A flatter’s guide to composting

Words by Maia Ingoe (she/her)

It’s late on a Monday night and someone’s remembered it’s rubbish collection day tomorrow. Trash is overflowing from the bin stuffed into an awkward kitchen corner, edges of the yellow WCC rubbish bag can barely be seen. Inside: coffee grinds, chip packets, rice thrown out after being left in the fridge too long, a banana skin, scrunched up paper towels, noodles that slipped out of the bowl. Something has a sickly-sweet rotting odour. Pushing aside a yoghurt container, you grip the edges of the bag to pick it up. There’s a brown-black liquid leaking out the bottom and food scraps that missed the edges of the bag have gathered in their own mouldy colony. You unceremoniously plop the bag on the sidewalk. 

In our disgust we aim to get rid of waste as fast as possible, but do we notice what goes into those yellow bags? If we took our time, we’d see that a good portion of it is food waste. On average, half of a household’s waste is organic matter. All of that could be composted, avoiding the smelly stew brewed in our bins every week. 

Composting might not be something we’re used to: for many of us, our knowledge might go as far as the ice-cream container Mum kept on the kitchen bench for food scraps. Maybe you had a compost heap at home, or a worm farm if your parents were into gardening. Likely, taking out the food scraps was the most avoided chore. Now that we have found ourselves in a damp Wellington flat with little or no access to garden space, dealing with food waste has slipped our minds. Rent, flat disputes over dishes, and how to split the bills take priority.

“The thought of handling mangled food is gross,” third-year student, Imogen Fletcher, told me. “It’s something I’ve always taken for granted, since my parents do it—I’ve always been removed from it.” Composting can be an intimidating feat, she said, since she doesn’t really understand the scientific jargon behind it. 

Composting is essentially assisting in the decomposition of organic matter and turning it back into soil with the help of bacteria and fungi, a process that doesn’t happen in a landfill. It’s slow going, but after months, the soil we get is called compost, rich in nutrients and highly valued by growers. Composting is a circular system at the simplest level—returning what we consume back to the ground to fuel the growth of new things, regenerating soil while producing fewer emissions in the process. Kate Hall, director of Ethically Kate, explained the importance of home composting: “[Food is] half of your waste, so it’s easy to reduce half your waste by doing one thing.” She said:

“I also encourage people because it’s fun and it’s good at teaching people about the circular system—it breaks down and grows into plants and other things.” When food waste is relegated to the flat trash corner, it festers rather than grows, and continues to do so when it leaves our kitchens for landfills.

It’s not just the cleanliness of the flat's trash corner at stake: when organic matter is sent to landfill, it has worse effects than the plastic wrappers and coffee cups buried there. Without oxygen to decompose, organics release methane, the gas mostly associated with dairy cows, which is 84 times more potent than CO2. Nine per cent of Aotearoa’s biogenic methane emissions come from organic matter in landfills, translating into four per cent of our total greenhouse gas emissions. It’s a small slice of the pie, but one created simply because it’s easier to bury food waste at the bottom of our bins. 

According to Kate Hall, the most important thing is to “have a good system so it’s really really easy to put organic matter into compost rather than landfill.” That’s as simple as having an ice-cream container in the kitchen for food scraps and keeping all the flatmates on the same page.

You can compost almost any organic matter—that’s all your food scraps and leftovers—but keep meat and dairy products away from the compost bin, as these are more prone to rot and odour. If you're committed, dicing up food scraps into smaller pieces can help speed up the process, as can aerating compost—turning the contents of the compost bin, helping to distribute the oxygen, moisture, and bacteria. Chucking in a few paper scraps, like the cardboard toilet paper rolls that build up a daunting pile in the corner of our flat bathrooms, helps to diversify the compost mix.

So what are the options?

COMMUNITY COMPOSTING

Composting doesn’t have to be individual: outsourcing into the community can be ideal for students with a tight budget or who are unable to set up anything permanent in a temporary flat. Community composting is also great for those living in apartments and inner-city areas with no access to their own outdoor space. Those new to composting can pass their food waste onto an expert, and often learn while they’re at it.

ShareWaste

Kate Hall recommends ShareWaste, an app aiming to improve urban composting by connecting donors (people with food scraps to compost) with hosts, people with a composting set-up able to receive more waste. It’s free and easy to use, but with only a few Wellington locations so far.

Kaicycle

Wellington not-for-profit Kaicycle operates a community compost and urban farming hub out of Newtown. They take household food waste by drop-offs or by collection—all done via bicycle. There’s a monthly cost: $17.25 a month for household drop-offs or $34.50 a month for weekly compost collection of up to 20 litres. Kaicycle currently has 145 customers on collection service and has three drop-off locations in Wellington that were set up last year. The aim is to have more drop-off locations within walking distance for suburbs and target collection to businesses and multi-unit buildings. 

“The current system of landfilling is directly contributing to climate change. Composting changes the linear economy of food waste into [a] circular economy,” said Kate Walnsley, who works with Kaicycle. The compost soil goes towards the regenerative urban farming at Kaicycle, which grows produce that goes right back to feeding the community. “We import so many nutrients into our cities through food which ends up in landfills—so how can we take advantage of those nutrients to grow more food within our cities?”

AT HOME OPTIONS

Basic compost bin 

This one requires a bit of outdoor space, so it doesn’t suit those in the most inner-city areas and apartments. It’s simple and low maintenance: just empty your food scraps into the bin and let it work its magic, decomposing food quicker than when it’s buried in the ground. It's the cheapest at-home method, with most bins easy to purchase for under $40 from a hardware store. But any down-payment can be a stretch on a student budget, especially considering the semi-permanence of this option—not ideal when you might be moving on from the flat in the next month or year. On the other hand, the saved space in those pricey yellow rubbish bags might be worth the cost.

Worm farm

Worm farms are pretty similar to compost bins, except they enlist the help of a super-decomposer: worms. Food scraps feed the worms, which decompose them faster and produce natural garden fertiliser. You’ll have to watch what you put in—worms are fussy and turn away from things like citrus. It’s a higher cost to set up that varies depending on the brand and type of worm farm, and requires more avid attention.

Bokashi

Bokashi is a Japanese method of fermenting compost. Bokashi bins are generally smaller and air-tight, made of one bin with holes sitting inside another. Bokashi takes fruit, vege, meat, and dairy waste, but doesn’t like paper scraps or compostable packaging waste. The key ingredient here is a bokashi ‘sprinkle’, which is rich with microorganisms that help ferment waste. It’s perfect for those with limited space as it can be kept indoors. It’s small, so it’s easy to empty and take with you if you move flats. Bokashi bins can be purchased from most hardware stores but at a higher cost—Aotearoa company Zing Bokashi sells bokashi kits from $70.

For my flat, we are blessed with the outdoor space that comes with living further from the CBD. Between four flatmates we are splitting the cost of setting up our own basic composting bin that can be emptied and moved in the future. Our landlords asked for it not to be permanent so new tenants wouldn’t be stuck with it. We’ve got an ice-cream container on the bench that gets emptied with the trash each week. It’s not perfect—not every food scrap makes it to the compost—and we learn as we go. Every flat has its own limitations, but composting is flexible, allowing us to find a solution that works for us.