5 ms·

Composting is one of the most fascinating and useful technologies in existence—it is an environmentally-friendly method for organic waste management, resulting

Composting is one of the most fascinating and useful technologies in existence—it is an environmentally-friendly method for organic waste management, resulting in a product with uses in agriculture, land/water management, and environmental remediation. I don't know why we don't do much more of it.

ethanwillis 6y ago
I think there just arent a lot of big businesses built around it. I'm actually planning on starting a compost business next summer. I've been planning out the process for the past 6-8 months and my go to market plan for it.
- maxerickson 6y ago
  How will you sterilize it? Bad to remove the bacteria. Good to not spread invasive species like worms and such.
  - ldiracdelta 6y ago
    In USA the ship has sailed on European earthworms a loooong time ago. Combating that is like hitting a river with a stick.
    - pfdietz 6y ago
      Well, we could import that giant leech that eats earthworms. :)
      - AareyBaba 6y ago
        Then we could need cane toads to eat the leeches!
        ethanwillis 6y ago
        I think I've read this book.. eventually a lady will have to eat an elephant
    - maxerickson 6y ago
      I didn't say "European earthworms", I said "worms and such". It's probably an okay idea to just slow the spread of various earthworms from Asia. There's lots of things that live in soil. We don't have to help them spread.
  - tomjakubowski 6y ago
    Sorry for the off topic tangent but your juxtaposition makes me wonder, are there species of bacteria that have been considered "invasive" on geographic scales? Like, one inadvertently brought by humans from one place to another, where they are now endemic and have disrupted the local ecosystem.
    - jaggederest 6y ago
      The classic example is old world / new world diseases. I believe syphilis is largely a new world disease, and athlete's foot was largely an old-world disease, along with of course smallpox, typhus, measles, etc. https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/qian/resources/NunnQianJEP.pdf https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/qian/resources/...
  - ethanwillis 6y ago
    That's a really good question that I don't have a solid answer to at the moment. The specific type of composting I'm doing is two phase. First I'm doing an anaerobic phase and then taking the output of that, pH balancing it if necessary, then feeding it to composting worms I've been breeding. Then I take the worm castings from them and bag that up. The initial source is really the problem. I'm taking local yard waste so it should be fine to redistribute locally, but sending it out further to other areas of the country could pose a problem. Ideally the anaerobic phase of the composting process should kill any invasive species in the compost, but maybe it won't. I know typically people go for an aerobic composting process and bank on the heat killing any pathogens in the compost.
  - foxhop 6y ago
    The easy answer is to only sell locally, in this way you don't need to sterilize and it doesn't cost as much to transport fertility which can be made on site, around the globe!
- ldiracdelta 6y ago
  I think there are quite a few such businesses, but maybe not in your area. I grew up going to such places with my Dad way back to the 80s. There is prior art before you take the plunge :-)
aidos 6y ago
I’m only just starting to get into gardening and we have a lot of garden waste to try to deal with (including a lot left by the previous owners). In the last few places I’ve lived, the previous occupants have always left a big pile of garden waste and it’s just sat there. Turns out you actually need to put in some effort to make compost - it’s really a big organic system that needs nurturing. Also, it does take a long time; months to years, apparently - but I’m not quite there yet so I’m no expert.
- alexose 6y ago
  There are so many opinions on how to compost that it can be hard to know where to start! In this gardener's opinion, however, Charles Dowdings' teachings on compost are absolutely fantastic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kf6CGj7xpFE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kf6CGj7xpFE
- kampsduac 6y ago
  It takes nurturing if you want to speed up the process, but this is optional. If you have long-standing piles of organic matter in a sunny location, make a garden bed there and you'll be blown away by how fertile the soil is.
- carapace 6y ago
  > a big pile of garden waste That's called a midden and it's a great way to get rats.
- foxhop 6y ago
  I can finish compost in as little of 30 days in the right time of year, with the right inputs. Cold compost process takes a couple years, hot compost takes months. Hot compost is great for kitchen gardens, cold compost is great for food forests. Hot Compost is bacteria dominant. Cold compost is fungal dominant.
alexose 6y ago
I agree, compost is amazing! I'm a small-scale farmer (maybe a large-scale gardener?), and one thing I've found about composting is that you just need a lot of material. Even at my small scale, it's almost an overwhelming amount of work to bring in the necessary inputs, or even just to move it around. One reason people turn to synthetic fertilizer, I think, is because of how incredibly nutrient-dense it is. A 30 pound bag of 20-20-20 fertilizer has a similar amount of nitrogen as an entire pickup truck bed of horse manure. If you've loaded/unloaded a pickup full of manure several times, you start to see synthetic fertilizers very differently :) A lovely aspect of hugelkultur is how little labor it requires over time, and how it uses logs as its main input. Logs are easy to find, easy to move, and decompose over many years if used this way.
- themgt 6y ago
  I have a garden in a front-yard with rock-hard clay. I'm no ideologue and still use synthetic fertilizer, but composting has been fantastic as well. First of all, after recycling and composting, I have very little trash waste - maybe a 10 gallon trash bag every couple weeks. Even junk mail and most packaging goes in the compost. Every so often driving by Starbucks I'll grab some of their giant "Grounds for Your Garden" bags and add that in too, and so the overall volume of compost is pretty high. After digging into the rock-clay a foot or two, I add soil+compost+logs and line each bed with logs that hold its shape but also compost into the ground over time. As you say I've put in very little effort after the initial, but the improvement over a few years in the entire yard has been dramatic - it's basically been brought back to life. The loop from garbage -> compost -> plant food -> my food is great, honestly makes me feel better about garbage. Highly recommended pandemic project.
  - alexose 6y ago
    Wow, you've described my situation almost exactly. Where my garden is now was nothing but hardpan and rocks. It's taken quite a bit of work over four years to "terraform" the area back to life. I've done a mix of techniques, but at the end of the day I've just found that the more organic material you can bring in, the better. I'm still looking for that silver bullet, though-- Something that can be deployed inexpensively at scale. I'm particularly excited to experiment with fracking daikon this winter (https://www.restorationseeds.com/products/fracking-forage-radish https://www.restorationseeds.com/products/fracking-forage-ra...). Anyway, it's validating to know that someone else has independently arrived at the same conclusions as me :)
ip26 6y ago
At an industrial/commercial scale, there are probably significant challenges ensuring your input stream is all actually compostable. The same sort of problem faced by recycling- which impairs its commercial viability. That said, my county is planning on building a commercial compost facility as part of a strategy to stop spending money building landfills. 50% of our current non-recycling waste stream is allegedly compostable. I hope it pans out.
- alexose 6y ago
  Good point. I wish we could decide as a society to move away from non-compostable packaging. In most cases, composting seems to be a better, cheaper, and less energy intensive solution than recycling. I have to give Amazon a lot credit towards this effort. They never use glossy cardboard (yay!), and their tape actually breaks down in my compost heap (although the labels don't). I recently got one of their new bubble envelopes, too, which appear to be made out of thick paper and cellulose. Super cool.
- pfdietz 6y ago
  The local organic grocery switched from polypropylene to compostable cardboard for the containers for their hot food bar. Sounds good, right? But why is it that sauces and oils don't soak into this "compostable" cardboard? Let's dig a bit on the net... hmm. The cardboard is coated with perfluoroalkanoates, chemicals similar to the old Scotchguard that won't break down even in a compost pile. Oh dear.
- genericone 6y ago
  At commercial scale, I think what is done on more modern farms is cover cropping after a cash crop is harvested, with a winter that kills the cover crop before seeds develop. Before is dies and becomes a thin compost residue layer, the cover crop is photosynthesising and converting carbon dioxide into carbon and other nutrients which exude through the roots into the soils, keeping the microbiology alive for the spring crop. That live soil is going to be as good as compost, and it doesn't need to be disturbed like compost normally is.
wcerfgba 6y ago
Y'all might find this project I discovered recently interesting :) https://www.makesoil.org/ https://www.makesoil.org/
pascalxus 6y ago
i totally agree. I haven't seen a single apartment complex with a community compost area, even here in supposedly green california. It should be a standard thing that's everywhere, like parks. and whoever's stopping by can vaulunteer to do the turning, once in a while or there can be a sign up sheet. Gardeners like myself would kill to get a good compost for our gardens.
hnick 6y ago
You can even cook with with! One of the traditional ways to make black garlic is to tie it in a jar and bury it in compost which cooks it low and slow over weeks.

ethanwillis 6y ago

I think there just arent a lot of big businesses built around it. I'm actually planning on starting a compost business next summer. I've been planning out the process for the past 6-8 months and my go to market plan for it.

maxerickson 6y ago
How will you sterilize it? Bad to remove the bacteria. Good to not spread invasive species like worms and such.
- ldiracdelta 6y ago
  In USA the ship has sailed on European earthworms a loooong time ago. Combating that is like hitting a river with a stick.
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    Well, we could import that giant leech that eats earthworms. :)
    - AareyBaba 6y ago
      Then we could need cane toads to eat the leeches!
      - ethanwillis 6y ago
        I think I've read this book.. eventually a lady will have to eat an elephant
  - maxerickson 6y ago
    I didn't say "European earthworms", I said "worms and such". It's probably an okay idea to just slow the spread of various earthworms from Asia. There's lots of things that live in soil. We don't have to help them spread.
- tomjakubowski 6y ago
  Sorry for the off topic tangent but your juxtaposition makes me wonder, are there species of bacteria that have been considered "invasive" on geographic scales? Like, one inadvertently brought by humans from one place to another, where they are now endemic and have disrupted the local ecosystem.
  - jaggederest 6y ago
    The classic example is old world / new world diseases. I believe syphilis is largely a new world disease, and athlete's foot was largely an old-world disease, along with of course smallpox, typhus, measles, etc. https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/qian/resources/NunnQianJEP.pdf https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/qian/resources/...
- ethanwillis 6y ago
  That's a really good question that I don't have a solid answer to at the moment. The specific type of composting I'm doing is two phase. First I'm doing an anaerobic phase and then taking the output of that, pH balancing it if necessary, then feeding it to composting worms I've been breeding. Then I take the worm castings from them and bag that up. The initial source is really the problem. I'm taking local yard waste so it should be fine to redistribute locally, but sending it out further to other areas of the country could pose a problem. Ideally the anaerobic phase of the composting process should kill any invasive species in the compost, but maybe it won't. I know typically people go for an aerobic composting process and bank on the heat killing any pathogens in the compost.
- foxhop 6y ago
  The easy answer is to only sell locally, in this way you don't need to sterilize and it doesn't cost as much to transport fertility which can be made on site, around the globe!
ldiracdelta 6y ago
I think there are quite a few such businesses, but maybe not in your area. I grew up going to such places with my Dad way back to the 80s. There is prior art before you take the plunge :-)

aidos 6y ago

I’m only just starting to get into gardening and we have a lot of garden waste to try to deal with (including a lot left by the previous owners). In the last few places I’ve lived, the previous occupants have always left a big pile of garden waste and it’s just sat there. Turns out you actually need to put in some effort to make compost - it’s really a big organic system that needs nurturing. Also, it does take a long time; months to years, apparently - but I’m not quite there yet so I’m no expert.

alexose 6y ago
There are so many opinions on how to compost that it can be hard to know where to start! In this gardener's opinion, however, Charles Dowdings' teachings on compost are absolutely fantastic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kf6CGj7xpFE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kf6CGj7xpFE
kampsduac 6y ago
It takes nurturing if you want to speed up the process, but this is optional. If you have long-standing piles of organic matter in a sunny location, make a garden bed there and you'll be blown away by how fertile the soil is.
carapace 6y ago
> a big pile of garden waste That's called a midden and it's a great way to get rats.
foxhop 6y ago
I can finish compost in as little of 30 days in the right time of year, with the right inputs. Cold compost process takes a couple years, hot compost takes months. Hot compost is great for kitchen gardens, cold compost is great for food forests. Hot Compost is bacteria dominant. Cold compost is fungal dominant.

alexose 6y ago

I agree, compost is amazing! I'm a small-scale farmer (maybe a large-scale gardener?), and one thing I've found about composting is that you just need a lot of material. Even at my small scale, it's almost an overwhelming amount of work to bring in the necessary inputs, or even just to move it around. One reason people turn to synthetic fertilizer, I think, is because of how incredibly nutrient-dense it is. A 30 pound bag of 20-20-20 fertilizer has a similar amount of nitrogen as an entire pickup truck bed of horse manure. If you've loaded/unloaded a pickup full of manure several times, you start to see synthetic fertilizers very differently :) A lovely aspect of hugelkultur is how little labor it requires over time, and how it uses logs as its main input. Logs are easy to find, easy to move, and decompose over many years if used this way.

themgt 6y ago
I have a garden in a front-yard with rock-hard clay. I'm no ideologue and still use synthetic fertilizer, but composting has been fantastic as well. First of all, after recycling and composting, I have very little trash waste - maybe a 10 gallon trash bag every couple weeks. Even junk mail and most packaging goes in the compost. Every so often driving by Starbucks I'll grab some of their giant "Grounds for Your Garden" bags and add that in too, and so the overall volume of compost is pretty high. After digging into the rock-clay a foot or two, I add soil+compost+logs and line each bed with logs that hold its shape but also compost into the ground over time. As you say I've put in very little effort after the initial, but the improvement over a few years in the entire yard has been dramatic - it's basically been brought back to life. The loop from garbage -> compost -> plant food -> my food is great, honestly makes me feel better about garbage. Highly recommended pandemic project.
- alexose 6y ago
  Wow, you've described my situation almost exactly. Where my garden is now was nothing but hardpan and rocks. It's taken quite a bit of work over four years to "terraform" the area back to life. I've done a mix of techniques, but at the end of the day I've just found that the more organic material you can bring in, the better. I'm still looking for that silver bullet, though-- Something that can be deployed inexpensively at scale. I'm particularly excited to experiment with fracking daikon this winter (https://www.restorationseeds.com/products/fracking-forage-radish https://www.restorationseeds.com/products/fracking-forage-ra...). Anyway, it's validating to know that someone else has independently arrived at the same conclusions as me :)

ip26 6y ago

At an industrial/commercial scale, there are probably significant challenges ensuring your input stream is all actually compostable. The same sort of problem faced by recycling- which impairs its commercial viability. That said, my county is planning on building a commercial compost facility as part of a strategy to stop spending money building landfills. 50% of our current non-recycling waste stream is allegedly compostable. I hope it pans out.

alexose 6y ago
Good point. I wish we could decide as a society to move away from non-compostable packaging. In most cases, composting seems to be a better, cheaper, and less energy intensive solution than recycling. I have to give Amazon a lot credit towards this effort. They never use glossy cardboard (yay!), and their tape actually breaks down in my compost heap (although the labels don't). I recently got one of their new bubble envelopes, too, which appear to be made out of thick paper and cellulose. Super cool.
pfdietz 6y ago
The local organic grocery switched from polypropylene to compostable cardboard for the containers for their hot food bar. Sounds good, right? But why is it that sauces and oils don't soak into this "compostable" cardboard? Let's dig a bit on the net... hmm. The cardboard is coated with perfluoroalkanoates, chemicals similar to the old Scotchguard that won't break down even in a compost pile. Oh dear.
genericone 6y ago
At commercial scale, I think what is done on more modern farms is cover cropping after a cash crop is harvested, with a winter that kills the cover crop before seeds develop. Before is dies and becomes a thin compost residue layer, the cover crop is photosynthesising and converting carbon dioxide into carbon and other nutrients which exude through the roots into the soils, keeping the microbiology alive for the spring crop. That live soil is going to be as good as compost, and it doesn't need to be disturbed like compost normally is.

wcerfgba 6y ago

Y'all might find this project I discovered recently interesting :) https://www.makesoil.org/ https://www.makesoil.org/

pascalxus 6y ago

i totally agree. I haven't seen a single apartment complex with a community compost area, even here in supposedly green california. It should be a standard thing that's everywhere, like parks. and whoever's stopping by can vaulunteer to do the turning, once in a while or there can be a sign up sheet. Gardeners like myself would kill to get a good compost for our gardens.

hnick 6y ago

You can even cook with with! One of the traditional ways to make black garlic is to tie it in a jar and bury it in compost which cooks it low and slow over weeks.