If you have a lawn or garden, you can easily transform food scraps into healthy, eco-friendly, compost. All you need to compost is basically a bin with holes at the bottom. But apartment-dwellers who don’t want to send fruit peels and veggie pieces to the landfill have a harder go of it. You need more involved equipment — and have to get more involved yourself.
This is why I haven’t started composting yet.
In fact, none of my local green, apartment-dwelling friends compost. And it’s not cuz we’re lazy! Anna actually keeps her food scraps in a bag in her fridge, then once a week or so, bikes the load over to her parents’ place — which has an outdoor composter.
It’s just tough to compost indoors. Jenn of Tiny Choices wrote a great post about the 4 ways to compost indoors. Guess what: Jenn doesn’t compost herself.
And I don’t blame her. And I don’t blame Beth of Fake Plastic Fish either, who names a fifth method — the Urban Compost Tumbler — and concludes: “I’ve found it’s not as wonderful as I’d hoped.”
Lemme be a debbie downer for the moment and show why each of these 5 options suck:
1. NatureMill Indoor Composter. Downer: It costs $375.
2. Bokashi composter. Downer: It doesn’t fully compost, thereby requiring that you put the bokashi’d goods into the ground or another compost bin to finish up. Um, if I had a piece of ground to call my own, or a separate compost bin, why’d I get a Bokashi?
3. Vermicomposting. Downer: It not only requires worms, but requires worm supervision to make sure they don’t die. Considering I’ve accidentally killed mint plants — supposedly plants that are supposed to grow like weeds with no supervision — I really doubt I’d be able to keep worms alive, much less healthy.
4. Urban Compost Tumbler. Downer: It requires a careful mix of green and brown material; a mismix will make it smell bad. It also requires flipping a very heavy object; some people can’t do it alone, and I like living alone.
5. Let someone else compost for you. Downer: It is not actually an indoor composting method. In addition, I don’t know of any official composting programs I can take advantage of in L.A. If you live in New York though, let Jasmin the Worsted Witch point you toward a composting program that can help you out.
Are you a successful apartment composter? Share your story to encourage us all, and I’ll include them in a future post. In the meantime, I’m going to figure out how I can push Santa Monica, the city I live in, to give us green bins we can put our food scraps in for city composting. Homeowners get these green bins, but not apartment dwellers. Surely there’s a way to change this –
If you DO have a lawn or garden, compost! You might be able to save yourself a few bucks by first checking to see if your city has a program to encourage composting. L.A. sells composting bins at subsidized rates to Angelenos, for example! Unfortunately — as usual — these bins are for outdoor composting only…. Why do cities cater so much to homeowners, and rarely to apartment dwellers?
Image courtesy of nyccompost.org
[crossposted on BlogHer]
i’ve been really considering this vermicomposting - i’ll let you know how it goes…i found a guide published in my area, looks quite extensive:
http://www.ciwmb.ca.gov/publications/Schools/56001007.pdf
Comment by madcaca — April 5, 2008 @ 11:26 pm
I’m pretty sure you know this, but the city of Santa Monica sells discounted bins too (the Smith & Hawken Biostack) — and unlike LA, they’ll sell them to non-residents for $10 more.
Comment by meg — April 6, 2008 @ 9:49 am
The idea situation would be neighborhood composting, just like neighborhood gardening, where apartment dwellers could take their compost locally and share in the “goods” when they were finished. It would be nice to be able to actually benefit from the compost we make (potting soil for indoor potted plants, for example) than sending it away to a commercial composter to be sold for their profit.
And, while the city of San Francisco’s Jepson Prairie compost facility gives away a certain amount of compost for free to city residents, you have to get in your car and drive all the way out to Vacaville to get it. How about all the apartment dwellers who don’t have cars in the first place?
Anyway, it’s a dream. But wouldn’t it be sweet if each neighborhood had its own local garden where we could contribute our buckets of food scraps every few days?
Comment by Beth aka Fake Plastic Fish — April 6, 2008 @ 11:50 am
I’m having some luck with Bokashi in my tiny studio apartment. Yes, it’s more or less by using a second compost bin, but the big draw to using Bokashi is the lack of a rotting food smell. I don’t have all the details worked out yet, but here’s how its going so far: http://pickyvegan.blogspot.com/search/label/bokashi
Comment by Jodie — April 6, 2008 @ 4:36 pm
The NatureMill actually starts at $299, and they have free shipping and group discounts ($249) which is not much more than the other options (especially when you consider the bokashi replacement material that you have to buy).
Comment by Russ — April 6, 2008 @ 4:51 pm
So I do collect my food scraps in my freezer, then bring them to a greenmarket to be composted by a cool organization, which also sells bags of finished compost as a way of earning income. I was recently in a Whole Foods and saw that they were selling those bags of soil, which I thought was so awesome! I do feel somewhat lame for handing off my scraps for someone else to compost, but I’m so glad that the finished product is then staying local and has a chance to green this city. (But Russ has a good point, above, about the cost of the Naturemill potentially being offset by the lifelong cost of Bokashi…)
Comment by Jenn — April 6, 2008 @ 6:14 pm
I’ve been composting since last summer. I was worried about killing worms as well since I killed my lavender plant last year, but the thought of throwing away so much organic matter really bothered me.
We almost did kill our worms and it was due to the high temperature last summer. Then our worms started turning white in color and I learned that it was because of the high levels of acidity (too many lemon peels being composted). A little bit of garden lime (available at home depot) solved that problem.
We also had another problem with fruit flies last summer. We quit eating bananas and the fruit fly problem went away…so this may be a problem to those attached to banana eating. :) There isn’t any bad smell or anything, or maybe I’m just used to it. But I will continue to compost when I move to LA from Philly toward the end of the summer.
The downside is the initial cost. I paid about $250 for my bin and worms. And the bin I purchased has layers, so its easy to move them around (even for a woman) as the worms travel between the layers. The other downside is that in the cold season (I went without heat for most of this winter), the worms don’t eat as much so we were freezing much of our scraps. And we have a large fridge which may not be an option for most apartment dwellers.
I’ve been reading your car free posts with great interest since people online seem convinced that car free living is impossible in LA. But we’re car free and intend to remain so when we move.
Comment by Beany — April 7, 2008 @ 6:25 am
Also…you don’t really need that much supervision. Since there are three layers in various states of uh…doneness, the worms keep busy for about 2 weeks without problems. You have to turn the thing to aerate it every once in a while. For some reason the worms tend to group together in certain sections only and turning it once in a while breaks up the party. I do check on it every few days because I’m just exciting that way. Plus I cook every day so I’m always adding something into the bin anyway.
Comment by Beany — April 7, 2008 @ 6:32 am
I just bought a worm bin from Santa Monica last week. They have “Wriggly Ranch” bins for $27.50 for residents and, as someone else mentioned, for $30-something for everyone else. Go any time during business hours:
http://www.smgov.net/swm/contact_us.htm
The bin is easy to set up, and comes with bedding and a helpful booklet.
Worms are available at the Santa Monica farmer’s market on Main Street on Sundays ($5 for 50 worms) and some Sustainable Works instructors have them as well. Also, you can often get free worms on Freecycle.
It has only been a week, but so far so good. The worms require very little maintenance: keep them moist, give them food. It takes a while to get enough worms to really compost all your “green” waste, but it is well worth it. I have my bin out on the balcony of my apartment, but it could easily be inside without a problem.
Comment by new to worms — April 7, 2008 @ 3:49 pm
I have been using a worm bin for composting my kitchen scraps for 2 years. I have successfully killed mint and yet the worms have been quite easy to take care of. They even survived a huge spill where the bin toppled over dumping all the contents, worms, castings, food, and liquid from the bottom chamber. It was an unfortunate mess and I lost a lot of the bedding for the worms, but they kept on eating and soon enough had a strong community again.
I started my bin after a free composting workshop offered by L.A. county where I purchased the bin with worms for something around $50 or $60. The county still offers the workshops. This site has a schedule for the workshop: http://ladpw.org/epd/sg/ws_schedule.cfm
It was enough information to get me going very easily.
Comment by Melissa — April 7, 2008 @ 4:10 pm
Hi,
I have to agree with some of the sentiments shared here. I’m WAY better at killing plants than I am at killing worms! haha :-)
While there IS a bit of a learning curve with vermicomposting, it is very easy once you get the hang of it. In my opinion the key is moderation - especially when you first start a new bin. It is SO much easier to overfeed your worms than underfeed.
Excess food can lead to anaerobic conditions and the production of various nasty compounds.
I recommend mixing up your bedding material with a bunch of food scraps, moistening the mix, then letting it sit for a couple weeks before even adding the worms. This allows time for the microbial community to develop (worms get their nutrition primarily from the microbes that are decomposing the food wastes).
Anyway - just my 2 cents worth! :-)
(yeah, I’m a little biased - haha)
Bentley
Comment by Compost Guy — April 8, 2008 @ 7:49 am
i just saw this wonderful video on youtube via treehugger on how to make your own tumble composter for only 8dollars. but she also uses a lawn mover … so perhaps not ideal in an apartment …
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/09/diy-compost-tumbler.php
Comment by Johan — September 8, 2008 @ 6:29 am