Composting - How each household could save up to €1,000 a year

If you're not already composting, the start of a new year is a good time to start afresh and plan to do so. Last year I attended a very interesting seminar at the Carlow County Council chambers given by Nuala on behalf of the Stop Food Waste Campaign which, apart from giving us a free source of organic matter, explained why composting is so important. 

The campaign is a great initiative primarily aimed at reducing the amount of waste that goes into landfill each year, and encouraging us to think more carefully about how we shop, cook and eat.

Their website is a mine of information and well worth a look but a couple of points that were highlighted include:

• The average person throws out the equivalent of three grown men of waste each year (300kgs), 30% of which is made up of food and 7% of garden and landscaping materials.
• One third of food that Irish households buy is wasted - the equivalent of a third of our groceries being stolen out of our shopping trolleys.
• The average household could save up to €1,000 a year by avoiding this waste by composting!

From our own perspective I'm so glad we have chickens and dogs for the cooked food leftovers. We also keep our waste to a minimum by writing weekly shopping lists and compost as much as we can, just using a few old pallets to make a couple of containers to contain it. Those practices combined with recycling, means that our family of five produces on average one black bin bag of refuse destined for the landfill every two weeks.

Nuala highlighted a few different composting systems and I was particularly interested in the ones for smaller gardens, as I'm often asked about them.

One was a Bokashi which seems like a really handy way of composting if you don't have a big garden but use an allotment.

Wormeries are another great alternative to compost bins and heaps, especially if you don't currently compost because you're worried about vermin.  I was hugely impressed by a community composting (wormery) scheme that a group in Temple Bar, Dublin have set up. Their log of how they went about it is well worth a read for anybody interested in community composting, particularly in an urban area.


It's worth keeping an eye on the catalogues or in your garden centres as different products become available, such as this Earthmaker Aerobic Composter where research has shown that it will make twice as much compost as traditional bins over the same period.

If you have a few minutes, do take a couple of minutes to check out the Stop Food Waste website above.

For anybody who isn't already composting and doesn't have the Brown bin option for their  'green' waste, it was suggested that they get a small bucket with a lid and throw all their food waste into it for a week or two to see how much is thrown away. 


Would you be willing to give that challenge a go?

If you'd like to know more about composting, there's a free downloadable pdf file on my website giving full details on how to compost.