The time to be green is now. One of the easiest ways (and you might not even have known it!) to do that is to join in on the waste management program from your own home. EYP.ph shows you how simple home composting can be and how accessible composting sites are in the city. So, take your pick on which method you want to employ. Just remember, it’s all about doing your part!
Composting 101
Composting is a process that allows organic matter to turn into fertilizer and healthy soil. If that sounds like rocket science, composting is really just letting the environment do the recycling for you. It reduces the amount of waste products you have to ship out to dumpsites, which is currently taking up too much land, through a natural heating method from the interaction of different resources in the your compost pile.
(Find some gardening equipment and supplies.)
Getting Started at Home
1. Choose to:
a) buy a composting bin
b) make a composting bin, or
c) start a pile on the ground.
A good composting bin requires a cover that allows air to circulate while still preventing animals (whether they’re dogs or birds) from messing up the work you’ve done on the pile. There are two types of organic matter. Brown matter is high-carbon material like leaves, newspapers, etc. Green organic matter is high-nitrogen material like food scraps, coffee grounds, etc. (Tip: Starbucks Coffee gives away bags of coffee grounds for composting for free.)
2. Pile-Building
Put brown material in the first layer. If the brown material is shredded, it can help the process go faster.
Alternate layers with brown material with layers of green material.
Begin with a 50-50 ratio.
Add more brown material when it starts to smell funny.
The composting process speeds up when you add more green to make it heat up. (The heat kills the seeds but preserves beneficial microbes in the pile.) Add water in between layers. Stirring it at least once a week to get the air to circulate makes it go faster as well. Ideally, your finished compost product can be ready in 3 weeks.
3. No-no’s
- Meat or dairy scraps
- Dog or cat poop, but chicken is fine
(Planning a garden makeover? See a list of landscaping services.)
The Waste Trade
Believe it or not, waste segregation has a market of its own. Some neighborhoods still have a weekly biker who goes around collecting used bote, dyaryo, bakal, and karton from homes. Most often they make a living by buying it from you at wholesale-like prices and then going through the trouble of re-selling them to businesses that recycle the items.
Big businesses like Noah's Paper Mills accepts all kinds of paper. Small businesses like Good Samaritan Foundation for the Disadvantaged accept only aluminum cans.
Other neighborhoods have their own segregation systems that follow the biodegradable/ non-biodegradable rule
(More home-related reads at Homes.EYP.ph.)
