Organic Waste

Imagine you have eaten your food; is anything left in your dish? What do you intend to do with it?

You might think what a strange question, but you should not throw away the leftovers of your food. You can keep it, and turn it to fertile and rich compost which is one of the treasures of our earth and helping the growth of plants. This activity is called “compost making”. This is so simple that anyone can do it.

You can make compost with garden dry leaves and cut grasses and leftover food. In fact you can make compost with any organic waste, anything which is from the ground and has no chemical or manmade substances. When we say ‘organic waste’, it means something which grew from the ground and was once a live plant and no chemical have been added to it. For example leftover rice or vegetable peels…

But do we have enough organic waste to make compost?

Yes we do. In fact more than half of the food waste or garden rubbish we produce is organic. Believe it or not, every person throws away more than 550 kilos of organic waste each year. Some clever scientists say that if for example, your weight is 45 kilogram, the amount of organic wastethat you throw away is almost 12 times of that. That is a lot of compost!  If instead of throwing away this waste, wemake compost with it, we would not have such a big problem with rubbish either.

What can we do?

We should do everything we can to reuse the organic waste we produce. There are easy ways to do this. For example:

Help your parents in the garden and collect the leaves and cut grass, anything from the garden is good. Pile them up like a little hill inone corner of the garden. After a while this little pile becomes good and useablecompost.

You can also ask your parents to help you making boxes to make compost. Put all the organic waste you have collected from the garden or the leftover food in the box and every couple of days move them around. You will slowly see how the waste you collected is changing to compost, as the soil in your garden.

One of the most interesting ways of making compost is by the help of garden warms.

Feed the garden warms

Do you know which one of these foods warms do not eat?

1. Meat  B) Garden waste C) Vegetables

You might not believe it but the greatest compost makers in nature are garden warms.

With the help of your parents or classmates make a wooden box of 60x60x20cm. Then find some red garden warms and put them in the box. Feed the warms by adding any food waste to the box; anything except meat, bones or very fatty food. Wait and you will see how by eating the food waste, warms actually make compost. The compost made by the warms are in fact some of the best and richest composts ever made.

We can do our best in keeping our earth healthy. It is true that human makes a lot of rubbish and waste a lot of food, but at least by recycling them, we can make sure that we are doing our bits to help the nature.