Reduce Your Carbon Footprint by Home Composting

Self made compost can take time to make, but it can easily lower someone’s carbon footprint.

Compost Pile. Lindsay. CC BY 2.0

Food waste is a major component of global warming, with all the methane that food produces in landfills when it rots. However, even if someone can’t finish all their food and have a little bit left, they can still lessen their food waste and overall carbon footprint in various ways like home composting. Since around ⅓ of the food produced in the entire world is wasted, composting organic waste can reduce roughly half of greenhouse gasses equivalent to carbon dioxide between 2020 to 2050. Composting is a process of turning organic waste into soil or mulch, and the compost that comes from it is nutrient rich and good for plants, so by composting, people can reduce their food waste and help plants grow. 

For composting at home, there are multiple things to keep in mind before starting. The first is that composting is going to take a lot of time, with anywhere between six weeks to an entire year depending on the method, and how much effort is being put into making the compost. The second is that there are two types of items to compost, “green” and “brown” items. Green means the food scraps, grass clippings, coffee grounds and tea leaves that are full of nitrogen, while brown ones are the carbon-rich items, like cardboard, egg cartons, dried leaves and wood shavings. Since the green items tend to be “wetter”’ and the brown ones more “dries”, an equal mix is good, though some say it is better to have a 1:3 green to brown ratio. As long as the pieces in the mix aren’t extremely large, and there is good moisture and access to air and oxygen, the pile will decompose into compost. Turning the mix every few days will help bring in more oxygen to help the process and control the odor. The oxygen is especially important because without it, the food will still compost but in an anaerobic way, which will produce a gas that is half methane and half carbon dioxide. Methane traps radiation much better than carbon dioxide, so it contributes to global warming 25 times more per pound.

Fruit on Compost Pile. Allispossible. CC BY 2.0

There are multiple methods of composting at home, but the fastest way is to simply get a home composting bin. There are many composting bins available for sale, but it is also possible to make a homemade one. With a compost bin, all that is required is to place the waste inside and let it decompose at a faster rate than leaving it outside. Some bins will continuously compost materials, while others will make batches of it.

Though using a bin is the easiest method, it is possible to do home composting without one. It is a little slower since the heat isn’t contained, but it works just as well. Trench composting is a technique that involves digging a hole roughly a foot wide and deep, then filling it halfway with kitchen scraps and other organic food waste inside before covering it up. Creating a heap and layering the materials in it also works, though it is better with some space as it may attract flies as the food rots. But, it has access to air, and needs access to water, and within a few months, the compost pile will be ready. To speed up the process, it is possible to use worms or other accelerators. 

Composting is a popular method around the world, especially among European countries. Germany has a high recycling and composting rate, sustainably getting rid of 65% of their waste as of 2019. Austria, Slovenia, Belgium and Taiwan also have recycling and composting rates higher than 50%. South Korea, however, recycles around 95% of its food waste by turning it into compost, animal feed, or biofuel. Their laws against sending food waste to landfills and having biodegradable food scrap bags that could be composted and compost bins for people to use have greatly added to this, as well as some places that track food waste per household and charge them for it. 

To Get Involved

Many communities have composting programs that aim to advertise the benefits of composting and will help people do it. Even in large cities where people live in apartments and don’t have a backyard to compost in, there are organizations that will take in food waste and compost it for people. In New York City, the Department of Sanitation (DSNY) has multiple programs just like this, focused on composting, educating, and waste management. CompostNow is an organization that has community gardens and programs in multiple locations that will take in food waste to be composted. Ecoscraps is another company that collects food waste, recycles it, and then sells the resulting compost. Their compost is available all over the country in stores like Home Depot and Walmart.

To find out more about the DSNY, click here.

To find out more about CompostNow, click here.

To find out more about Ecoscraps, click here.

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Katherine Lim

Katherine Lim is an undergraduate student at Vassar College studying English literature and Italian. She loves both reading and writing, and she hopes to pursue both in the future. With a passion for travel and nature, she wants to experience more of the world and everything it has to offer.

Volunteer Tourism is (Sometimes) Not the Answer

“The number of truly orphaned children in Cambodia halved in 2013, but the number of orphanages doubled.”

Perhaps you woke up today and realized that it was time for you to travel the world. If you’re anything like me, avoiding traditional tourism is a priority as you begin to research the ways and places to travel. The good news is, there are many alternatives to traditional tourism. Oftentimes, travelers want to make a difference as they move through the world so, naturally, combining your travel adventures and your philanthropy is a good idea, right? Not necessarily. While it’s likely that the most effective way to help someone in need, is to stay put and send them the money you were going to use on your trip, I know that most folks who volunteer in place of traditional tourism do so with good intentions. You should know then that there are some things that often go over-looked by those of us who want to see the world and make it better as we do. So, before you pack up and head to the Bahamas to do some hurricane relief here are three of the more commonly overlooked risks to keep in mind:

1)     Carbon footprint

Chances are if you’re going somewhere that falls into the category of volunteer tourism, or voluntourism, it’s going to take massive amounts of fuel to fly there. Make sure that it’s worth the environmental cost before you hop on a plane and travel somewhere that is likely experiencing the effects of climate change firsthand. Check for train routes, and other alternative forms of transport before you book a flight that covers the whole length of your trip.

2)     Building Projects

Many do-gooders hope to help people in need by building homes, schools or orphanages. While these things are certainly needed around the world, I hate to say it, you’re most likely not a qualified builder, and you probably don’t know building codes/laws for the place you’re visiting (though if you are-good on ya). You’re more likely to build a poor standing structure than say, a local professional, who you may have inadvertently taken the job from because you were willing to do it for free (though this isn’t always the case).

3)     Orphanages

Turns out that many children in orphanages around the world have at least one living parent –or at least an Aunt or two. Many families are told that their children will be better cared for and given better opportunities if they allow their child to be separated from them. Those opportunities rarely arise, and governments love to capitalize off the billion-dollar (orphan) travel industry. For example: the number of truly orphaned children in Cambodia halved in 2013, but the number of orphanages doubled.

Children are included in a workshop on how to mitigate the struggles their community faces. Raeann Mason

In an increasingly xenophobic world, however, travel volunteerism can be used to combat these very problems. In order to avoid falling into the trap of becoming volunteers who perpetuate poverty and crisis, we need to shift our focus. We can mitigate the negative effects of voluntourism by first engaging with a place as it is –be patient— wait to be invited by a local and help in their pre-existing projects. We can also educate ourselves about the organizations we are considering volunteering with – doing some vetting is necessary if we want to be responsible travelers. Don’t forget, we can always not volunteer with an organization at all. Get neighborly and meet the people around you; see if you can meet their needs all on your own. Because if we can shift our mindset from “helping” the poor to engaging in a cultural exchange we allow ourselves, and those we hope to benefit, a stable foundation that can be built upon. The more we learn about the places we hope to go, and the people who live there (like, on a personal level), the better we can bring the world together instead of breaking it down with our ignorance.

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Raeann Mason

Raeann is an avid traveler, digital storyteller and guide writer. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Mass Comm & Media Studies from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication. Passionate about a/effective journalism and cultural exchange, she is an advocate of international solidarity and people's liberation. As the founder of ROAM + WRITE and EIC of Monarch Magazine, Raeann hopes to reshape the culture of travel and hospitality to be ethically sound and sustainable.

The Environmental Cost of Entertainment

We often look forward to when we can slip from reality into the atmosphere provided by a movie, concert, or football game. But what is the real cost behind the $60 ticket?

As the COP25 summit comes to an inconclusive close and the number of scientific reports being released on the urgency behind climate change continue to increase, action is necessary or disaster is imminent. Some activities are more glaringly environmentally unfriendly. You know driving your car releases pollutants, you can even see it leaving your vehicle. But there is a whole industry built around letting us all escape, being entertained through sports, or movies and music, so we don’t have to think about our problems for a moment. Only these activities have a huge environmental cost.

 Hollywood is an obvious place to start. Movies not only cost millions of dollars to make but are extremely resource dependent. A study found that a single hour of television produced in the UK emits 13 metric tons of carbon dioxide. That is just carbon emissions, separate from food waste from catering, large energy uses on generators, resources used in building sets, and environmental degradation from filming in remote locations. For example, sets are often made out of lauan, a lightweight plywood that is harvested from rainforests. A UCLA study in 2006 found that a single sound stage results in the destruction of 4000 hectares of rainforest. In the US, over 1200 films and television series are produced in a single year. Solutions exist. Non-resources intensive options could be redistributing waste though donations, recycling, and composting. Reducing energy use or finding alternatives, minimizing transportation, and reusing wastewater. Even getting rid of plastic water bottles on film sets would decrease the environmental footprint.

 The music and sport industries do little better. Events that revolve around stadiums, world-class concerts, super bowls, even your average Saturday afternoon college football game, leave wakes of endless energy use, transportation fumes, and trash cans full of uneaten hotdogs and coke cans. A study done by Julie’s Bicycle found that 43% of the music industry’s environmental impact is from audience transportation to the venue. This is even more true at music festivals or sporting events that span multiple days or even weeks. Estimations say that average numbers for a well-attended music festival produce 212,000 pounds of waste per day, use upwards of 16,000 gallons of fuel just to power generators, and over 78,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions just in attendee travel (could be doubled if included staff, artist, vendors, engineering etc.).  For sports, the Olympics are a major environmental question. Not only do more than a half million people travel to one location from every corner over the world, cities take on major reconstruction projects for one event. In Rio, the 2016 Olympics emitted over 3.5 million tons of C02, not including the 7 years of construction, and had major issues with water pollution.

 Even entertainment in our own homes can have a negative environmental effect. Studies show that watching 30 minutes of Netflix is equivalent to driving almost 4 miles. That might not seem like a lot, but if you binge watch all of Harry Potter, that is almost 20 hours of screen time or 160 miles. Maybe on average you stream an hour of television every day that is almost 3000 miles in one year or the equivalent of driving all the way across the US. Spotify is not much better. Transmitting music to streaming sites is thought to generate between 200 to 350 million kilograms of greenhouse gases.  A large portion of Spotify’s carbon footprint comes from data centers, basically the energy that powers the internet. They have recently reduced their emissions by relocating servers to the Google Cloud which uses more renewable energy and buys carbon offsets. Even so, data centers as a whole account for 2 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

 The entertainment industry is only growing. The increase in access to movies and music through streaming services has dramatically changed the culture surrounding live events. Let’s be conscious about how we choose to consume entertainment. 

DEVIN O’DONNELL’s interest in travel was cemented by a multi-month trip to East Africa when she was 19. Since then, she has continued to have immersive experiences on multiple continents. Devin has written for a start-up news site and graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in Neuroscience.