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Start composting and use your kitchen and garden waste to encourage wildlife and help your plants grow
Composting means allowing organic material to rot down naturally into a crumbly brown, fresh smelling product.
Your kitchen and garden waste can easily be recycled into a precious natural resource - a rich and fertile food for your soil that will also encourage wildlife into your garden. Let's not waste it!
What happens to our waste?
Did you know? If everyone in Gloucestershire made their own compost, there would be 10,000 fewer bin rounds on the road each year!
Organic waste materials, like vegetable peelings and garden cuttings do not rot down as you may think when it is put into landfill. There is not enough oxygen to start the rotting process and so it ferments, producing environmentally harmful substances like methane (the harmful greenhouse gas) and leachate (a nasty toxic slime).
Landfill sites are now managed to a very high environmental standard but common sense says that we shouldn’t be throwing away this organic waste.
Although the kerbside collection of garden waste is certainly a better option than putting it in landfill, composting at home is a better solution to reduce the amount of waste going into landfill and guarantees free compost for life!
More great reasons to get composting:
- You can use your homemade compost to grow healthy, nutritious fruit and vegetables
- Have fun planting seeds with your family – and eat the results!
- Peat-based compost seriously threatens the peat bogs where it is found
- By making and using your own compost, you are feeding nutrients to the soil, improving drainage, friability and aeration
- Wildlife loves compost. Thousands of mini-beasts and other tiny organisms work together to make it happen. And many creatures find a compost bin a snug warm place for the winter, including slow worms, hedgehogs, frogs and toads
- You will be feeding your plants and boosting wildlife food chains in your own garden from the soil up
- You will be attracting a whole range of friendly beetles, insects, birds and small mammals into your garden
