Why compost?

Home Composting is something practical we can all do to support the development of a sustainable future. Recycling kitchen and garden waste at household level makes perfect sense in lots of ways – it is good for the environment, reducing the need for both transporting and land filling of waste and, of course it is the perfect closed-loop system, where the householder is the waste producer and processor, as well as the end user of the finished product.

Composting is a significant way to reduce the mountains of waste that we send to landfill each year.

Composting is the controlled decomposition of organic material such as grass and tree cuttings, plant material, vegetable peelings and waste food to produce a stable material containing organic matter and plant nutrients.

There are often benefits in applying this material to land, including nutrient addition, improved soil structure and improved water retention. Increasingly sophisticated composting technologies are available that will enable large volumes of organic waste to be diverted from landfill.

Around 238,000 tones of Municipal Solid Waste are produced from households, commercial premises and street cleansing in Ayrshire and Dumfries and Galloway each year.

Around 209,000 tones of this is household waste, about 0.9 tones per household per year Almost all of this waste is disposed of in landfill sites at present.

Land filling can contribute to global warming and can result in deterioration of the environment.

We need to change the way we deal with our Waste by Reducing, re-using and recycling more.