Getting scrappy about sourcing scraps for your compost pile.
Everywhere you look, somebody is throwing *something* away that you could put in your pile.
Building a compost is easy. Maintaining one can be a little trickier. It’s not just the potential smells, the rats, the bears… it’s knowing what materials to add and when and in what proportion and order, in addition—and importantly!—to figuring out how you’ll manage to produce these materials at the rate that your compost is going to need them. Phew.
All composts need a balance of elements—roughly two parts high-carbon material to one part high-nitrogen material—in order to generate efficient decomposition, but most people I know tend to manifest an excess of one element or the other. Rarely both. For example, they may love to cook and have lots of food waste (nitrogen!), but live in a small apartment without a yard (lack of carbon). Alternatively, they may have a busy job and barely time to eat at home, but a huge tree in their yard that will consistently shower the ground with leaves (carbon). A good way around this issue of imbalance is to anticipate it with a quick lifestyle audit.
Ask yourself:
What does your household waste look like? What types of things are you throwing away and how often?
Are they things that are high in nitrogen, like food scraps or coffee grounds, or do you mostly deal with carbon materials, perhaps from being an active landscaper or having a lot of cardboard boxes from deliveries?
Do your daily habits and surroundings generate a continuous balance of both high-carbon and high-nitrogen materials?
Okay, good.
Now you have a generalized sense of what materials you will have on-hand regularly for your pile—and which ones you will need to source from somewhere outside your home. Luckily, no matter who you are and where you live, I guarantee that you are surrounded by opportunities to source your missing element.
If you lack nitrogen…
Juice shops. Juice pulp is like rocket fuel for compost piles. A dose of high-nitrogen material that is already pulverized into the tiniest possible pieces, thus primed for microbial digestion.
Coffee shops. Ask the person behind the counter at your favorite coffee shop what they do with their coffee grounds. You may be able to intercept. In some cases, you can even provide them a bucket to fill that you offer to pick up and drop back off again.
Small grocery stores. Food that shows up bruised or moldy often gets thrown in the trash. Chat up your local grocer to see if they’d be willing to give it to you, once in awhile, instead. Also, I specify “small” here because bigger corporations tend to have stricter rules and larger volumes of waste that would be more difficult for an individual to navigate.
If you lack carbon…
Small grocery stores (again). The produce sold by your local grocer often arrives in cardboard boxes. Dozens and unbelievable dozens of lovely, compostable cardboard boxes. I have stopped by my corner store to relieve them of the burden of their cardboard produce boxes on more than one occasion. (See picture above.)
Local tree trimmers. Make friends with the tree trimmer on your block and ask them if you can bag up some of their wood chips to bring home. You’re often saving them time and energy to do so, and they will gratefully accept.
Delivery-addicted friends. Intercept a friend’s cardboard boxes before she can stuff them in the recycling.
Craigslist for “Free Mulch” posts. People will often post when they have a pile they want somebody else to deal with. Again, you’re often saving somebody time and energy to make use of their mulch. One person’s trash, etc.
You can also outright purchase materials.
Max from The Cactus Store told me that he buys animal bedding from a local feed and tack store, which he then uses as a carbon supplement for his compost. It runs $10 for a 40 pound bag.
Over time, you might come to find that curiosity about the material world fills you with delight. Objects in your routine are no longer disconnected entities, available to you for their aesthetic pleasure or brief utility. Instead, they practically vibrate with potential life. Garbage becomes especially fascinating. Another person might throw out that load of wet cardboard, but you can do something tremendous with it. You can guide its transformation into fertile earth.
Nurturing your curiosity about the world of materials around you, in this way, will have a tremendous impact on your composting practice. I do encourage spontaneous and continuous investigation. Start researching the things in your house. Think about what books are made of and also your dryer lint. With practice, you’ll develop some fluency around what things are made from. In fact, you may even find yourself subconsciously diagramming the components of every material you encounter. You can and should also just start to talk to people around you. Make conversation with local business owners about what they do with their waste. Chat up pet owners. Muse aloud to friends. You’ll be amazed at the opportunities that arise, in addition to the new connections and friendships.
These days, I get a lot of very funny phone calls from people who are looking for better things to do with their garbage then send it to a landfill. I once received a text from the headquarters of a popular clothing brand. They had left out a stack of empty cardboard boxes over night and it had rained, rendering them unusable for shipment to customers. Was there something I could do with them? I nearly jumped out of my seat. The cardboard, now a pre-moistened source of microbe-nutritious carbon, soon ended up composted into fertilizer at a succession of community gardens around Los Angeles. Another time, a friend messaged me about an artist’s exhibition he had just attended. “The sculpture is huge and made entirely out of manure,” he wrote. “Would you be interested?”
