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My Compost Bin And I

Posted by Hemos on from the building-from-scraps dept.

John writes "There they were, staring at me with a last glimmer of hope. I tried to turn to avoid the cries of help they echoed, but they were too much for me to bare. Minutes later, with an insight of knowledge, I quickly devised a plan to rescue these dying souls. And out of the bitter remains I found around my place of refuge, I constructed a home for them - somewhere where they could be in peace - a compost bin. The vegetable scraps rejoiced! Their time of suffering was no longer, for my divine plan had taken effect. "

4 of 302 comments (clear)

  1. Greencone + Compost + Recycle = little garbage by Neil+Blender · · Score: 5, Informative

    I recently bought a house. One of the first things I did was build a compost bin and buy a greencone. Between that and recycling, I have very little garbage each week. Another benefit is no smelly garbage in the house since everything that rots or decomposes goes in either the green cone or the compost.

  2. How lame by jukal · · Score: 5, Informative
    why don't you instead turn the compost bins into electricity generators. There was a related story on slashdot, which I could not find, so instead, read this(generating electricity with biomass):

    Cuba is about to start the nation's first-ever sugar cane harvest in which a sugar mill will not make SUGAR, but instead will be generating electricity from the biomass.

  3. That compost bin sucks. by leastsquares · · Score: 5, Informative

    1) Who cares about the compost getting wet when it rains? So long as the drainage is fairly good, a bit of rain won't hurt.

    2) It looks like it is sitting in the sun. That's going to really stink in the summer. Instead of being a nice place friendly mold/fungi/insects to hang out, it is just going to attact wasps and roaches in the summer.

    3) How do the worms get in? Worms really help to make good compost. They mix it around, while eating much nasty bacteria.

    Not that I'm an expert in composting or anything. He should have just cut a couple of 6 inch holes in the bottom of his box and sat it on some soil.

  4. Re:food waste breeds vermin. by david.given · · Score: 5, Informative
    A neighbor I once had composted all their kitchen scraps in our shared back yard and there I learned that not all things rot well. It stank, but that was the least of it's problems.

    Well, yeah. That's why you get a Green Cone. They're deceptively simple; there's some very cunning engineering in there that makes your compost decompose properly. It's not just a bucket.

    Basically, it's a solar-powered convector. There's a big air space inside, and baffles to route the air into the compost. The air is drawn through the material, maintaining high oxygen levels and preventing anaerobic decomposition (this was the problem you had; without proper ventilation, you get anaerobic bacteria, which produce assorted unpleasant substances including ketones, which smell to high heaven). It's largely sealed and even if you leave the lid off, they don't smell.

    If installed properly --- it's got to get sunlight --- it basically requires no maintenance. You put waste in. Nothing comes out. The decomposed material is absorbed into the ground under the Cone. They say that in a particularly bad year the bacteria might not be able to decompose everything, and you may need to empty it... but this will only happen every couple of years at most.

    They are seriously neat gadgets, and are a stunning example of high-tech designs implemented in low-tech materials. They're definately worth checking out at their website. If I didn't have a flat I'd buy one like a shot.

    ...

    The same sort of technology is coming into fashion. In Australia I've seen lavatories built this way. These have a solar-powered fan to force the air through the waste; air is sucked down through the lavatory, through the sewage, which is kept dry, and then vented out a chimney at the top. No water needed. No power needed. No maintenance needed, except for someone to come and clean the human-accessable bits every now and then. In fact, you can make money out of them --- the processed sewage is top-grade fertiliser.