Every year in April we celebrate Earth Day. It’s a day to take a minute and consider what we can do to benefit our environment. It can be an overwhelming task. Save the Earth? Ummm, okay? But where do we start?
Well, one simple and practical place you could start is with a compost. Rotting dirt? Yes! Why? According to the Environmental Protection Agency, “About 94 percent of the food we throw away ends up in landfills or combustion facilities. In 2017, we disposed 38.1 million tons of food waste.” All of those orange peels, coffee grounds, and egg shells that you throw away every day, just go to the landfill to pile up. Instead of tossing them in the trash you could take them out to a section of your backyard. Why should I take a corner of my yard and make it into a mini landfill? Because it will reduce the amount of garbage you throw away that goes to the landfill and eventually produces Methane gas. What’s Methane gas? Methane is a toxic gas made from decomposing fruits and vegetables in the landfill. It’s toxic to us, animals, and the environment around us.
What do I get for this? I mean if I’m going to put work into this, and sacrifice pristine land space, than I want to get something out of it. When my family started to compost, we noticed that we weren’t using so many garbage bags. And you pay money for garbage bags, and if you use less garbage bags, than you use less money. You also take the garbage out less. Instead of your compostable remains turning into garbage it actually turns into valuable soil. Food scraps decompose to improve soil health by adding vital nutrients and minerals into the dirt as they break down. Rather than buying packaged bags of compost dirt, you can make your own while reducing landfill waste.
My family has a planter box up in the top of our yard, so we began to routinely threw all of our fruit and vegetable scraps up there. And after a while, we began notice we had plants growing from the compost. In fact, the previous Halloween, we found a few pumpkins that had grown from the compost. The best part is that it wasn’t hard at all, but we were still helping our planet. Remember, even if it’s just a little baby step, it’s still a step to saving our Earth.
Resources: https://www.epa.gov/recycle/composting-home#benefits
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