Composting While Cooking: A Guide for the Kitchen

One of the largest contributors to home-based composting piles is kitchen waste. Scraps from meal preparations as well as cooking supplies can be added to a compost bin and, in turn, contribute to your soil and mulch.

According to the U.S. EPA, each American throws away an average of 1.3 pounds of food scraps daily. In addition to this, yard trimmings and food waste combined make up almost 28 percent of the nation’s municipal solid waste stream. Even if half of this can be diverted and recycled through composting, our daily trash levels could start to decrease.

Before you can collect these scraps in your kitchen, you need to prepare where the compost will be stored.

Keep it Stylish

Composting bins have come a long way throughout the past few years, and the kitchen composter is the leader of that change. Popular options range from the stylish counter containers, like the Kitchen Compost Crock, to the hidden cabinet unit, such as NatureMill’s automated composter. Both these units are useful but serve different purposes.

The crock would be best used for a home that has an outdoor compost pile and is just used to store scraps for a short time inside the house. This unit can be kept on the counter next to the sink or by the stove. As the week progresses, add your kitchen scraps to the small container. Just like trash duty, assigning compost duty will include taking the house scraps out to the large pile and cleaning out the crock weekly.

The automated composter is useful for smaller spaces or homes without larger piles available. You can compost your scraps inside your home in a shorter period of time. In fact, according to NatureMill, its composter can “speed up the process of composting by heating, mixing and aerating the waste that gets put into it. After two weeks, fresh food waste can be turned into nutrient-rich fertilizer for the garden.”

Now that you have the storage, what can you compost?  Composting guides generally sort matter into two categories, according to what they contribute to the process: green (nitrogen) and brown (carbon). A lot of kitchen items are perfect for your pile. The below list is just some of our favorites, to view the rest of this list, visit Plantea.com.

Breakfast

• Apple cores
• Banana peels
• Burned toast
• Coffee grounds
• Date pits
• Egg shells
• Grapefruit rinds
• Oatmeal (cooked or raw)
• Outdated yogurt
• Stale or soggy breakfast cereal
• Sunday comics
• Tea bags and grounds
• Soy milk
• Watermelon rinds

Lunch

• Brown paper bags
• Chocolate cookies
• Freezer-burned fruit
• Fruit salad
• Peanut butter sandwiches
• Peanut and other nut shells
• Pickles
• Popcorn
• Pumpkin seeds
• Stale potato chips

Dinner

• Artichoke leaves
• Cooked rice
• Corncobs
• Fish scraps, such as shrimp shells, crab shells and lobster shells
• Freezer-burned vegetables
• Jell-o
• Old pasta
• Olive pits
• Onion skins
• Pie crust
• Potato peelings
• Produce trimmings
• Rhubarb stems
• Seaweed and kelp
• Spoiled canned fruits and vegetables
• Stale bread and bread crusts
• Tofu
• Tossed salad

Supplies

• Cardboard cereal boxes
• Expired flower arrangements
• Grocery receipts
• Shredded cardboard
• Matches (paper or wood)
• Old spices
• Paper napkins
• Paper towels
• Shredded newspapers
• Wood chips and ashes
• Wooden toothpicks