the GoodEater Collaborative

Author: Joshua Levin (34 Articles)

Joshua Levin is a consultant to non-profits and their corporate partners in sustainable agriculture business development and sustainable food markets. Joshua holds an MBA from the NYU Stern School of Business, where he was a Catherine B. Reynolds Fellow in Social Entrepreneurship, and a BA from Harvard University. He lives with his wife in Brooklyn, NY.

One of the most sweeping irrationalities in our society is the broken fertility cycle.  Fixing it is one of the most basic and effective ways to impact the environment through your eating.   Here are 5 Easy Steps for Composting in a Small Urban Apartment – and having a lot of fun doing it!

By “broken fertility cycle”, I mean that we utilize huge amounts of fossil fuels to artificially generate fertility in soil, and then we seal off giant landfills to store all the food waste.  In those sealed coffins, food breaks down anaerobically, releasing huge amounts of methane, which is 25x worse than carbon.  Many municipalities report that up to 50% of landfill space is taken by food scraps.   This very same material, when composted and used as fertilizer, promotes excellent plant growth, puts nutrients back into the ground and your food, and generates living soil which actually breathes – sequestering carbon from the atmosphere.  This is the traditional way to create soil fertility, and it is what we will all end up doing again some day — one way or another.

This guide is inspired by a rash of wonderful articles on GoodEater about the importance and experience of composting. First, tea executive Stefan Schachter wrote Composting: Sustainability in Action. Then, James Beard award-winning author Deborah Krasner wrote: Worm Harvest. They bring various viewpoints to the table, and so I decided to create a practical guide to direct the energies they’ve stimulated among readers.

If you’re new to composting, you probably have a lot of questions.  How do I set up a compost in my little apartment?  How much does this thing cost?  Is it a lot of work?  What about the smell?

To answer these questions, I’ve been running thermophilic (traditional) compost bins and vermiculture (worm) compost bins side by side for months in order to learn best-practices and create this guide for GoodEaters:

5-Step Process for Easy Composting in a Small Urban Apartment

First, Decide Whether to do “Traditional” or “Worm” Composting

Traditional, or thermophilic, composting uses bacteria and fungi to break down food aerobically.  The food passes through a heated stage created by the bacteria (your bin will get up to 170 degrees) to aid in the digestion.  The benefits of this system are that you can create a huge bin, fill it with a large volume of stuff, including autumn leaves, grass clippings, etc., mix it with “greens” (kitchen scraps), and then virtually set it and forget it.  In the spring you’ll have your rich soil for the new year’s garden.

Worm bins use a certain type of worms called “red wigglers” to digest the foods more rapidly.  You can view the purpose of these worms as merely transports for efficiently delivering the bacteria in their stomachs to fresh food (of course, one could say the same for humans).  This system is favored for it’s speed, quality of compost (“worm castings”, which are actually their poop), and the fact that the fast digestion results in little anaerobic bacteria – the source of bad smells.  If you definitely need to compost indoors and/or have very little space, worm composting is the way to go.

Here’s a chart to aid in your decision:

Second, Decide Whether To Build or Buy

If you are setting up a traditional bin, I suggest buy one.  In a rural environment you can set one up cheaply with chicken wire far from the house.  But in an urban environment, you don’t want to attract raccoons, rats, or squirrels.  A professionally-made bin is pest-proof.  I use the classic Bosmere K767 Garden Compost Bin 11-Cubic-Foot Capacity, which was recommended to me by the folks at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and works like a charm. If you live in New York, you can buy this and other bins at-cost through the city.

On top of that, you’ll probably want a small little bin in your kitchen to collect scraps between regular trips to the outside compost.  For this I recommend the classic Norpro Grip EZ Stainless Steel Compost Keeper, which has an active carbon filter to stop smell.  It also looks nice.

All this adds up of course.  But if you are going to go with worms, it’s so easy to build a worm bin.  It cost me $5 in materials and took less than 30min.  I watched a dozen of YouTube videos, and this one is the best for building the most basic and inexpensive worm bin. This one can go right under your kitchen sink:

The cost of worms is your main expense in this system: usually $20-25.  In New York City, to get your worms, contact the Lower East Side Ecology Project, phone: 212-477-4022, email: oreinc[at]earthlink.net.  Order your worms, and they’ll have them for you at the Union Square Farmers Market.

Of course, there must be a workaround?  Yes.  Check Craigslist and Brooklyn Free Cycle.  People often give away free containers of red wigglers, as they are quite prolific and everyone wants to promote composting.  I got my colony started thanks to two give-aways from friendly folks.

Third, Bag It Up for Vegetable Stock

Now that you have your bin, the fun begins! The last three steps are is actually my secret 3-Phase Process for getting the most out of every ounce of food purchases.

Keep a plastic bag in your freezer.  Throw kitchen scraps that can be used for vegetable stock into the bag as you go – e.g. stalks, stems, mushroom stubs, etc.  Everything else – e.g. eggshells, teabags, coffee grounds, etc. – throw right into the compost.

The secret ingredient to many dishes – from soups to stirfrys – is not in fact butter, but homemade stock.  Once your bag is full, throw it in a big pot with a head of garlic, an onion, a couple of bay leaves, and maybe some thyme or parsley.  Bring to a boil and then simmer for an hour.  Finally, skim out the solids and throw them into the compost.  I refrigerate some of the stock for short-term use and freeze the rest in ice-cube trays for later use.

Fourth, Make Your Compost Pile

See here for a list of what you can add to your compost and what you can’t.  The three main principles you need to know are:

1. Add roughly equal volumes of browns (cardboard, bread, etc. – all rich in carbon) and greens (veggie clippings, etc. – all rich in nitrogen).
2. Keep it moist, but not sopping.  Like a damp sponge.
3. Don’t add meat scraps, cheese, or anything oily.

Also, if you have a traditional bin, you should stir/rotate your compost around as much as possible so oxygen gets in there and you don’t get too much anaerobic bacteria.  For worm bins, the critters do the work.

Fifth, Harvest and Add to Your Plants!

To harvest from a worm bin, follow this example.  To harvest from a traditional bin, just take from the bottom.

Mix a scoop of compost right into the top of the soil in your potted plants or vegetable garden.  For new plants, mix at about a 1:3 ratio with the cheap “garden soil” from the nursery to make your own, super rich potting soil.  Lastly, you can steep a couple scoops in water for 24-hours to make compost tea, a super rich liquid fertilizer full of beneficial micro-organisms.  When poured over plants, this will create that living soil that sucks carbon out of the air, makes veggies go nuts, and fixes micro-nutrients to the plant roots for your own healthy consumption.

Who needs MiracleGro?

And if all this is really beyond you, no problem.  Every city has organic waste drop-off points which you can look up online.  In NYC, there’s some right in Union Square, as well as at all the major parks and gardens.  Just a warning, however, that you’ll be missing out on lots of fun, as well as a huge ego boost when you crown yourself “Master of the Bacteria”.