Why compost at home
More than 60 per cent of the contents of the average rubbish bin is biodegradable and over a third can be easily composted at home. This includes fruit and vegetable peelings, garden waste, tea bags, coffee grounds, cardboard and paper.
The North Yorkshire Rotters and North Yorkshire Council have been promoting home composting since 2007. The Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) the worlds leading gardening charity promotes home composting as a great way to make use of your garden waste.
Composting at home is the most sustainable way to recycle and reuse your garden wastes and the vegetable wastes from the kitchen.
Not everyone in North Yorkshire is able to home compost so North Yorkshire Council also collect these wastes for recycling. Garden waste is collected in a segregated collection vehicles. It is then processed by commercial composting sites in North and West Yorkshire. Kitchen wastes are currently collected by the residual waste bins and recycled at the Allerton Waste Recovery Park where it is processed through an anaerobic digestion process where these wastes go on to produce electricity.
By composting at home we are all able to compost both garden waste and vegetable based kitchen wastes in the same compost bin and completely eliminate all the carbon emissions associated with waste collection vehicles, the transportation of these wastes and also the carbon emissions associated with the commercial processes used to recycle these wastes.
By home composting we all get a bonus that at the end of the home composting process you have a nutrient rich, peat free compost which has cost nothing to produce.
Compost Bins and Home Composting Advice
There are a wide range of home composting bins which you can use to start Composting at Home. From the basic to the most expensive compost bin or the home made ones, the process is the same, what the more expensive bins can do is speed up the composting process – so if you are a keen gardener with lots of material to put in a compost bin then a more expensive compost bin might be great for you. However if you have a smaller garden and not so much material to compost a more basic cheaper or home-made compost bin might be ideal.
There is also lots of information on how to compost on www.recyclenow.com/how-to-recycle/home-composting and the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) website at www.rhs.org.uk/soil-composts-mulches/composting
The Recyclenow.com ‘Composting at Home’ guide is available to download as a PDF below:
North Yorkshire Council promotes Composting at Home as the most sustainable way of managing garden and kitchen vegetable wastes for those residents who are able to do so. Each year North Yorkshire Council commits funding to assist North Yorkshire residents to purchase compost bins from the GetComposting. If you wish to buy a discounted compost bin the details are on the leaflet below or you can follow the link to www.getcomposting.com
If you are a resident of North Yorkshire Council your discount will be automatically applied when you input your postcode.
Peat Free Compost
Yorganics – Your garden green waste made into peat free compost here in North Yorkshire
The Circular Economy in action here in North Yorkshire
The recycling industry often talks about a Circular Economy where materials are manufactured and then recycled time after time reducing the impact on world.
Composting is one of the very best examples of a Circular Economy in action. Garden wastes are collected across North Yorkshire they are then composted and made into a peat free compost which residents can buy and use back in their gardens to grow more plants. This circle can continue to be repeated again and again, a great example of the Circular Economy in action here in North Yorkshire.
The fact that this is all happening in North Yorkshire also means that transport carbon emissions are also kept to a minimum.
From 2024 to reduce the impacts of climate change the UK is stopping retail sale of composts made with peat. The garden green waste collections made by North Yorkshire Council refuse teams has been made into a peat free compost for many years. it is manufactured to the nationally recognised British Standard PAS100.
Yorganics compost can be bought at Household Waste Recycle Centres across North Yorkshire,
Full information is available at www.northyorks.gov.uk/bins-recycling-and-waste/reduce-and-reuse/composting