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 can also be tossed in.
4. Pet Areas - Whether your pets are in kennels or they roam the house, chances are you collect pet hair constantly. And this makes an excellent addition to your compost pile. If you keep small pets like gerbils or birds, then their woodchips and newspaper can be added too. Even pet droppings can be added to a compost pile.
5. Bath & Laundry - Don’t throw away the lint from your dryer when you’re washing clothes. Instead, add it to your compost pile. The same goes for hair from the shower and sink drains, and hair that comes from cleaning your hair brush or comb.
6. Yards & Gardens - The outside of your home is one of the best resources for composting materials. When you cut the grass, if you can’t stand to leave it sit and decompose where it lies then collect it and add it to the compost pile. The same applies to raking leaves: If you must rake them up then be sure to add these to the compost pile too.
When you’re trimming the rose bushes or tree branches, break the trimmings up into small pieces and add them to the compost pile. If you have dead flower heads, pine needles, hay, straw, or anything else organic that you can think of, it all goes into the compost pile. Just colect anything you can find which isn’t plastic or metal, and chances are it’s a great candidate for composting.
Now, while pretty much anything organic can be composted there will be exceptions based on where you live. Putting meat and dairy products into the compost pile can create a very bad smell that will offend your neighbors, and possibly get you into trouble with the local health department. So keep your area and neighbors in mind when selecting items to compost, and have fun discovering all the various things from around your home which can be composted!
