Disposing kitchen waste always been a dilemma for people living in small
spaces. I also faced this. I wanted a simple but clean solution so that can
dispose my kitchen waste without disturbing nature or my neighborhood. I went
on a search. You know where I went. Yes I went to the World Wide Web....searched
for a viable waste disposal mechanism.
My searches pointed
me mainly to two types of waste disposal mechanisms.
1. Aerobic Composting.
2. Anaerobic Composting.
Even though I found the methods, I realized that it’s not an
easy thing that you put your waste in the compost bin and next day you have the
compost. It’s much more complex in terms of chemistry and time consuming, something
like 2-3 month or even up to a year to fully decompose your waste.
I remember, when I was a child my father doing similar
thing. He dug a big trench in the soil and put green leaves and dry leaves.
Mixed with cow dung and covered it. I was amused. I didn't know what he was
doing until Jan 2016 when I went on searching for composting method. He was actually
making compost.
Now I am more confident that this will definitely work,
because, my father did it 30 years back when there were not internet or
advanced technologies. So this must be something people know and practiced for
several years. Something people learned from nature. Yes, this is happening every
day in our gardens and forests. Leaves fall they decompose and become
fertilizer for the plant.
You basically you need to simulate the process happening in
the thick forests in your kitchen backyard. Don't be disappointed, it’s not so
difficult.
After a lot of study, I found that method 2 is not the one I
want. Anaerobic composting. In this
method, you put all you waste is an air tight container and give control to the
microorganisms to take over. These microbes doesn’t require oxygen/air, hence
the name. These micro-organisms multiply in this environment produces lot of
stinking stuff, larva’s and sometimes harmful bacteria’s along with decomposition.
This is definitely not what I want; I don't want my backyard to stink. I am
sure nobody will like it.
But I am seeing that majority of people are doing this
method. Why...?? In this method you can dispose 90% of your kitchen waste
including cooked food, vegetable peels and fruit left overs. But no meat fish
because they can produce even more smell and harmful microorganism. My brain
tells me that this is not I want. So, I decided not to do this.
Next one is Aerobic composting. Here we feed a different
kind of microbes. The oxygen loving ones. They decompose and produce, carbon
dioxide, water during the process. This requires correct level of moisture,
heat, air/oxygen, and your waste. No smell, no larvas, no harmful microbes. Do
you think this is the right thing? I felt itis the right one for people like
me.
But there is some downside to this. You cannot dispose all
you kitchen waste to it. The list is something like, vegetable, fruit peels,
egg shells, tea/coffee extracts and anything organic uncooked stuff. So
choosing this method requires a strategy to zero your kitchen waste.
Here is the strategy I developed.
1. Cook just as much you eat.
2. Eat all of what you cook.
I hope this covers the biggest concern of cooked food. It
takes care of meat, fish etc. Then what is left as waste is vegetable peels,
fruit peels, egg shells etc. which you can happily add to your aerobic compost
bin.
To make aerobic compost you need a perforated bin. I purchased
a plastic bucket and drilled holes all over around it. This is for air/oxygen
to get in and feed the air loving microbes. Kept the bin on a raised platform
using bricks where it can get sunlight during the day; a shade to protect from
rain. You need to add equal portion or waste + dry leaves/paper/cardboard. This
is to make the right environment to the microbes. They need nitrogen and carbon
in 1:30 ratio to live happily. Nitrogen comes from you waste and carbon from
dry leaves, newspaper etc. Adding a little cow dung slurry can speed up the
process. The final product that you get after two or three months is called
compost or black gold. It will smell like earth black is color. You can use it
as fertilizer for your kitchen garden. Interesting isn’t it?
 |
| 1 weeks waste |
Now you need to take care of a few things for the well-being
of your pet microbes. You need to maintain right level of moisture (moist but
not wet) and not dry, sunlight and air. You need to shuffle the bin every other
day to aerate the container. If not, the anaerobic microbes will take over and
it will stink. Finally DON’T put cooked
food, fish, meat and citrus fruits like lemons and oranges in to the compost bin.
You can see snaps of my compost bin. Hope you liked it!
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