August is the peak of the season for delicious fresh fruits and vegetables, whether from your own garden or from local farms. This abundance of summer produce is worth waiting for through those cold New England winters, but it also produces a true challenge to the many city-dwellers without outdoor space – how to compost all that organic waste?

Many cities will subsidize large composting bins for those who have backyards, and this truly is a great opportunity to reduce the amount of waste sent to landfills. However, for those apartment-dwellers, or for those who generally prefer not to trudge out to the back of their yard with their food scraps, there is the kitchen-composter produced by NatureMill.

Designed to do the rotating and the aerating often required by other composters, NatureMill is willing to do the work for you. You can add your vegetable scraps, your coffee grounds, even meat or fish – though perhaps decomposition creates enough odors without adding fish. The composter can handle up to 120 pounds of material a month and uses ‘hot composting’ to drive the process a bit faster than your backyard composter. No worms must be added, just the food scraps and off the little machine goes, decomposing your waste without the pungent smell. NatureMill does alert you that you may detect a slight smell (like mushrooms), but in weighing the smell over the emissions of methane from landfills, I’d take the smell. And hey, you can always keep the composter in the garage if it’s that bothersome. When you’ve added enough organic matter, the indicator light will tell you that your compost is ready – et voila, a great fertilizer for the garden or even for your household plants. If you head out on your summer vacation, you can set the bin to “vacation mode” and off you go.

Composting not only reduces the amount of waste each individual generates, but reduces the collective amount of trash generated, which drives down the number of trash collections needed, and the oil needed to power those vehicles. Such a small step such as putting your organic waste in a NatureMill bin instead of your trash can have huge impacts on the environment. According to the EPA, methane gas emitted from landfills is 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. As landfill fees increase, as the piles of trash grow, as we send our trash overseas to other countries, it seems time to take control of our waste and recycle as much as possible. We’ve become accustomed to sorting cans and bottles, now on to corn husks and banana peels.

This post was first published on The Green Bean Blog. To continue reading, please visit Food Scraps to Fertilizer: Urban Composting is a post from: