Green Cambridge supports both "backyard" Doing composting where you live gives you local access to finished compost from the items you use everyday. You can put that right back into your soil, pots, and flower beds around your home without any transportation costs. But not everyone can compost at their home. That's why we're really excited to see Cambridge's new city-wide curbside composting! It's composting for the rest of us.
With this new program available to all residents, the organic materials you throw away are sent to Charlestown where it is screened to remove contaminants and blended into a slurry. The slurry then goes into an anaerobic digestion tank that uses microbes to eat the organic material, releasing methane. The methane is captured to make clean energy in the form of heat and electricity. Remaining solids are made into a nutrient-rich fertilizer for use on agricultural fields in Massachusetts.
How Can I Do Backyard Composting?
Composting at home is easy. Just purchase a compost bin, one of the more popular ones being the Yimby Tumbler Composter. Just fill with your food scraps, give a turn every week, and you'll have fresh compost available to you as needed.
What is Composting?
Composting is nature's way of recycling and is one of the best and easiest things you can do to reduce waste and grow healthy and sustainable garden or houseplants. Under controlled conditions, organic material decomposes and is transformed by critters in the soil such as bacteria, insects, earthworms and fungi that recycle nitrogen, potash, phosphorus, and other plant nutrients into humus.
Why Compost?
With this new program available to all residents, the organic materials you throw away are sent to Charlestown where it is screened to remove contaminants and blended into a slurry. The slurry then goes into an anaerobic digestion tank that uses microbes to eat the organic material, releasing methane. The methane is captured to make clean energy in the form of heat and electricity. Remaining solids are made into a nutrient-rich fertilizer for use on agricultural fields in Massachusetts.
How Can I Do Backyard Composting?
Composting at home is easy. Just purchase a compost bin, one of the more popular ones being the Yimby Tumbler Composter. Just fill with your food scraps, give a turn every week, and you'll have fresh compost available to you as needed.
What is Composting?
Composting is nature's way of recycling and is one of the best and easiest things you can do to reduce waste and grow healthy and sustainable garden or houseplants. Under controlled conditions, organic material decomposes and is transformed by critters in the soil such as bacteria, insects, earthworms and fungi that recycle nitrogen, potash, phosphorus, and other plant nutrients into humus.
Why Compost?
- Save Time and Money. Reduce soil and fertilizer purchases while decreasing local disposal costs. By composting, you won’t have to bag and drag yard waste to the curb for collection!
- Curb Climate Change. When organic is buried in the landfill, methane is produced, a greenhouse gas that is 72 times as potent as carbon dioxide over a 20 year timeframe.
- Protect Groundwater. In the landfill, rainwater collects contaminants when it comes into contact with garbage. This liquid " leachate", can pollute ground water, lakes, and rivers.
- Enrich The Soil. Compost reduces erosion by improving soil structure and adds essential nutrients to the soil, helping to grow trouble-free plants with less water, fertilizer or pesticides. Plants love compost!
- Learn And Have Fun! Children and adults develop a fascination with their compost piles. The complete recycler composts food and yard wastes!
