Eco-Friendly Products

Our landfills are inefficient. The majority of our waste that gets sent to them, despite it's natural ability to biodegrade, is not biodegrading. There are a number of factors that contribute to this, but the bottom line is that these factors aren't going to change and our landfills are getting more and more full on a daily basis.

Landfills emit methane gas into the atmosphere, which can contribute to global warming. The only solution is to be more aware of what we send (or don't send) to landfills. The EPA estimates that nearly 25% of the waste we send to landfills can be composted at home, creating a great natural fertilizer that can be used to make plants healthier instead of helping to kill them by emitting methane in landfills.

Composting is one of the things that we can all do, such as recycling and using reusable shopping bags, to help improve the health of our planet. Used on a large scale, compost can help to yield more crops, restore contaminated soil, help reforestation, and decrease our need for chemical fertilizers – all steps in the right direction.

If you don't have a yard or don't do any indoor or outdoor gardening, your compost can still be used. Many local governments will collect it through their yard waste programs or you can advertise on local bulletin boards and find a local gardener or club that will happily accept it.

Collecting compost is simple. With the exception of meat, oils, and dairy products, most food scraps can be composted. Hair, clean paper, coffee grounds, wood chips, fireplace ashes, and pine needles are examples of the numerous other items that can also be tossed in your compost. Composting really is as simple as tossing all these materials in either an open outdoor bin or a covered indoor one. Turning the pile over every week will yeild a mature compost pile in a couple of months that can be identified by it's crumbly, dark, earth-smelling properties.

Once mature, it can be used as fertilizer without any modifications. A quick search online will give you plenty of sites with information about getting started on your own. It's simple – probably about as easy as recycling – and much easier than remembering your reusable bags for every shopping trip.

But the benefits are great – less landfill waste, less methane gas in our atmosphere, more natural fertilizer, and an overall healthier planet. The cost? Nothing really. You're going to throw those items away anyway – what's the difference in throwing them in a compost pile versus the garbage can?