Austin's residential composting program started more than a decade ago and now serves around 210,000 homes. What happens to all that stuff you throw in compost bins? Follow along.
“We were producing way more than we needed,” she said. “And then we would dump it on the garden bed [and] random stuff would grow from the seeds that had been in the compost. So, we’d randomly get like a squash growing.”“It was just so much maintenance,” she said. “We ended up feeling really grateful when the city …expanded the composting program.”
If compostable materials like food waste get tossed in the trash, they not only take up space in a landfill, but they also decompose there without oxygen, releasing harmful methane gas. Instead, this material can be used to create compost that can be added to soil to help it retain moisture and nutrients.
In some of the newest piles, you can easily distinguish yard waste bags from Lowe’s and Home Depot, branches, apples, eggplants and pizza boxes. While the piles don’t really smell, Crawford said they do draw in some visitors, like birds and hogs who help themselves to the “buffet.”“Green” nitrogen-rich materials — like apples and egglant — heat up the compost pile, helping to break down the material.details exactly what can and can’t be composted.
Operations Manager Zach Thomas said the material could be sold at a significant discount as long as the buyer is told about the contamination. “If you were to stick a thermometer deep inside [the pile], it is very very hot,” he said. “And we don’t want them to catch on fire. And the watering process also helps with the compost process as well.”
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