Six Excellent Reasons To Start Composting This Week

Chances are, you've started gazing woefully at your trash can full of carrot tops, watermelon rinds, eggshells and coffee grounds wondering if now's the time to start composting. You may be wondering what you'll need to buy to kick off the process, or what it's like to navigate the world of composting from within a small urban apartment. We've got answers for that and much more, and if we've left any compost heap unturned, our friends at Best Plants have every detail mapped out perfectly.

Check out six of our best reasons to start composting this week.

This four-tiered bin features a top lid that keeps odors inside, and three levels where your food waste and worms make a happy home together. A spigot on the bottom dispenses "compost tea," a liquid that's incredibly nutritious for house plants.

Through a combined effort, Re:Vision's composting program has been able to take on more than 500 pounds of The Real Dill's vegetable and herb scraps every week.

"We're closing the loop for a healthy and resilient future." It's a big promise, and one that Industrial/Organic founder Amanda Weeks intends on keeping. She and her team have developed a strategy to use anaerobic fermentation to more efficiently break down food waste, and intend to put the ideas into practice starting this summer at their first facility in Brooklyn.

I always feel guilty dumping the pulp from my juicer into the compost bin, which is why I thought the moist pulp would be the perfect addition to a breakfast muffin.

The WiFi– and bluetooth-enabled electronic box, which looks like a sleek trash receptacle, is as useful for avid gardeners as it is for resourceful apartment-dwellers with garden boxes. It has the capacity to process eight pounds of scraps at a time and features a built-in sensor that moves material to the bottom of the device, where it's heat-processed to kickstart the decomposition process. The result: two pounds of fresh fertilizer made with stuff you would have just thrown away — and much happier plants.

For every vegetable, I have some sort of wisdom I could share. Whether it be some of the things that people don't typically think of, like carrot tops, radish tops, celery leaves and things like that, or even some of the more common vegetables that might give people a new perspective. Oftentimes I talk about the onion and the life span of an onion, and how it starts in the spring with the green tops and most people don't know that.