If you’re wondering what else you can put in the compost bin, look no further. Capsule spoke to the Compost Collective’s Sarah Williams, who tells us some shocking things you can and can’t actually compost at home. And that actually – that “food scraps” bin run by the Council, is in fact, NOT a compost bin.
I will out myself here: This entire time I’ve been using the Auckland Council’s Food Scrap bins, I honestly thought it was a compost bin.
Turns out, they’re TWO COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THINGS.
Look, it doesn’t help that the Auckland Council bag liners have a massive text saying “Compostable Bin Liners” and my brain just somehow made that assumption.
It wasn’t until I did my research for this piece (that I thought would be fun to do!) that I realised, boy oh boy – I was heavily mistaken. (Don’t cancel me! I’m just a girl!)
So, because I’m SO very clearly not a composting expert, I turned to an actual expert: Sarah Williams, a workshop facilitator at the Compost Collective – an organisation teaching and helping Aucklanders to “waste less and compost more”.
When I told Sarah my embarrassing mishap, she so KINDLY told me that actually, a lot of people don’t realise that the food scraps bins are different from compost bins.
Compost Bins vs Food Scraps Bins
So what is the difference? Sarah says: “Auckland Council, [and] other councils around New Zealand, have food scrap bins. That is where we put our food scraps, they get collected, and in Auckland’s case, get taken down to Reporoa, near Rotorua, and they get turned into methane gas.”
It’s not composted as such, she says, but that methane is used as electricity to power nearby greenhouses growing tomatoes. “It’s still being put to good use, but it’s not composting it … Then there’s a bit of ‘sludge’ that’s leftover and that’s used as fertiliser on farmland nearby.”
Composting at home, on the other hand, is where people have black bins, or some sort of fancy set up, and are layering in those food scraps, plant material, and normally paper and cardboard, says Sarah. “That gets broken down into compost which we put into our garden.”
Shocking Things You CAN and CAN’T Compost at Home
Now that we’ve clearly defined the difference between the two, what can you actually put in your compost bins at home?
Anything that is made from organic and natural materials – so plants, vegetables, natural fibers – means they can break down and get composted, Sarah says.
“Some of that will be dead now, like trees turned into paper, that’s okay to compost because it was once alive and natural.”
Now for the fun part, Sarah shares some SHOCKING things that you CAN compost:
- Nail clippings
- Cotton earbuds
- Tissues and paper towels (as long as it wasn’t used to wipe artificial cleaning products. But a tissue used to blow your nose? Put that in there!)
- Kitchen cloths made of 100% cotton (it means saving it from the landfill too!)
- Dead animals, like a possum (Though disclaimer: She says it’s only people on farms who have told her this, so maybe skip this if you’re just in it for a cute little backyard garden?)
And shocking things you CAN’T compost at home:
- Fruit stickers (Maybe not the biggest shocker, but there’s still heaps of fruit stickers that end up in compost bins. So make sure to remove them!)
- Meat and cooked food (you don’t want rodents to get in your compost! But if you really want to, you’d need to set traps.)
- Lint from the dryer (microplastics end up in our clothes, and would end up in the garden)
- So-called compostable coffee cups
- So-called compostable mailing bags
The coffee cups and mailing bags were a big shocker to me, given that the whole point of business moving towards this direction is to improve theirs and their consumers’ carbon footprint.
Sarah says the bags and coffee cups need the compost bin to get to a really high temperature to break down, which can only be done through commercial composts, unless someone has a really fancy composting set up at home.
“Normally at home, you’re making what we call a cold compost, just adding to it slowly over time.”
So a lot of these bags and coffee cups still end up in landfill, says Sarah, and there isn’t a lot of commercial composting available to the general public either. Another great reminder to bring our own coffee cups to cafes!
Food Scraps Bin: What You CAN and SHOULDN’T Go In
For food scraps, what you can put in the bin is quite literally food scraps. Some shocking things you CAN actually put in there:
- Meat and cooked food
- And yes – this includes even all the fat trimmings
- Chicken skin
- All sizes of bones – particularly smaller bones like fish and chicken
- Paper towels and tissues
- Indoor cut flowers
- Bread and mouldy food
Sarah says there’s unfortunately a lot of rubbish that ends up in food scraps collection, and people have treated it as a rubbish bin, whether by accident or not.
“It kind of defeats the purpose. It does get screened out … but that’s a cost and that’s all just going to end up in landfill.”
Composting for Beginners
Sarah says if you’ve never composted before, doing a beginners composting course would be a great start.
The Compost Collective runs free workshops, and she says there are a bunch of other workshops around the country.
She adds that while composting is really good, what’s even better is not having food waste in the first place.
“That’s one thing to always keep in mind, is looking at our food waste or food scraps and go, ‘How come I’ve got all this in the first place?’ Some of it’s unavoidable, food scraps, banana peels, apple cores… but there’s a lot of food waste [in Aotearoa].
“So yeah, trying to reduce that is a really great place to start. And then compost it.”
