’t forget the dust and dirt from this room when you clean too.
3. Den, Office or Reading Room - If you have an office or study space in your home then you have a rich source of compost here too: Paper. Old post it notes, lists of to do items, shopping lists, old schedule pages and more can all be added to your compost pile. If you tend to eat in this area then any left over food …
