Composting is easy – everyone’s doing it!
Coleraine Borough Council ran a free composting demonstration recently at Causeway Street Recycling Site, Portrush.
Thanks to funding from the Department of the Environment’s Rethink Waste campaign, Coleraine Borough Council organised the event to demonstrate the benefits of home composting and how simple this is to do.
Conservation Volunteers Northern Ireland carried out the demonstration and had their mobile “Green Machine” and displays to highlight suitable materials for home composting.
Making compost at home couldn’t be easier with a home composter or compost heap. Every day items from egg shells, tea bags and vegetable peelings to animal bedding and even the contents of the vacuum cleaner – all can go towards making nutritious compost. Garden waste such as grass cuttings, leaves, hedge trimmings, weeds, twigs and small branches (cut into pieces) can also be composted at home in a composter or compost heap.
Composting is an inexpensive, natural process that transforms your garden and kitchen waste into a valuable food for your flowers and plants. Give composting a go to reduce your carbon footprint, help keep our rates down, produce a useful product from rubbish and help protect precious peatland habitats.
Fiona Watters, Waste & Recycling Officer with Coleraine Borough Council explains, “People get into composting for all sorts of reasons. Some of us are motivated through a love of gardening; many don’t like to waste leftovers or out-of-date food, preferring to put them to good use by making compost; some of us are keen to reduce our carbon footprint; and many people simply want to send less waste to landfill.”
When rubbish is sent to landfill, air cannot get to the organic waste. This means that as food and garden wastes break down they create a harmful greenhouse gas – methane – which may cause global warming and climate change. However, when this same waste is composted above ground at home, oxygen helps the waste to decompose and hardly any methane is produced.
Fiona continued: “Making compost at home really is a win-win for people and the planet – composting at home for just one year can save global warming gases equivalent to all the Carbon Dioxide (C02) your kettle produces in a year. Plus, after about ten months, you will have a free fertilizer that your flowers and pot plants will love.
Caption: Members of the public attending Coleraine Borough Council’s home composting demonstration in Portrush with Susan Lynn (right) of Conservation Volunteers Northern Ireland
For further information on how you can reduce, reuse and recycle log on to rethinkwasteni.org.
