Healthy You: Get the most out of food by composting your waste

Food scraps make up a third of all things we throw away. But instead of sending them to rot in a landfill, there’s a better option: recycling and reusing them through composting.

Composting means taking organic things and letting them break down or decay in a specific way so they can be used again. Once your scraps have been turned into compost, it can be mixed into soil to make it more nutrient-rich. It can improve soil for your house plants or garden.

Compost is more than just leftovers from your plate — it includes things you wouldn’t eat, like pizza boxes, coffee grounds and eggshells. You might see those things as trash, but as the saying goes, one person’s trash is another person’s treasure.

“We use and we waste a lot of stuff,” says Alex Truelove, director of ZeroWaste. “So much of what we throw out is compostable, but we compost almost nothing.”

Continue reading this story from the July 2020 issue of The Nation's Health.

Photo courtesy Jchizhe, iStockphoto