Get all the dirt on composting at home

By Mary Bandziukas

Do you bag or compost your leaves? Have you asked your landscaper whether he carts yard waste to a composting facility? Do you have a worm bin somewhere in the kitchen or closet? Do you have a compost pile out back? Do you purchase compost in bags from the garden shop? None of the above?

Composting is a way to recycle organic materials such as fallen leaves and old house plants into a dark, crumbly, soil-like material that can be returned to your garden or flowerpots to fertilize your plants. Organics are mixed together, kept moist, and stirred to add air. Organisms such as microbes and worms nestle into this pile of organics. If done right, the composting material heats up from the microbial activity. Usable compost is ready in as little as six weeks, or as long as a year, depending on the ambient temperature and the level of the composter’s effort.

It’s a little biology and a little chemistry, and can be done indoors or outdoors, in spaces large or small. New York City encourages composting, and you can purchase compost bins and take lessons in composting through the Botanical Gardens in each borough.

Making dirt might not sound glamorous, or important, but here are some of the benefits:

• Saving natural resources. When you fertilize your garden with compost, you don’t need to purchase fertilizers that required natural resources to make them.
• Reducing carbon emissions. If you compost at home, trucks are not ferrying your yard waste to a distant composting facility or land fill.
• Improving water quality in the Hudson and Harlem rivers. Compost helps soil absorb rainwater and helps keep both the water and soil from washing downhill into surrounding waterways.
• Conser ving drinking water. When soil absorbs rainwater, gardens don’t have to be watered as much.
• Reducing other greenhouse gasses. When organics are buried in landfills, they produce methane. When we use fertilizers instead of compost, the fertilizers enter surrounding waterways and create nitrous oxide. Both of these gases are much more potent greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide.

Last year, organics made up the largest proportion — 47 percent — of residential garbage and bulk items set out for curbside collection, as reported in the New York Department of Sanitation 2007 Annual Report. That’s almost half.

This year, the figure will be higher because the department has suspended its fall leaf collections. Nearly 18,000 tons of leaves were collected and composted last year. This year, they will all be collected as garbage.

Tr y composting your organic waste, and see how much your garbage is reduced. Use compost in your garden or flowerpots, and never buy fertilizer again. With a little encouragement, you might discover that there’s a bit of an organic chemist inside yourself.

For step-by-step instructions on how to compost, go to www.riverdalepress.com and see the column online.

Mary Bandziukas, a Queens resident, has worked for more than 15 years as an urban planner and environmental program manager. She has been a consultant with the Riverdale Nature Preservancy for the past decade.

Sustainable Riverdale appears in the third issue of each month’s Riverdale Press. It is the work of the Riverdale Nature Preservancy, done in conjunction with The Press and the Natural Resources Defense Council. Have an issue you’d like to see addressed? E-mail newsroom@riverdalepress.com, and put Sustainable Riverdale in the subject line, or write to The Riverdale Press, 6155 Broadway, Bronx, NY 10471.

This is part of the October 16, 2008 online edition of The Riverdale Press.

Have an opinion on this matter? We'd like to hear from you. Click here.