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Food Waste As Compost Bin

Writer's picture: Dr. Sanjay JoshiDr. Sanjay Joshi

Updated: Jan 13

Compost Bin

Hello Dear Readers,

This week, I thought of giving you a pictorial representation of the kind of vegetable and food waste you can add to your compost bin. As you can see in this slide, you have to keep adding all the ‘biodegradable’ leftover vegetable and other residues (I won’t call these ‘waste’) to your compost bin. Let me tell you one important thing.


All these residues are parts of the fruits and vegetables that we do not or rather we cannot eat as these do not fit into any of the cooking recipes that are there for cooking purpose. Now coming to the biodegradable thing. Although these leftover residues are not fit for eating by us, humans, they provide excellent source of nutritious food for those tiny little microscopic bacteria and other living organisms.


They have their own ‘cooking ideas’, ‘recipes’ and everything that is required for this purpose. These are the biological entities that ‘break down’ or ‘degrade’ these residues into fine, powdery material, that is, bio compost and release all the essential minerals and micronutrients needed to enrich the soil. This is a classic way of recycling the nutrients. These bacteria need optimum temperature to remain active. The required temperature in maintained by the decomposition reactions that occur inside your compost bin.


The leftover food residues shown in this slide are also biodegradable as they are animal or plant products, but it is not advisable to add those to the compost bin as they will take much more time to decompose than the normal vegetable waste. May be if you have a lot of this kind of waste being generated in your house, you might want to have a separate compost bin just for the meat, bones, egg shells etc. More about this next week. Till then, have a good weekend!


(The author is an environmentalist. Views personal.)

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