A compost bin is a handy tool in which you can recycle your food waste and kitchen scraps, turn it into compost for your flower or vegetable garden, and keep your organic waste out of landfills.
You can choose from many different types of compost bins, each with its pros and cons. It’s time to open the lid on what these are and how exactly you use them.
What Is Composting?
Composting is the recycling of food waste, such as fruit and vegetable scraps, yard waste, such as grass clippings, and other organic materials. Mimicking the decomposition process that occurs in nature, composting combines these materials in a compost bin and breaks them down over the course of weeks and months. Composting at home is an effective way to speed up the natural composting process and produce a material rich in potassium, nitrogen, and phosphorus.
How Does Composting Work?
Composting is as simple as letting nature’s natural decomposition do its thing. At home, you simply have to create an environment where compostable materials can be broken down by aerobic organisms and microorganisms. During the composting process, these critters chew up and break down the materials in a compost pile—the name given to the literal pile in the bin—before digesting it and breaking it “into smaller pieces in a process called fragmentation.”
Though the specific compost process depends on the type of compost bin you use, it typically focuses on aerobic decomposition, which requires oxygen to be introduced to the compost pile regularly, typically by mixing manually, one way or another. For compost piles to be effectively broken down, they must meet the following criteria:
- Plenty of oxygen
- Adequate moisture—With the right mix of wet materials and dry materials, you can keep compost moist, but not soaking wet.
- Composting materials with the right carbon-to-nitrogen mix, for a ratio of 30:1, although some guides tell you to just keep your brown and green to 50:50 in your bin—Carbon-rich materials are usually dry or brown materials, such as paper, cardboard, dried sticks and leaves, wood ash, and pine needles. Nitrogen-rich, or green, materials, are fruit peels, vegetable scraps, eggshells, and coffee grounds.
- A small amount of soil, which holds the microorganisms needed to kickstart the process.
- Organic matter to add to your compost pile.
What Are the Benefits of Composting?
If you’re still wondering what the point of recycling household organic matter is, you might not have heard of the multiple benefits of composting. Composting reduces the amount of waste that ends up in landfills. This is a major benefit because food scraps account for 28% of what gets thrown out every week. Once at the landfill, it’s buried under countless tons of other rubbish, where it goes through anaerobic decomposition.
Anaerobic decomposition, during which the waste has no access to oxygen, releases biogas, a mixture of carbon dioxide and methane, directly into the atmosphere, where it traps heat, worsening the effects of climate change.
Finished compost also serves as an alternative to chemical fertilizers, which can damage the environment and the agricultural process. With traditional fertilizers, the soil becomes dependent on the chemicals, discouraging healthy organic matter and depleting the soil of natural nutrients. Chemical fertilizers also wash away into aquatic ecosystems and cause algal blooms that deprive aquatic animals of oxygen and eventually kill off whole populations of wildlife.
Usable compost also improves soil by encouraging it to retain more water, reducing the amount of water that crop fields need.
If the environmental advantages weren’t enough, compost also provides nutrients for garden beds, lawns, flowers, and vegetable gardens. Flowers and plant life benefit from the nutrients in compost, making them healthier and letting them bloom for longer. It functions as an effective alternative to synthetic fertilizers, which leach harmful chemicals into the environment. Vegetable gardens, flower beds, and potted plants benefit in the same way. These myriad benefits explain why farmers call compost “black gold.”
Types of Compost Bins
Basically, a compost bin is a container that encourages the composting process and speeds it up. Not all compost bins are the same. There are actually several types of compost bins to choose from, each ideal for different sets of circumstances. Choose from the following compost bins to learn which one is right for your lifestyle:
Stationary composter
Stationary composters are perhaps the most common type of outdoor compost bin, as they’re the easiest to use. Enclosed compost bins, they have an opening at the top that opens and closes and can be locked into place, which keeps the odor inside and pests out. Designed with simplicity in mind, you place the organic material through the top opening, microorganisms process the contents, and you then remove the finished product from the bottom. Composting with these enclosed bins takes longer if you don’t mix the contents manually.
Unlike other compost bins, stationary composters come in either aerobic composting or anaerobic composting options. Aerobic composters involve aerating the compost—turning it to add oxygen—whereas anaerobic composters are not turned, instead allowing the composting materials to break down more slowly, without oxygen.
Compost tumbler
Also called batch tumblers, compost tumblers are typically elevated units that have multiple compartments to fill with waste. These compartments are encased in a rotating drum that can be spun by hand or with a cranking unit. Rotating the unit adds oxygen to each of the compartments, aerating the compost and breaking down the matter faster.
Once a compartment has been filled, the matter decomposes into compost while you add your new kitchen scraps and yard waste to the second compartment.
Compost tumblers make it easy to harvest the compost, as well, since you can just put a bucket beneath the opening and let it pour out.
Worm bin
Though worms can be used in other composting bins, a worm composter has a large concentration of a specific breed of worms—usually red wigglers—that eat your kitchen waste and create compost much faster than other methods in a process known as vermiculture.
Worm bins can be tiered to allow for composting in batches or can be like the stationary composter mentioned above. You can use any basic plastic bin to make a worm farm, but try to reuse one you already have. Alternatively, worm composting also has an in-ground option that directly feeds the nutrients into the soil it’s installed in, removing the need to harvest the compost pile.
For more information on vermiculture, read my article all about worm composting.
Bokashi composting bin
Bokashi composting is one of the easier forms of composting, as you don’t need to put much effort into setting up your bin, but you will need to add bokashi inoculant, which mixes microorganisms, water, wheat, bran, and molasses, into your bokashi composting bin. You can buy this premade in a store or online. The process uses the microorganisms to break down the materials, and you’ll still need to mix the compost regularly. Bokashi composting is particularly effective for apartment dwellers, since it doesn’t take up much space.
Food waste digester
A food waste digester might be a better option for anyone who wants to reduce the amount of food scraps and waste they throw out but isn’t specifically interested in the benefits of composting. These comprise a lower basket installed below ground level and a cone-shaped bucket above ground to add food and kitchen waste to. The composting material then makes its way to the lower basket to decompose. Microorganisms take care of most of the organic waste, while the rest seeps into the soil, removing the need to empty the bin. Naturally, this is only suited to outdoor or backyard composting.
Countertop food waste processor
These can be a more effective way to compost indoors, as countertop food waste processors don’t take up much space and don’t emit the odor sometimes associated with composting. While these don’t technically produce compost from kitchen scraps and food waste, the finished product is quite close to actual compost. Instead of composting, they chop up and dehydrate the waste, thereby turning it into a usable fertilizer. Taking advantage of this is as simple as being able to collect food scraps and add them when there’s enough space. They’ll be done before you know it.
How to Choose a Compost Bin
Choosing from these compost systems can seem complicated, but it’s easy to narrow down your options based on various criteria, such as how much space you have and what you want to use the compost for. Whether you’ll use composting indoors or outdoors will be a determining factor in this. Food waste digesters, for example, are not suitable for indoor composting. On the other hand, if you want a lot of fresh compost to add to your garden, a countertop food waste processor may not be the ideal method for you.
While larger spaces mean you can compost more materials, large compost piles aren’t appropriate for everyone. If you’re composting in an apartment you’ll encounter a number of restrictions, so a countertop food waste processor is probably the easiest, though not the only, method.
Lastly is the amount of daily effort you want to put into your new composting project. The compost bins I’ve listed above involve either active composting or passive composting. How much extra time you have will dictate whether active or passive composting is best for you.
How to Build Your Own Compost Bin
While buying a compost bin is an effective choice to start composting quickly, you can also make your own compost bin. Before doing so, you’ll need to figure out how much available space you have, among other factors. Once you do, making a DIY compost bin involves a few simple steps.
1. Acquire materials
Getting together the materials is the obvious first step. Wooden pallets make a good sustainable and low-cost source material. Look for recycled options with an IPPC stamp depicting an “HT” for “heat-treated.” You’ll also need these items:
- Wood screws
- Drill and drill bits
- Screwdriver
- Staple gun
- Measuring tape
- Pencil
- Tight chicken wire
- Weed barrier paper
- Utility scissors
2. Add chicken wire to wood pallets
Though adding chicken wire to each of your pallets isn’t a mandatory step in the process, it ensures that the compost stays inside the compost bin. Attaching this is as simple as measuring it out to the size of four of the pallets, cutting it to size, and attaching it.
3. Connect sides to the bottom
Now, it’s time to connect each of the pallets, which involves measuring where you’ll place your screws, lining the pallets up, and screwing them together, creating your compost structure.
4. Add top and finish
Finally, it’s time to add a top, which functions as a way to open and close the DIY compost bin, before adding the hinges and connecting everything.
How to Keep Pests Out of a Compost Bin
Rats and other pests, such as fruit flies, can be attracted to your compost bin by the smell, as well as seeing it as a place to keep warm and out of the elements. That not only affects the bin itself, but could also lead to pests around your home. The main way of preventing this is by sealing off their access to the bin and making sure it doesn’t emit an odor. Certain compost bins excel at this, such as stationary composters and compost tumblers. You can further minimize the odor by avoiding meat, bread, and similar materials, keeping your ratio high in carbon rich material, and turning your compost pile regularly.
That’s not to say you should try to keep all of the critters out, as earthworms, snails, slugs, sow bugs, millipedes, and white worms are all part of the natural process.
What Can You Put in a Compost Bin?
You need to have the right balance of compost materials in your bin for everything to break down effectively. That means having the right amount of brown and green materials in your compost pile. Broadly speaking, brown materials are yard waste and green materials are kitchen waste.
Certain materials, are best for your compost pile:
- Cardboard, uncoated and cut up into small pieces
- Hair and fur
- Shredded newspaper
- Small dried sticks
- Dried grass clippings
- Coffee grounds and filters
- Eggshells
- Sawdust
- Wood chips
- Food scraps
- Green and dried leaves
- Kitchen scraps and food waste
- Vegetable and fruit scraps
- Tea bags
- Banana peels
- Shredded paper
- Fruit peels
What should you avoid composting?
To keep your compost pile and finished compost healthy, safe, and nutritious, you’ll need to avoid adding specific materials to your compost bin. Diseased plants must be avoided for any composting that doesn’t involve heat—which destroys the disease—as these plant diseases can spread across the compost and then affect wherever the compost is spread, making it harmful instead of helpful.
You should also never compost meat or meat scraps, as these could breed diseases in a similar way, as well as attracting unwanted pests, which can be irritating to deal with. At the same time, you should also avoid adding the following materials to your compost pile:
- Bread
- Acidic fruits and vegetables
- Pet waste
- Rice (which can release toxins, regardless of whether its dried or cooked)
- Cooking oils
- Coal or charcoal ash
- Colored or glossy paper
Wrapping Up
If you’re interested in reducing your environmental footprint without needing to put much effort into it, compost bins can be an effective option. Starting a compost pile is as simple as knowing what compost bin you need and using it accordingly. So use this guide to pick the best compost bin for your needs and start composting today!