A few benefits of composting in your home

Nature has been composting forever. Here, you'll find the benefits of composting for your garden, for diverting waste from the landfill, and for reducing costs with this DIY mentality:

Composting is the process through which waste products are recycled into nutrients that plants, animals and other organisms can use.

• Soil organisms such as bacteria, fungi, insects, worms, and lichen are in the business of building soil.
• What is waste to us is food for many of them, and their job is to recycle these nutrients for us to use. The nutrients are constantly in flux between being food for those who biodegrade them and providing nutrients to those who consume the results.
• The consumers create waste that is then biodegraded and so on. By separating your trash into non-biodegradable materials and biodegradable materials, and then composting the biodegradable ones, you can create amazing, loamy soil that results in abundant harvests within a thriving soil community.

Since you're separating biodegradable materials from non-biodegradable materials and only allowing those that absolutely can't be composted (or repurposed, reused or recycled) to go to the landfill, you're diverting waste from the landfill and into tangible resources.

• It's also important to note that biodegradable materials that end up in landfills are less likely to biodegrade because the conditions aren't set up for it.
• The soil organisms aren't there, nor is the soil, nor is the balance between oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and plenty of water. There are, notoriously, too often numerous harmful chemicals found in landfills that can be life threatening to soil building organisms.

Anyone who's ever bought compost and soil knows how quickly those costs can add up.

• However, fruit and vegetable peelings, coffee grounds, leaves and other biodegradable waste products are free; turning these into compost can save you hundreds of dollars, literally, while producing higher quality soil over time.

In nature, there's no such thing as waste. By following nature's rule of recycling nutrients, we can grow better gardens and cultivate healthy ecosystems for nature's critters to thrive in.