DIY composting
Why framing food waste through the politics of recycling needs revision
A garden based on the twin principles of edible cultivation and being good for pollinators is a garden with an insatiable demand for compost and soil conditioner.
How that demand is satisfied varies.
The market solution turns gardeners into consumers. It requires the recurrent annual purchasing of large volumes of organic material, in the form of 60-litre bags of compost. The hard truth of the matter is that these products are a long way from sustainable. Not only do they come surrounded in large amounts of unrecyclable plastic packaging, but many also remain peat-based. So, whilst they nurture and support plant life, these products are far from carbon neutral. Weaning commercial and amateur growers off of the peat-based products they’ve long been accustomed to using is a major challenge.
Rather different is the DIY solution. Here gardeners are producers. There are two main routes to producing DIY compost/soil improver. One source of compostable material is leaf matter. I wrote about this, and the scavenging activities that underpin it, in the post on Autumn Leaves. Another source is the inedible parts of fruit and vegetables – the inner cores of apples, peppers, carrot and parsnip tops, potato peelings, banana and citrus skins and the like – plus the leftovers from drinking tea and ground coffee. This matter is the remainder of some, but not all, household food and drink consumption. It therefore exemplifies circular principles – but at the household scale.
Learning to produce compost from inedible fruit and vegetable matter is – as I’m finding – a journey of active experimentation. First to contend with is the question of a suitable container (in my case, a ‘Dalek’), and then, ‘where to put it?’ But the real fun starts when one starts to put stuff inside the bin – for this is not a case of ‘dump and leave it to get on with it’. That results in a slimy, undecomposed mess. Instead, active care and maintenance are in order – mixing ‘greens’ and ‘browns’, learning what they are in the first place, frequent turning over with a garden fork and watering. Plus, there’s a need to think hard about what one is actually putting in to that compost bin. Removing stickers from banana skins is an obvious one. Less obvious is to remove spent tea from tea bags – particularly when all the books and online resources suggest otherwise. Although there are some ‘plastic free’ options on the market, most manufactured tea bags contain small amounts of plastic. They are used to seal the tea bag and to get it to hold its shape when hot water is poured on it.
And then there’s the wait – for, once a compost bin is full, it still needs to rot down. Waiting for usable compost to materialise means that another bin needs to be started – otherwise all those food scraps are going to end up in the general household bin. The consensus is that composting at both the household and neighbourhood scale requires not one but three bins; one to fill, one actively decomposing and the third supplying compost to use. It's this which explains why DIY v market are not either/or compost options but rather a ‘both’. The time and space required to produce DIY compost mean that household and neighbourhood scale composting initiatives are at best supplements to, rather than supplanting of, the market.
Small-scale composting, then, may not be the answer to the challenge of producing an environmentally sustainable growing medium at scale but there is another reason why household and neighbourhood scale composting matters. This is its potential with regard to the challenge of reducing waste.
That potential is immediately obvious to anyone engaging in household composting for the first time. Proponents of composting state that it results in a reduction of 35-40% in the amount of material being placed in the general (or residual) waste bin. In my experience, eating a largely vegetarian diet, the reduction is even bigger – of the order of 50%. Not only does that have the knock-on effect of reducing the total amount of household discard, and reducing the material characterisation of that discard to little more than plastic films, it keeps a large amount of organic matter out of the residual waste bin. This needs to happen if this material is to be kept out of landfills.
Such a win-win combination ought to make household and local neighbourhood scale composting a policy priority. Yet, in the UK it doesn’t. Why’s that?
The answer to that question lies in the politics of waste and recycling.
The latest waste policy in England mandates the collection of food waste by local authorities by 2026 at the latest. Underpinning that mandate is the need to keep organic material out of landfills and to increase recycling rates.
Adding food waste to local authority waste/recycling collections generally adds about 10% to a local authority’s recycling rate. That is evidenced by a comparison between those local authorities which have food waste collection services and those that don’t. Achieving this level of performance improvement though requires that the food waste produced by households is actually collected. And therein lies the political problem with household and neighbourhood scale composting initiatives: whilst they reduce waste, they divert a large amount of what’s included in the category of food waste away from local authority collection services. This material therefore is excluded from any calculation of a local authority’s recycling rate.
Good for the environment it may be, but local composting is not good when it comes to the politics of demonstrating recycling and diversion from waste. More strongly, it keeps recycling rates suppressed. So, it is politically expedient not to encourage it.
In my view, it’s this politics of recycling that’s one of the reasons why thinking in terms of the category ‘food waste’ persists. Putting the remainder of household food consumption in one catch-all category (‘food waste’) elides the very real material differences in that remainder, obscuring from consumers the potential for a fraction of what’s currently construed as a waste stream to be turned to compost. It also suggests that the challenge of ‘food waste’ is to be addressed through undifferentiated ‘food waste’ solutions that in turn demand food waste collections.
In the UK, local authority food waste collections provide the feedstock for large scale commercial anaerobic digestion (AD) plants. The primary product of these plants is a biogas, which is fed into the national gas grid. The less talked about output of these plants is a ‘digestate’ – or, what was once hoped to be a marketable compost-like material. The economics of AD processing, however, aided by financial incentives that qualify these plants for renewables payments, ensured that the plants were designed to chase the more lucrative gas product. In short what was encouraged was the rapid processing of largely unsorted food waste derived from households and commercial and institutional kitchens.
It will not surprise DIY composters to learn that those decisions resulted in a ‘digestate’ that regulators subsequently failed to certify as a marketable growing medium. Regulatory failure has meant that that the large volumes of digestate produced by commercial AD plants is classified as a waste – which means it mostly ends up in a landfill, or the very destination that food waste collection by local authorities is supposed to avoid. But then, because it’s been collected and counted in recycling calculations, that fate remains obscured.
This harsh reality suggests a need to pause a mandate for compulsory food waste collection
Beyond that, what’s needed is 1) to stop seeing food waste exclusively through the lens of waste and recycling, that is, as ‘food waste’, and 2) to start talking about it differently. A useful first step would be to break the category food waste down into materially differentiated types of stuff, and then to highlight that some of this stuff – when well-tended and cared for – has the potential to supplement a household’s annual compost needs, at no additional cost other than the outlay that it took to purchase as food. There’s a need for some straightforward talking about how inedible vegetable and fruit matter can be turned into a low/no cost valuable resource.
The practicalities, however, remain. Many people – especially those with gardens and yards - have the outdoor space to engage with DIY composting. But, not everyone has such a space, most especially those living in flats and apartments. Then there is the mismatch between an aesthetic that many now regard as normative for their outdoor spaces and composting. Outdoor ‘room equivalents’ majoring on seating and socialising and framed through fashion leave little room for a container dedicated to compost. In these circumstances, local, street and neighbourhood scale composting initiatives, of the type that are to be found in Brighton and in multiple areas of Leeds, would seem to offer the most promising route forwards. They are an inspiration for us all.