When you’re chopping and peeling while making your dinner after a long day at work, it can be so easy to chuck it all into the general bin along with your other non-recyclables, but this quick decision could be having a major impact on the environment.
Up to 50% of the rubbish we throw away in our normal kitchen bin can actually be composted, and studies have shown that if we stopped throwing this away it could save 9.3bn tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions being released into the atmosphere – roughly the same as the total combined emissions of the US and the EU. Yikes.
It’s especially bad to throw food waste away when so much effort goes into making it in the first place. To give you an idea:
- 100 buckets of water to produce just one loaf of bread
- 54 buckets of water to rear one chicken breast
- 6 buckets of water to grow one potato
- one bucket of water to grow one tomato
So, with Earth Day 2023 landing on Saturday 22 April 2023, then why not take this as a sign to invest in a kitchentop scraps bin – or your local council might provide one for you – and start popping your kitchen peelings into it. You could even use things like your egg shells in the garden to fertilise brands, or save the peelings to create stock, like TikTokker Ashley Diedenhofen:
You can even use scraps to make your own compost. Here’s how…
How to make garden compost with your food scraps
- Find the right position for your compost heap – usually in a shady, tucked-away corner of the garden.
- Fill with around 25-50% soft green material (grass clippings, weeds, kitchen waste, etc.) and the rest should be woody brown material (wood chippings, cardboard and dead leaves).
- Make sure to ‘turn over’ your heap every once and a while to make sure air is getting to every section and that it’s all evenly decomposing.
- It can take anywhere from six months to a year for your compost to be ready, so in the meantime, you can plan which gorgeous flowers and veggies you want to grow from it.