What Composting Taught Me

It started with a project for an environmental science class.

I was someone who struggled with gen ed credits in college. They were s boring, and I didn't see the importance of taking a million and one math, science, and sociology classes in order to get my degree and become a full-time writer. But here I was anyway, signing up for what was reportedly the easiest science credit I could score. It was even an online course!

I underestimated the impact that this class would have on me. And alos the time it would take to just get through. You see, initially, it actually was easy; online posts to discussion boards and submitting worksheets filled out after watching an hour-long lecture my whimsy professor recorded in her office.

But midterm brought a whole new beast into the mix: an environmental impact project. We had to formulate an entire experiment, from thesis to results and everything in between, that measured our individual environmental impact, and I was fresh out of ideas. I'd been cruising through the class, simply doing the least I could to just keep a passing grade.

I'd also been binge-watching Corinne and Rob from ThreadBanger on YouTube, and it just so happened that Corinne would be my saving grace. She'd recently put up a project about DIY compost bins that she'd started. An idea took shape in my head, and I wrote a project proposal based around these trash cans turned compost bins.

My teacher accepted, with the caveat that I would have to account for my entire three-person household's contributions to the compost, and she wasn't sure how much readily available compost I would have in a short two months. She approved it anyway and I set off on my experiment.

I first bought two trash cans (with lids, that's important!) and some landscaping stones to prop them up with. I also bought some garden soil, bungee cords, and new gloves. My relatively easy setup consisted of the two trash cans, each drilled with a few aeration holes along the side and bottom, layers of leaves and grass clippings, soil, and food scraps, and finally, the lids, locked in place with bungee cords so that my dogs and other animals wouldn't easily tip them over. I even dug up some worms to toss into the bin to help decomposition.

I started caring about my bins. I found myself keeping close track of their health and what was going on, and every time I strayed across a worm while working in my vegetable garden, I tossed it in the compost to eat its fill. I rolled those bins around my yard, my dogs yapping and chasing me as though it was a fun game, and enjoyed the work.

When my compost was ready, long after the class and the project were both over, the rich, dark earth mixed well with my garden soil and made my garden thrive as it had never before. I was not only satisfied; I was proud.

I had to weigh all of the scraps before they went into the compost pile; that wasn't hard. The hard part consisted of two things: rolling the compost bins around my yard to get them mixed up, an important step to making sure your compost is properly aerated and mixed, and weighing the resulting compost at the end of the experiment. It was kind of gross standing on a scale with the compost bin in hand.

In the end, I helped greatly reduce our carbon emissions in our household, and in my research for the project, I learned that composting could reduce carbon emissions from food waste in landfills by six metric tons of CO2 yearly if everyone cooperated. I learned that even someone lazy and forgetful about reducing, reusing, and recycling could take twenty minutes on a Saturday to help offset some of the greenhouse gasses we spill into the air in our day-to-day lives.

I still have my compost bins. They sit in the same spot in the yard and though I don't measure their output anymore, I have the best vegetable garden in the neighborhood. I grew a zucchini the size of my forearm, and the sweetest watermelon. I became more conscious about how else I could help the environment, like reusing greywater and incorporating rain barrels into my yard's layout.

This DIY composting adventure may have started as a project to pass a class, but it opened the door for me to explore more ways to help the environment, right in my own backyard.