Home Composting with Fora

One of our solutions to help solve the plastic pollution crisis is to use home compostable sachets as our cleaner refill packaging. Once empty, these sachets can be chopped up into small pieces (best practice if you want them to compost faster), then added to your home compost to biodegrade. If we are to achieve the sustainable future that we envision, composting has a critical role to play.

In the natural world, there is no such thing as waste. Humans have invented the concept of landfills - of throwing resources into a hole in the ground, instead of finding solutions to keep them in use or return them to nature. Landfills not only perpetuate the concept of ‘waste’, but they also create a lifeless environment where when materials break down, they discharge toxic chemicals and gas.

In the natural world, everything grows, dies, then decays - becoming food for another organism. It is the circle of life.

By sending food scraps and other organic matter (basically anything that was once living) to a landfill, you’re disrupting that circle of life and stopping those nutrients from getting back into the soil. Also, by sending organic matter into a landfill methane gas is produced. A gas with a global warming potential 28 times greater than carbon dioxide.

In an average home compost, there are trillions of different life forms - from worms to larvae and fungi, to microorganisms. It’s basically a tiny over-populated city of organisms.

For these organisms to thrive, and your home compost to thrive, they need the ideal balance between nitrogen, carbon, water, and oxygen (the same as almost all life on this planet). If you have too much or too little of any of these four building blocks, then the materials in your compost will take longer to biodegrade, and / or your compost could smell terrible.

Nitrogen-rich materials are basically those that are colourful and wet. Examples include all food scraps, coffee grinds, and fresh grass clippings. Carbon-rich materials are basically those that are brown and dry. Examples include paper bags, cardboard, and dried grass.

Managing your home compost and achieving the optimal conditions can take some time to master. It’s both a science and an art, and like anything new, you’re going to make mistakes, and learn a lot as you go. But there is heaps of information and resources out there, all you need to do is look for them.

Some key pieces of advice we recommend:

• The more surface area your food scraps or paper bags have, the easier it is for the microbes to consume them (=faster biodegradation). So, cut up your broccoli stalks (if you prefer not to eat them), tear your paper bags up first, and rip your avocado skins into pieces.
• If your compost is wet and smells, then you need to add more carbon rich (brown and dry) materials.
• If your compost is dry and there is not much sign of life (worms are your best indicator) you need to add more wet and nitrogen-rich materials and / or water.
• It’s important to make sure your compost can breathe. Turning it every couple of weeks with a fork or compost aerator, or using a tumbler compost, will ensure this happens.
• If you don’t have space for a compost, find a friend who does (or check out https://www.sharewaste.org.nz/).
• If you’re having trouble with your compost, then ask for help or look for some advice.
• Give our home compostable cleaner refills a go! x