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DIY Composting: Why Are We Paying Someone Else to Do What Our Gardens Can Do for Free?

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  DIY Composting: Why Are We Paying Someone Else to Do What Our Gardens Can Do for Free? There was a time when composting was simply part of having a garden. Vegetable peelings, leaves, grass cuttings and dead plants did not automatically disappear into a council bin. Much of this material went onto a compost heap, into a compost bin or directly back into the soil. Somewhere along the way, many of us stopped doing it. Today it is perfectly normal to put garden waste into one bin and food waste into another, then have a lorry collect it so that somebody else can process it. Council recycling schemes have undoubtedly helped divert organic waste away from general rubbish, and that is a good thing. But there is an interesting question: Why send valuable organic material away from our homes, only to go out later and buy compost or fertiliser for the garden? Home composting can be remarkably simple. You do not need expensive equipment, complicated machinery or a large garden. At its simp...
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The Food Waste Recycling Paradox: Cutting Carbon Without Putting Plastic Into Our Soil

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  The Food Waste Recycling Paradox: Cutting Carbon Without Putting Plastic Into Our Soil Food waste seems like one of the easier environmental problems to solve. We buy food. We eat what we need. We avoid throwing food away. Anything genuinely unavoidable — vegetable peelings, bones, eggshells, tea and coffee waste — goes into a food-waste collection or composting system rather than the ordinary bin. Simple. Except, as is so often the case with environmental problems, the closer we look at the complete system, the more complicated it becomes. A new study published in Nature Food has examined what happens when food waste is diverted away from landfill and towards alternatives such as composting and anaerobic digestion. The headline finding is extremely encouraging. Modelling by researchers at the University of Vermont suggests that large-scale diversion of US food waste away from landfill could reduce the climate impact of food-waste management by 89–99% . Nitrogen pollution associ...
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Are We Buying Too Much Food — And Eating Too Much of It?

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  Are We Buying Too Much Food — And Eating Too Much of It? Food waste is one of those environmental problems that seems almost absurd when you stop and think about it. We grow food. We irrigate fields. We manufacture fertilisers. We use machinery to harvest crops. We refrigerate food. We package it. We transport it, sometimes thousands of miles. We put it on supermarket shelves. We drive to the supermarket and pay for it. We take it home. And then quite a lot of it ends up in the bin. For years, the often-quoted figure has been that roughly one-third of the food produced for human consumption around the world is lost or wasted. That figure originated from FAO estimates and remains a useful indication of the extraordinary scale of the problem. More recent figures provide a little more detail: FAO estimates that around 13.2% of food is lost between harvest and retail, while UNEP estimates that another 19% of food available to consumers is wasted in retail, food service and households...
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One Weekend That Could Change Your Home Forever

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  One Weekend That Could Change Your Home Forever Going greener at home does not always require a heat pump, a roof covered in solar panels or a new electric car. Sometimes it just requires a weekend. Two days. A ladder, a screwdriver, a few replacement light bulbs, some sealant, perhaps a bag of wildflower seeds — and a willingness to look at your home slightly differently. Most homes waste surprisingly large amounts of energy and water through dozens of small inefficiencies. A draught under a door here. A dripping tap there. A heating system running when nobody needs it. Lights that consume far more electricity than necessary. A garden that could support far more wildlife with remarkably little intervention. None of these things appears revolutionary on its own. Put them all together, though, and you can make a surprisingly significant difference. So here is a challenge. Give your home one weekend. Not to rebuild it. Not to spend thousands of pounds. Just to find out where energy...
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