Yeah, no joke, that’s what this one is about.
After N pages of thinking it through, my solution is to toss two layers of clear plastic over my tumbling composter (below), and hope it buys me a few weeks.
As I have learned from Watch Wes Work, it’s only temporary, unless it works.
It’s a long and winding road, to end up with that. But sometimes you have to assess the options, even if nothing new jumps out at you.
With my redneck double-glazing, the plastic surface of the composter reached about 110F, on a roughly 70F day. There’s no way that’s going to get me through the winter. But maybe it gives me some time to think about it.
Background
Source: Amazon.
I use the composter shown above.
It has two weird features.
First, it’s made in Canada.
Second, it doesn’t work in cold weather. At all.
I guess that’s why they send them down here, eh?
Turns out , wintertime composting is a problem for anyone who composts small amounts of material, in a colder climate. The heat given off by decomposition isn’t enough to keep the compost warm. Composting grinds to a halt as temperatures fall.
My dad claimed that when he was a kid, dairy farmers in upstate New York would mound up cow manure around their barns for winter. This was not for the aesthetics of it. Instead, this was done to take advantage of the heat generated by large volumes of rotting manure.
In hindsight, that was a lot funnier the way my dad told it.
For two decades now, I’ve stopped composting kitchen scraps each fall, and resumed in the spring. Today it occurred to me … instead of just putting up with it, I should … maybe look for a solution?
What a radical thought.
What’s that garbage worth to you?
Generically, the problem has two parts: Get rid of your kitchen scraps responsibly, and produce desirable compost for the garden.
Here’s the thing: I want the compost. In my experience, compost is nature’s Miracle-Gro(r). Or maybe vice-versa. It’s good for what ails a plant, and then some. It’s inexplicably helpful. Gardening black magic.
Otherwise, merely disposing of kitchen scraps responsibly is not an issue for me. I think. Elsewhere in the U.S., those scraps might be landfilled, at which point their anaerobic decomposition would generate methane. If vented to the atmosphere, that’s a bad thing. By contrast, Fairfax County VA incinerates its garbage, generates electricity from that, recovers metals as possible, then landfills the ashes. Here, food waste in the household garbage is just more biomass fuel for the electrical grid.
There’s some minor benefit in recovering the plant nutrients in those kitchen scraps. But not much. You only need trace amounts of those in the garden, and until the world runs out, those nutrients are cheap. At present, looks like 10-10-10 fertilizer (10% (by weight?) each of nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus) runs about a dollar a pound, retail. I’m finally getting to the bottom of the 10-pound bag of that stuff that I bought fifteen years ago.
Should I fry in Hell for all eternity on account of that? I’m thinking, probably not, but it’s debatable. Conservation of mass says that N, P, and K went somewhere. If not stored in the soil in my yard, or gone down the sewer pipes, they’ve run off to the Chesapeake. But is that a large, medium, or small contribution of those nutrients, on a per-person-year basis? No clue.
Plenty of ways to get rid of household kitchen waste
If it were just a matter of getting rid of kitchen waste, without putting it in the household garbage, I have numerous free and paid disposal options in my area. Practically speaking, these would require me to store my kitchen scraps for a week at a time. But no longer than that.
Reportedly (my wife did the homework here): In Fairfax County, VA, I have at least these following locations for dropping off my kitchen compostables, for free. This includes animal products and plate waste, items you would not typically compost at home.
- The Fairfax County I-66 and I-95 transfer stations/landfills (documented, here).
- plus all ten farmers’ markets run by Fairfax County (same document).
- Selected Mom’s Organic Markets (Moms) (documented, here)
- Whole Foods in Vienna (solely an internet rumor, not documented).
In addition, there’s the option of weekly composting home pickup for $360/year. Around here, one may subscribe to a privately-run once-a-week compost pickup service. Apparently the dominant local service is highly recommended by its users. It costs ~$30 a month for weekly composting service, and there is no mention of seasonal contracts, so I’m assuming it’s an annual contract. They’ll even throw in a couple of 20 pound bags of compost, per year, if you ask for it.
The free drop-offs lack appeal for a few reasons. One, for some reason, my wife isn’t keen on my routinely transporting buckets of decomposing garbage in her car. Two, I’d be on the hook for making that trip weekly, without fail. Three, these would require a dedicated car trip just for dumping the kitchen scraps, as I don’t routinely visit any of those places.
The energy required for my part of these options isn’t a big deal, but … It’s about an 18-mile round trip to the I-66 transfer station. That would use about the same amount of electricity as drying an extra load of laundry, a week, in the wintertime. (Call it 3.5 KWH/week.) Doing that for three wintertime months would generate around 40 pounds of additional C02 release. That 40 pounds is within rounding error on my household carbon footprint. Not a big deal.
I do wonder about, and am clueless about, the fossil fuels required for the paid pickup option. Near as I can tell, customers of that service are spread thin. The service provider has a distinctive bin, and I’ve only noticed one household in my broad neighborhood that puts a bin like that on the curb. That implies that there are a lot of truck-miles per pickup, but I have no clue just how many, or how large the carbon footprint of that is.
But mostly, where I live, the decisive factor is that putting kitchen scraps in the trash is more-or-less environmentally harmless. As noted above, they end up as biomass for electrical generation. They seem to have what economists term “free disposal”, environmentally. You can convert them back to carbon at virtually zero net cost. Spending any fossil fuels to get rid of those scraps seems like a losing proposition, from a carbon-footprint perspective. Let alone the time, effort (and potential car-stink residual) of any of the free dropoffs.
Why go to a lot of trouble, or some trouble and expense, just to shoot yourself in the foot, environmentally? Even if you’re only shooting yourself a little bit. If my options are to haul it myself, pay someone to haul it separately, or just put it in the household garbage, it makes more sense to chuck it in the garbage. At least in Fairfax County. YMMV.
You know you’re a suburban gardener when …
Source: Ace Hardware. Not AI.
You find yourself buying shrink-wrapped shit. That is, packages of manure. Off the hardware store shelf. And not for cheap, either.
I think that was near the low point of my organic-gardening phase. In the distant past, I was a gardening purist and sought natural sources of nutrients for my garden. No Matter What.
Until one day, after transporting an entire 4’x8’x2′ utility trailer of horse bedding from the exurbs to my garden, I did the math and realized I could have bought the same amount of nitrogen for about $1*, in a nice, clean bag, at the hardware store. With far less expenditure of fossil fuels for transport. And far less effort.
* Calculated from data in this reference. Typical used straw bedding weighs in at maybe 4 lbs/cubic foot, and is one-fourth horse manure. Manure from a sedentary horse comes in around 7 pounds nitrogen per ton. My trailer would have held ((4x8x2 cubic fee, * 4 lbs/cu ft.)*(.25% manure * 7 lbs nitrogen per ton for manure / 2000 lbs per ton) = ) about a quarter-pound of nitrogen. Which is slightly less than you get in a pound of 30-0-0 lawn fertilizer. Which costs about a buck at Home Depot. You don’t believe me? Read the N-P-K percentages on the shrink-wrapped manure, above.
Organic sources of garden nutrients are nice because they are typically slow-release and low-nutrient-density. That makes it just about impossible to shock your plants with over-fertilization. (Or goof-proof, said as one who has goofed.) These also add carbon if worked into the soil, which improves its tilth. But the flip side of low nutrient density is inevitably a relatively high environmental cost in transportation energy. Finally, I would guess there’s less likelihood the nutrients will be transported by rain runoff, rather than being used by your plants.
Despite that, I decided that it was smarter to use artificial fertilizers sparingly than it was to lug around tons of low-nutrient-density organic matter. Hence the soil test kit comes out every spring. And I limit my organic materials to those I can gather at home. Including kitchen compost.
I’m all for organic sources of garden nutrients. I just don’t want to haul them any significant distance. Let alone dispose of the packaging.
A tempest in a compost tea pot?
Before I go to any significant cost to fix this problem, I need to have a quantitative handle on the benefit. Just how much kitchen-waste compost do I typically produce, in the (roughly) nine months a year that the composter actually works. And by inference, how much will I gain from an additional three months.
On the output side of the equation, I’d guess that my composter produces about a cubic foot of finished kitchen-scraps compost every three months. I seem to empty one side of the composter about that often, and each emptying yields one and a half five-gallon buckets of compost. (N.B. a cubic foot is about 7.5 gallons). Working it in the other direction, that’s about a third of my estimated initial volume of kitchen waste, which seems about right. (I mix “brown” material 50/50 with the kitchen waste, so in theory, in three months, six cubic feet of total composter input ends up generating one cubic fit of finished compost, or just under an 85%) reduction in volume. Not sure if that’s a reasonable figure or not.)
So that’s the question. Where I live, there’s no particular environmental harm in chucking food scraps in the garbage. The only real benefit of not doing that is the highly desirable compost. So as I work through this problem, the issue boils down to how much effort should I go to, to obtain an extra cubic foot of high-quality kitchen-scrap compost, per year?
Stuff I’m not going to do.
Countertop electric composter.
I recall this coming out as a new product just a few years ago. Now there’s an entire industry segment for countertop electric composters. These dry and grind your kitchen scraps, resulting in “shelf-stable” dehydrated material.
Looks like your typical countertop electric composter will:
- cost about $350.
- hold maybe three quarts of kitchen scraps maximum
- dry and grind that in 6-10 hours
- produce a dry, shelf-stable product.
- reduce the volume by about 90%.
- produce odors as they work.
- Use about 0.8 KWH per quart of scraps.
That last one is my estimate. The manufacturers say somewhere around that much electricity per batch. But they must be counting on the machine to be only about a third full when run, typically. (Calculation not shown. It was boring.)
From the gardening perspective, the end product seems a bit weird to me, in that, well, it’s still food. It’s not composted, as in rotted. It’s dehydrated, ground food scraps.
Really, the only difference between this and a food dehydrator is that this dries your food (scraps) and grinds them up.
It’s as if someone mated a hair dryer and a garbage disposal. I can’t help but think that the (stressed) moving parts predict a relatively short lifespan.
If I had to work up a figure for my expected electrical use over the winter, for this device, I’d guess that I’d run this for three months (90 days), producing about two quarts of kitchen scraps per day. If that then takes 1.5KWH per load, over the course of the winter season this would use 135 KWH. In Virginia, that would result in about 90 pounds of additional C02 emissions per season, from the electrical generation. (I can’t count on any reduction in landfill methane from not putting my scraps in the trash, because Fairfax County incinerates everything. I think.)
Aside from the cost, the smell when operating, the potential for the results to attract vermin when used outside, the electricity consumed, and the likely short lifespan of the device, this seems like a pretty good option.
Ew. Just ew.
One common nugget of internet wisdom is to freeze and store your winter garbage, and compost it later.
Another alternative is indoor worm composting.
Nope.
Groping toward a solution
First, all the internet gives me, for fixing my current composter, is lame advice. Ooh, just move the composter to a sunnier spot. That should help with daytime warmth. Aah, what you need is some insulation, so the heat of decomposition isn’t lost.
Qualitatively, those make sense. Yeah, you got it, I want my compost to be warmer.
Quantitatively, there’s not a chance either one will do the trick. As a solar heater, my composter sucks. That’s not what it was designed for. It has a lot of mass, but little sun-absorbing surface area. It doesn’t trap any hot air (it’s not glazed), it’s just black plastic sitting in the sun. And did I mention it’s plastic, yet it relies on conduction of heat through the durable plastic walls into the composting material. Separately, as a heat-retaining compost holder, it sucks. For one thing, the container of compost is suspended, allowing cold air to contact the container from all sides and both ends, all the time. And you literally can’t insulate the ends or the thing won’t spin.
Let me now discount some out-of-the-blue solution to this. For example, it might be possible to purchase bacteria that operate efficiently at lower temperatures. I’ve seen hints that such exist, but I haven’t really hit upon a product aimed at the home market. Or, surely I could use electricity to warm the composter, but (see “free disposal” above) that surely increases my carbon footprint. Let me ignore things of that nature. One’s over my head, the other seems like outright stupidity.
And yet, the internet is kind-of right, because, practically speaking, it comes down to finding a cheap way to keep that composter warm. Cheap, because my total reward from this is to reap a whole extra cubic foot of compost per year.
And so, first shot, I covered my composter, as I might cover a plant. In effect, I mocked up a little greenhouse for it, where it stood. Just like my tomatoes.
Maybe the bricks behind it provide thermal mass. Maybe that’s where the composter sat and I didn’t want to try moving it when full.
Having looked at solar air heaters, I now know to classify this as a direct solar heater, and as such, probably low-powered. So I don’t think this, by itself, will do it. It’s still a lot of mass, and not a lot of surface. (Plus, if it does, I’m going to kick myself for not having done this sooner.)
But, in my back pocket, I have the notion that it’s not hard to add an indirect solar air heater to that. And once you go that route, you can, to a limited degree, pick your power to match your application. So the obvious next step, if and when this fails, is to take the one I just built, mod as required, and see what temperature it can produce inside that composter “tent”.
But that’s as far as I go, today. Maybe this will do the trick for the next few weeks. As with my tomatoes, it’s a season-extender. I doubt this is going to get me through the winter.
