What Materials Can Be Composted?

Regardless of your opinion on climate change, composting your extra foods and natural wastes can only ever be a good thing. You can fuel your garden, create natural “fertilizer” for plants that you want to grow and that other people want to grow with ease. In short, you can become a more active contributor to the circle of life which, we can all agree, is a beautiful thing. However getting into composting can sometimes feel like a totally new hobby. There’s equipment that people talk you into getting, and there’s loads of guidelines that you have to learn before you can even get started. However, getting into composting isn’t that complex, in fact, as a company that specializes in recycling organic materials, we think composting is easy to get started with. So, what are the basic guidelines to getting a composting project started? Let’s take a look.

The Basics of Composting

You may not know it, but the average household in the U.S. produces around 200 pounds of kitchen waste every single year. That’s a lot of trash to be sent to the landfill that doesn’t belong there. Composting, admittedly, isn’t simple and needs to be fed and cared for much like a scientist would feed and care for a sample of bacteria that needs to be propagated and encouraged in its growth. It’s like that, because that’s exactly what happens. In your compost pile, you’ll need to support the microorganisms that work to break down the kitchen refuse and turn it into nutrients and basic building blocks for the compost plants need. It’s a careful balance, ensuring that those delicate microorganisms don’t get exhausted and can multiply and thrive quickly.

Proper composting techniques require a careful mixture of “browns” and “greens.” Greens are generally defined as the materials you’re adding to your compost pile that is rich in nitrogen and proteins. This helps the compost pile heat up as the microorganisms thrive and interact with these proteins that allow them to feed, multiply and become fruitful. The browns that are added to the pile are carbohydrates and they work as food sources for the bacteria in the compost pile and works to break down the contents of the pile. Balancing how much of the browns and greens you add, as well as how much of the other, harder to break down materials you add, works to make a symbiotic relationship and an ecosystem within the compost pile, that can be, admittedly, be difficult to maintain.

Ingredients that take much longer to break down are things like fats of any sort, meats and dairy products. They’re more complex in their composition and take longer to be broken down. These ingredients also make your compost pile smell, and they attract rodents and flies as well as other unwanted scavengers who won’t think your kitchen refuse is trash at all. Composting those heavier ingredients often does require special equipment to ensure no unwanted critters get to your compost pile when they’re out scrounging. It’s best to compost these materials at a commercial composting facility.

Greens Materials Appropriate For Compost

• Coffee grounds
• Used tea bags
• Eggshells
• Seaweed
• Trimmings from plants
• Veggies
• Fruits
• Grass clippings
• Other organic material

Brown Materials Appropriate For Compost

• Natural paper with no additives / colors / plastics (shredded)
• Dryer lint
• Cotton fabric
• Straw
• Dead weeds
• Corn stalks
• Cardboard
• Sawdust

Higher Maintenance Materials for Compost

Some materials can be added to a compost pile but will take longer to break down, and you can expect them to be broken down slowly over time. Paper products, for example, can be added but will take a very long time to break down in comparison to strawberries or some older broccoli. Items like toothpicks and wine corks as well as corn cobs and nut shells take a long time to break down and should often be put on the bottom of the pile initially.

Materials to Avoid

It’s true that there’s lots of different organic things that you can add to your compost pile, but there’s also a large amount of things that are considered organic that you can’t put into your compost pile or else you risk ruining the integrity of your little ecosystem. If you put paper products into your compost pile, be sure to avoid glossy papers or coated paper options as those will be coated with non-organic materials. For other paper products like tissues and paper towels, avoid putting anything in your compost that’s been soaked in non-organic materials like bacon grease, kerosene, makeup and makeup remover. Any chemical that seems like it shouldn’t be added to your compost, probably shouldn’t be. Also avoid twigs and large branches as they won’t break down very quickly simply because it’s too large of an item and from too much at a time. Raspberry and blackberry brambles also put your compost pile at risk of failure as well.

Managing Ratios of Materials

Keeping the ratio of “browns” or carbohydrates and green materials in your compost balanced is, like we mentioned, very crucial. Keeping a ratio of three to four parts carbohydrates and one part greens is often a great start to managing a successful compost pile, but it can be hard to manage what sort of waste you create. For example, when you’re gardening at the beginning of the season, you’ll likely produce more greens as you’ll be creating more plant waste, while later in the summer, you’ll likely be making more carbohydrates and less green materials to add to the compost. If you find that your compost pile isn’t heating up properly, you’ll need to add more green materials. Or if you start to smell your compost pile more, you likely need more brown materials to balance it back out.

Unfortunately, while there are better ways to maintain the ecosystem in your compost, there’s not that many ways to control what sort of trash you’re producing. So, what do you do when making your own compost pile is just too much work to manage, balance and contribute the right ingredients to?

Reach Out to A1 Organics in Colorado

We accept a huge variety of different organic materials to add to our own compost piles that fuel the community and provide excellent, safe STA-Certified Compost for folks all over the state. We accept things like soil, brush and extra long limbs, and other refuse that you simply don’t have the room to add to your compost pile. If your pile can’t handle the materials, ours can. Find out more about the materials we accept, and ask about our partners who collect/deliver refuse materials. We’re happy to take it off your hands to help the community grow beautiful plants, strong trees, reduce our carbon footprint, and more.