Composting 101: Outdoor Pile Method
Create less garbage and more healthy soil on your property.
As a leader for sustainability in your community, you know that composting saves money, prevents pollution, and improves soil quality while meeting the daily need to manage waste. These benefits earn composting the top spot on our list of household and organizational practices that protect our environment. Today’s post in our series covering our Sustainable Practice Top Twenty—the most important practices to measure and improve in any household and organization—features our Composting 101: Outdoor Pile Composting practice guide. For other composting methods, see our Sustainable Practice website.
Helping You Become Superbly Sustainable: A Quick Note
People who create superbly sustainable households and organizations can successfully lead many others on pathways to sustainability. But if no one in your community knows how to become superbly sustainable, who is leading and where are they taking you? Our mission at Sustainable Practice is to empower you to create superbly sustainable homes and organizations. We believe you can be an agent for positive change on a planet that needs you—when you have the knowledge and experience necessary to be a wise leader for sustainability in your community. We also believe that we can always learn something new from each other, so please share your ideas and insights so we can improve what we do!
Two measurements show the environmental impact of composting:
How many liters of waste you compost per week.
How many liters of garbage you send to incinerate or landfill per week.
Is the juice worth the squeeze to measure this for your household or organization? Keeping a record of how many pails of compost and how many bags of garbage you take out isn’t hard. Once you have this data, then you can understand your opportunities, set your sustainability goals, plan your pathways, take action, measure your results, and commit to keep improving. For my family, I keep track of how many compost pails of waste and bags of garbage I take out each week. If I start taking out less compost and more garbage, I know something has gone off the rails.
My family has a one-gallon (about 4 liters) kitchen counter compost pail for collecting food scraps and containers, paper towels, and anything else that is biodegradable, so we keep putrescible waste out of our garbage. Our town requires garbage to be contained in either a “small” 15-gallon (holds about 57 liters) or a “large” 33-gallon (125 liters) plastic bag. When my family is on top of our “zero waste” game, each week, we compost about 20 liters of household waste and send less than 50 liters of garbage to burn or bury. How about your family?
Composting 101
Outdoor Pile Composting
Make a compost pile outdoors to keep organic materials on-site to decompose naturally. Rather than transporting organic materials off-site and losing soil-building nutrients, use your compost to improve local soil and increase biodiversity.
Pathways
Goods: Manage Waste Well
Food: Grow Organic Food
Habitat: Conserve Habitat
Community: Demonstrate Best Practices
Goals
Save the environmental costs of
storing, transporting, incinerating, and landfilling solid waste; and
flushing, holding, and treating liquid waste.
Keep organic material out of landfills, septic tanks, and treatment plants.
Enrich local soil with compost.
Enhance your backyard biodiversity without creating a nuisance or hazard.
Learn more about your local environment.
Equipment and Materials
Kitchen sink strainer [Optional]
Kitchen compost pail [Optional]
An outdoor area, one to three square meters, for a compost pile
Wire, wood, or similar material to build a composting bin [optional]
“Brown” ingredients (dried leaves, paper, cardboard, wood chips, etc.)
“Green” ingredients (kitchen scraps, grass clippings, chicken poop, etc.)
Liquid organic waste (drinks, sauces, urine, etc.) [Optional]
Garden hose or watering can [Optional]
Gardening tools (shovel, pitchfork, rake, wheelbarrow, etc.) [Optional]
Steps
Allocate an outdoor area, one to three square meters, for a compost pile.
Build a composting bin in this area. [Optional]
Collect “browns.”
Collect “greens.”
Layer “greens” covered by “browns” on your compost pile.
Pour liquid organic waste on your pile and cover it with “browns.” [Optional]
Keep your pile moist. [Optional]
Turn your pile so materials in it all get exposed to air. [Optional]
Allow decomposition to occur naturally, producing compost.
Use this compost to amend soil.
Measurements
How many liters of solid and liquid waste you compost on site.
How many liters of garbage you send to incinerate or landfill.
Outcomes
Increase the volume of solid and liquid waste you compost on site.
Reduce the volume of garbage you send to incinerate or landfill.
Reduce the volume of water you flush to your septic or sewer.
Amend your soil with compost.
Discussion
The practice of outdoor pile composting handles organic waste beneficially by encouraging biological decomposition to break down the material and return nutrients to the soil, so you send less garbage to incinerate or landfill and flush less water to septic or sewer systems. This composting 101 practice is suitable for pathogen-free plant-based material and requires at least a square meter of outdoor area for a compost pile. Outdoor pile composting can be a daily practice, but decomposition slows or stops during cold weather, so this practice may require months or several years to produce compost. Intermediate and expert composting practices can produce compost much faster than this practice.
This practice is a step along these pathways:
Goods: Manage Waste Well to compost or recycle 100% of your solid waste, incinerating or landfilling zero percent of your waste.
Food: Grow Organic Food to replace synthetic pesticides and fertilizers with integrated pest management and compost.
Habitat: Conserve Habitat to increase biodiversity in your local ecosystem.
Community: Demonstrate Best Practices for family, friends, and neighbors.
Organic waste includes paper, cardboard, wood, food scraps, weeds, leaves, grass clippings, dishwater, and other putrescible materials. If this waste is not composted on-site, it must be transported off-site using trucks for solids and septic or sewer systems for liquids. Here are the environmental savings achieved by composting organic waste:
No plastic bags are required to contain it.
No trucks are required to pick it up.
No air pollution is emitted to transport or incinerate it.
No particulate matter is created while transporting it. (As tires wear down, small pieces break off and pollute air and water as particulate matter.)
No transfer stations are required to sort through and route it.
No incinerators are required to burn it.
No landfills are required to bury it.
No landfill methane gas is created from it. (Organic material buried in landfills creates methane, an explosive and potent greenhouse gas.)
No water treatment plant sludge is created from it.
A backyard compost pile provides habitat for detritivores, and soil amended with compost provides fertile habitat for a diversity of species below ground and above ground. Compost adds organic matter to soil, which improves the ability of many plants to grow in clay or sand and to tolerate infrequent watering.
Superb composting practices benefit all concerned without creating a nuisance or hazard. Poor composting practices may create bad odors, attract vertebrate pests, grow weeds, and spread pathogens that sicken your family, guests, or pets.
For pathogenic and animal-based material, practice other composting methods that reach higher temperatures and deter vertebrate pests. For decomposition to occur year-round in cold climates, you’ll need tens of cubic meters of material (to maintain warmth inside the pile) or practice indoor composting methods.
Definitions
Browns: organic material with high available carbon content
Compost (noun): organic material that has decomposed to resemble soil
Compost (verb): to encourage organic material to decompose into compost
Decompose: to break apart large molecules into smaller molecules
Garbage: solid waste that is not composted or recycled
Greens: organic material with high available nitrogen content
Liquid waste: liquids you no longer want
Organic material: high-molecular-weight substances that naturally decompose into smaller-molecule substances
Recycle: return waste to manufacturers for use to produce valuable goods
Solid waste: solid material you no longer want
Troubleshooting
Your compost pile smells bad:
Turn your pile to expose material to air.
Increase your ratio of “browns” to “greens.”
Investigate which materials cause smells; avoid composting them.
Materials in your compost pile decompose slowly or not at all:
Outdoor temperatures may be too cold; wait for warm weather.
Water your pile.
Turn your pile to expose moist material to air.
Increase your ratio of “greens” to “browns.”
Add a compost accelerator, such as material from a hot pile.
Your compost pile attracts vertebrate pests (mice, rats, raccoons, etc.):
Observe whether pests are eating material in your pile; if so, stop adding those items.
Observe whether pests are nesting in your pile for warmth; if so, trap pests.
Practice pest-proof composting methods.
Your compost pile attracts invertebrate pests (mites, flies, spiders, etc.):
This is natural and unavoidable in outdoor composting; these species indicate a healthy local ecosystem.
Practice indoor composting methods.
You produce very little compost:
This is a natural and desirable outcome; you have successfully achieved the goals of this practice.
Increase the volume of material you add to your pile.
Invite family, friends, and neighbors to contribute their organic waste to your compost pile.
Many weeds grow in soil you’ve amended with compost:
This may simply indicate the soil is more fertile.
Avoid putting weeds that have gone to seed in your pile.
Cover your pile to avoid wind-blown weed seeds accumulating.
Limitations
Composting aromatic food waste (including meat, dairy products, baked goods, and oils) with this method can smell bad and attract pests.
Cold weather inhibits composting.
Pathogens (viruses, fungi, bacteria, weed seeds, etc.) may persist in finished compost.
Waste may take a year or longer to decompose fully.
Opportunities
Practice intermediate or expert composting to
Compost aromatic food waste and pet waste
Compost faster
Compost year-round
Mitigate pathogens
Practice plant-based diets to
Reduce aromatic food waste
References
Books
Articles
3 Bin Compost System (Fully Explained!), Help Me Compost
Composting at Home - The Green and Brown Alternative, Cornell Cooperative Extension
Composting 101, NRDC
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