Why Can't You Compost Meat?
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 3 фев 2020
- Composting becomes more widespread and accessible all the time, keeping millions of tons of food waste from ending up in landfills every year. But there is one quirk of some composting programs that can be a little annoying: they don't accept meat scraps. But why? And are there ways to overcome this limitation?
SciShow would like to extend a special thank you to Nathan Rutz for his insights into the science of composting!
Hosted by: Hank Green
SciShow has a spinoff podcast! It's called SciShow Tangents. Check it out at www.scishowtangents.org
----------
Support SciShow by becoming a patron on Patreon: / scishow
----------
Huge thanks go to the following Patreon supporters for helping us keep SciShow free for everyone forever:
Kevin Bealer, KatieMarie Magnone, D.A. Noe, Charles Southerland, Eric Jensen, Christopher R Boucher, Alex Hackman, Matt Curls, Adam Brainard, Scott Satovsky Jr, Sam Buck, Avi Yashchin, Ron Kakar, Chris Peters, Kevin Carpentier, Patrick D. Ashmore, Piya Shedden, Sam Lutfi, charles george, Greg
----------
Looking for SciShow elsewhere on the internet?
Facebook: / scishow
Twitter: / scishow
Tumblr: / scishow
Instagram: / thescishow
----------
Sources:
pubs.extension.wsu.edu/backya...
academica-e.unavarra.es/xmlui...
www.thespruce.com/basics-of-b...
cwmi.css.cornell.edu/AppendixA...
whatcom.wsu.edu/ag/compost/fun...
whatcom.wsu.edu/ag/compost/fun...
pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/comp...
So the trick is to mix sawdust in with all the bodies.
Noted.
Thanks SciShow for showing us how to properly dispose of all the dead bodies in our basement!
People compost cattle, so why not peoples?
@@uhohhotdog, we've all got 'em! If someone says they don't have bodies in their basement they're probably lying.
Don't forget the lime! In comes in handy.😉
The temperature gets hotter faster if you make the pile HIGHER rather than WIDER, so keep that in mind.
so all this boils down to: compost can have little a salami. as a treat
Cat approves.
This comment is highly underrated.
lol
This just made my day....thank you😂
0:40 On the contrary. This is how I will raise my raccoon army.
🦝
There’s a fool in my neighborhood who tosses bread in the sewer grates to feed the raccoons. He doesn’t realize he’s actually raising a flea and tick army
@@MehYam2112 as long as it doesnt have the novel coronavirus !
@@MehYam2112 Forget the fleas and ticks; the thing to avoid with raccoons is their scat and the easily-airborne raccoon roundworm eggs in it.
@@NajwaLaylah
And last but not least; avoid getting bit by raccoons. Chances are that you will get rabies.
Geoff Lawton has a YT channel on sustainable small farming and greening arid areas.
He showed a way to use leftover meat, when waste collection may not be ideal in a hot climate.
·Meat scraps go in a suspended bucket.
·Flies home in on the bucket and can enter through small (1") holes.
·The flies lay eggs, and their larvæ eat the meat scraps.
·Some larvæ fall through smaller holes in the bottom of the bucket, and they quickly get gobbled up by chickens.
Meat scraps get turned into eggs & chicken.
Great idea! And after the meat is gone, you can toss the bones onto the compost right?
Just feed the chickens the meat. Saves work and reduces the risk of botulism.
THATS SMART!!!!! HOLY CRAP!!
That's a practice calling for new diseases.
Wouldn't old, gross meat juice and bits of decomposing meat fall through as well, though?
Weird, I have literally never heard of the no meat part. Hell, our local compost site gets a few hundred pounds of salmon bits from the fish smoking shop every Wednesday. Also the pile is done in 90 days.
They are probably good at keeping their heap aerated.
It's fine if you either let it compost for a long period of time or dont use the compost for food. There are plenty of compost places that use the corpses from the dead animal pickup service (mostly roadkill) and sometimes butchers/farms. Fish poop and bodies are actually AMAZING for compost because of all the nutrients
I compost everything.
It is probably a hot compost system. Worm bins generally do ok with meat too as long as they are deep enough for the meat to be buried, that way pests and smells won’t be a problem.
We bury the whole fish deep in the garden bed making sure to have them spread out and only like once in the year well before we plant, so the worms and microbes have time to process it.
Most people compost wrong anyway by just doing just food scraps without enough dry leaves, shredded paper, etc. You'll get smelly compost even without meat that way.
I knew the oxygen bit, when dealing with dead cattle as a kid on my families farm, we would bury the carcass in a mix of sand, on a bed of old silage (fermented animal feed). I didn't know about the carbon/nitrogen/oxygen thing per se, but it was explained to me that the bacteria in the silage was less smelly, and the sand allows oxygen. It worked, after 4-5 months the carcass would basically be gone (which is around how often we would lose an animal) and the backside of the pile is where we would take compost for the garden.
Also of note, the pile we are talking about here was about 5-10 times the volume of the animal placed inside. Unfortunately they can't do this method at the new farm as they have bear problems. But it was a super neat thing to see growing up.
This is why composting in Texas is so easy. Temperature isn't an issue.
I compost animal scraps all the time. Chicken bones, fish guts, sinewy bits I don't eat. Never had a problem with a "slimy mess" before.
See, you just listed all the tastiest parts.
But was it smelly?
@@kcazseeley Nope.
@@sdfkjgh I eat *other* animal bones/guts.
Mike, from Texas: Ok, if it's down to personal preference, I can respect that. Do you render the bones into stock, or do you gnaw on them as-is? I do both, and my stocks are amazing.
The video didn't really explain what the Bokashi method is, other than adding better bacteria. But where do you get those bacteria, or how to you encourage the better ones over the badder ones? What IS the Bokashi method treatment?
You have to buy bags of the bacteria infused sawdust. It kind of has a very brewery smell and you add that to an airtight container with a drainage system to collect the liquid.
From that you get both a highly nutritious liquid concentrate which you can use for plants (that also stinks to all hell) and a good compost mix which you can use as normal compost.
There is literally thousand of videos (here on yt) and blogs about it, just use your favorite search engine!
love when people ask these kind of questions on the friggin INTERNET :) on a website with literally millions of instructional videos on*anything*
Buy innoculated grain, or a liquid spray which often comes with the kit initially.
Google is your friend...
That's super interesting, I wonder how they do it here in Copenhagen. We've been sending all organic stuff, including meat and bones, as well as paper towels and all the normal vegetable stuff, to communal composting for a few years now. I believe they make it into bio-fuel that some of our city buses use, but I have no idea how they deal with the meat, or if maybe the bio-fuel production is less dependent on the process that is a problem for composting into fertilizer?
The fuel is made during anaerobic digestion (gas) and only the remainder is then composted. So it's not that similar to home composting.
Gas busses, baby.
It is most likely due to the temperature they are composting the organic materials. Industrial composts typically function at temperatures between 60-72 degrees centigrade and are therefore inhibitory to many of the harmful bacteria he is describing. Furthermore industrial composting introduces methods of oxidation further reducing the strict anaerobes described.
This is also what we do in the Seattle area. Basically anything you can eat, goes into the compost. Bones, milk products, carcass pieces, etc.
You guys have rib-eyes powered buses over there in Denmark?
What is this "leftover meat" you speak of. I understand the words individually, but put together?
It is beyond science.
LMFAO
This must be one of them impossible fringe science things like white holes or magnetic monopoles.
Well, like the carcass of a chicken. The bones still contain quite a lot of protein.
Commenters got wooshed
I've never heard of this. We compost meat in my part of Canada. In fact, animal remains are best composted if they can't be rendered otherwise. You just have to do it right.
Canadian here too (NS) and we have always composted meat. I clicked on the video because I'd never heard of composting without meat.
I don’t actually cook meat in my house so I never even thought about it but Ottawa definitely does accept meat in the green bin. It also accepts things in plastic bags now for some reason...
they probably treat it properly in the processing plants, because it's way easier the less people have to separate at home.
Also it sounds like you just shouldn't dump an entire chicken in there, but bones and skin will most likely contain more things which slow bacteria growth, most notably hair and bones.
@@Nerobyrne No. Industrial composting is temperature and oxygene controlled, and sterilised before it is sold as fertilizer, that means a lot of things you can't compost at home, can be done at the facility. The reason you can't compost meat at home, is not pathogenes, but attracting pests like rats.
@@inkerstales2336 oh look who didn't watch the video
Neat. My city composting program takes all food scraps including meat and dairy but it does not accept animal waste (dog poo in biodegradable bags and cat litter).
That probably has multiple reasons. For one, there might be parasites in the poo that could spread that way, so better be safe than sorry. Then, biodegradable bags - unless it's paper - often aren't (or only under very specific circumstances that your average compost plant can't reach). And cat litter is usually ceramic and thus doesn't compost (and while it's nice to throw in cat litter for potting soil to keep the moisture, most people don't want to spread it in their gardens).
Most cities do, in fact, compost meat. Where do you think roadkill goes? It just goes straight into the town dump, and in many states it goes into an organic waste section that just turns into compost. There was actually a segment about it in that old show Dirty Jobs. Roadkill cleaner.
There's some deception around biodegradable packaging. Some will only degrade in reasonable time while exposed to UV, sunlight is good enough. Not in the dark. If your local facility is well managed at a high enough temperature to kill bacteria (let's hope!) then I think it will kill parasites too. My cat shits and pisses in thé garden, so I suppose that gets a bit of uv sterilisation..... They probably don't want the clay/kaolin in mineral litter.
Ottawa use to be like this but now accepts animal waste and even in plastic bags... makes me suspicious
So strange, because for bacteria meat and poop are surely same thing.
"Why can't you conpost meat?"
This is a question a murderer would ask
In France we hust cut the meat in tiny pieces and mix it with wood scrapes or hay before putting it in the composter so the ration is still good
La machine à cookies
Well, not all of France 😉 but that's a great idea !
And i like your pseudo 🤗
J'hésite, mais, pour moi, l'addition de deux verres de sauvignon blanc à la recette fait mieux. Après, bien sûr, qu'on a bu le vin et pissé.
I thought you were gonna say "in France we cut the meat and boil it to make stock for our delicious food".
... But I do this at home?
Edit: oh, I live in Campo Grande, Brazil. A normal day gets to about 34° C/93.2° F at 12:00 pm and a hot day gets to about 38-39 C.
I'm not a professional, but with temperatures that high, it's definitely more possible than others
@@baranorak4080 lol high temperature, Here in India where I live it reaches 50 C in summer
@@vaibhavacharya9428 Your thermostat might be broken.
@@SpookyRipples9 I live in Rajasthan lol
@@SpookyRipples9 people doesn't know India at all. Hahaha
Read: "The Humanure Handbook", by Jenkins.
Excellent information. It's what got me interested. I compost ALL of our household and human waste, along with whatever animal carcasses come my way for years now and have never had a problem with smell or unwanted rodents.
It's an off-grid solutions Bible on our 5 acre bushblock 😁
I used to throw fish carcasses in my garden when I was done filleting them, it was great, free fertilizer.
A large, municipal service with the technology to accept meat should. Economy of scale makes this easy. It's a lazy one that doesn't.
Yeah exactly. The only time I ever heard that you can't compost meat was when our city's composting system was new (and people had been misinformed)
What kind of backwards compost service won't accept meat? We've been composting meat in Vancouver/Richmond B.C. for like a decade!
Maybe it's a thing in the U.S., as a fellow Canadian from Ontario this is the first I have heard of a no-meat policy.
Maybe he means more for like home composting
@@shaunaisaJellyBean He explicitly said it was about municipal compost services
The city compost service in Ottawa takes meat. I freeze scrap meat until collection day to keep maggots out of the bin.
Same in South Australia. Ours takes dog poop too.
This is very interesting. Here in Germany we are really very much into recycling and composting, and I never heard of meat and cheese not going on the compost. I just finished an apprenticeship as a gardener and we spend quite a lot of time at trade school on professional industrial composting and composting at home. The CN-ratio was a major topic, but meat never really got mentioned specifically.
I can see it becoming a problem when you have a lot of meat and relatively little plant matter, but that doesn't really seem to be something that ever becomes an issue in ordinary circumstances.
Either Germany has a much lower ratio of animal waste compared to plant waste than other countries, or this is a hypothetical issue that has become over-exagerated as common knowledge in some places but not others.
Thank you for mentioning that. Along with the moisture level, the carbon to nitrogen ratio in compost is the most essential part.
And as he was saying, meat can be composted, but you have to make sure you do it right. The only thing that wasn't mentioned was, that with any process of composting involving meat (even fish/sea critters), make sure you grind it into a paste. This makes it easier to spread around over a larger area.
Super concise and helpful intro to the possibility of composting meat/dairy, thank you!
I'm an aspiring gardener in Arizona. This video was most helpful.
WOOO! I was happy when you mentioned bokashi. Thats what I do and I even built my own buckets and cultivated my own sample of lactobacillus with rice water and milk =)
How I do it: 1. Bokashi. 2. After bokashi put material into compost bin with carbon to get hot, heat breaks it down faster. 3. Red wigglers and other detritivores live lower down in the compost bin and process the material further. 4. Collect processed compost from the bottom.
I love composting/worm farming and love to share what I know. I encourage you to start in whatever way you can. Happy composting!
An excellent question!
Hell yeah! I compost animal parts, including whole dead animals, in a base of straw and it always turns out great and is smell-free. It's one of the best ways to give your compost a boost in phosphorus for your flowering plants especially. Cornell and Oregon State Universities have good articles on this that go more into the details.
The municipal composting here in southern Ontario accepts meats. it may be the case that he municipal composting involves much larger piles of material and so are better at keeping the higher temperatures. Also, for all I know, they analyze the mix and add material from various sources to optimize the process. For instance, after Christmas, they have a special collection for Christmas trees. Some of those are chipped and distributed as mulch, but they could also keep some to add to the compost stream to increase the carbon content.
Meat and dairy NO PROBLEM in a metal (i.e. chew-proof) compost bin with a one-way entrance allowing rats and raccoons to get in but not out. So no mess to clean up and extra meat to compost: win-win!
I'd worry about the temperature being high enough to deal with the parasite load in rats and raccoons.
Tim Sullivan Sir, that’s one of the best ideas I’ve heard! That would work, as I have groundhog problems. Thanks, you’ve given me another street of thought.
yikes, haha
Not Dave's Channel Use this compost for non edibles? That may work...
As a compost enthusiast, I everything that is bio-origin into a place ( a large bin) and cover it by dirt or dry leaves. Simple like that and it stacks as time goes by. Usually after 2-3 months, it is ready to mix with soil+stuff for plantation
I’m a charter captain and I compost large quantities of filleted fish carcasses along with the guts in wood chips. I’ve never had it go anaerobic and there is never any smell or pests. It is safe to turn after 6mo all the flesh is gone and there are only the larger spines and heads left which are odorless and brittle.
One time our 7 month old steer died unexpectedly in the middle of winter. We buried it in the compost pile and it was completely gone by spring. No bones, no noticeably worse than normal smell, nothing. Now that he mentions it, there was some black liquid slime remaining, but the carbon-rich waste hay combined with it to make good fertilizer anyway.
Interesting question and video, thanks!
i do a mix of aerobic and anerobic composting i have enough vents in my 3 stage composter to allow aerobic composting around the edges and the core turns anerobic and decomposes quickly. the only smell is brief hydrogen sulfide smell when i turn it over into the next stage. works so quick i made a 90l garbage pail of compost in one year to turn into my garden this spring.
I'm actually starting a compost pile. I knew not to put meat in but its awesome to see why.
You CAN set up a separate box just for meat composting that has little holes in the bottom with it mounted a few feet off the ground...right above where chickens run. The bugs drop out and are a higher nutrient content for the chicks per peck. It still will smell-even with ventilation holes, though!
Thanks a lot! Long wondered question there!
AFAIK composting done by waste management round here tends be anaerobic in airtight tanks, and you can put any organic waste in them. You get fertiliser and soil conditioner out, plus the methane produced can be burned for energy or sold as fuel. Sometimes aerobic composting is done as a second stage in order to digest the lignin and remove undesirable compounds.
Wow. They actually got this spot on. Also id add to note if you are actually composting correctly you have about a square meter of material to compost all at once so that much material can handle about as much meat as a small badger if turned ever day or two.
Thank you for posting this- I've always wondered why we didn't compost meat.
Thanks a lot. I was always of the understanding that any waste for is good for composting, but turns out it's not as simple as that. Might've saved my garden I was tending to, thanks a lot 😄
"...which smells like rotten eggs."
can I put eggs in the compost though?
The shell takes a long time to compost
@@MrJonnyboyyo true, but even if they come out intact the slow release of calcium into the soil is normally beneficial.
@@MrJonnyboyyo I crush shells and spread them around the yard.
The municipal compost companies in the Seattle area don't have any problem with meat or cheese and does not exclude it. I've never heard this. All food goes in the compost bin.
I cover the carcass with a mix of carbonated rice hulls and ordinary rice hull. It’s an excellent mix for me so far since it doesn’t produce any smell at all. Also my rice hull mixture is aged and weathered so it’s probably packed with microbes.
We'll 'compost' anything biodegradable (that pile just in the wood edge by the house). If you're throwing out many animal products (aside from bones), you're buying/eating wrong. Do the planet a favor and DON"T WASTE THESE THINGS THAT REQUIRE THE MOST RESOURCES TO PRODUCE. Please.
: )
I work as a butcher and we use a rendering company. This can relate to this video. Good stuff
Wow. That is interesting how that works. My family used to keep a compost pile when we lived back in New Mexico. We call it the "mulch pile". We did have a rule of not putting in meat or dairy. The one exception was egg shells. The main reason was to avoid rats. We already had a mouse problem. So the one compost rule prevents the situation from getting worse. In later years, we got cats in yard. It was awesome. It was the best pest control ever. This eliminated the mouse problem. The cats do like to go to the compost pile and scavenge. I have just figured something out. If there are cats, then it would be okay to put meat and dairy products out. It is a good combination. The cats would love to gobble up such products. They will happily eat up any rats that come over. If this is done, than one should be careful about the timing. There is a special rule about cat food. The same rule should be applied to compost. Compost is like cat food in that both would be eaten by cats and other meat eaters. The rule is that the stuff has to be taken out early in the day. The ideal time is early morning. This gives cats enough time to eat up everything before nightfall. Putting food out in the evening or night is a bad idea. It would attract skunks. Skunks are very annoying and very stinky. If they eat cat food when given the chance, then they would probably eat meat and dairy in the compost. The video mentions racoons. I have never seen racoons in person. I think that they might be better than skunks. I bet raccoons smell good.
I just started composting at home and was wondering about this!!
You can compost meat if you have the right conditions. Perennial City Composting here in STL does it.
I put it in as an afterthought, but read to the bottom if you want to help solve a scientific mystery!
I developed an aerated aquated digester for "composting" all our food scraps (makes a liquid fertilizer that is basically a bacterial flock suspended in qa mineral rich solution).
I can speak from experience, meat is one of the easiest and fastest things for the system to convert! You can throw an entire steak in and it will be totally gone within a few hours!! same with juggs of milk, etc... the stuff that takes a while are the bones, seeds, coffee grounds, egg shells (although they disintegrate into very small fragments very quickly). The system uses vortex shedding and the resulting vortex cavitation to provide the aeration (along with some hydroxyl radicals created by the cavitation), so it's more than capable of keeping up with the oxygen demand, so odor isn't an issue, but too much protein, especially milk protein causes some pretty crazy foaming!.. lol
Anyway, point is, if you can provide sufficient oxygen "composting" meat isn't an issue. Plus, if used in the garden at the right stage of decomposition, your garden will explode in productivity due to the stimulating effects of protein hydrolysate!
Actually while on the topic, a bit of a neat side note, in testing the digester i came across an interesting phenomenon that i don't really have a good explanation for. I was thinking of uploading a video, maybe see if the folks at sci show had any thoughts on it. When doing viscosity and surface tension experiments, various types of oil were added to distilled water and aerated in the system to observe the effects of surface tension reduction. The oils used varied from olive oil to pure mineral oil. In all cases the system would produce an oil in water emulsion, but interestingly, it remains stable after the system is shut off... and i mean crazy long term stable. I have an erlenmeyer flask sitting on my shelf with a mineral oil in water emulsion that i made nearly a year ago! Looks the same as the day i ran the experiment!?!
I found it so strange that I systematically went through ever increasingly stringent controls to try and eliminate all confounding factors. Using air filters on the air pumps, using different air pumps, using distilled water, deionized water, higher and higher purities of oils, but I always got the same results (although it is worth noting a far smaller percentage of highly non-polar oils such as xylenes would actually remain in stable emulsion, so polarity likely plays a role to some degree, but the fact that it still worked regardless i found very strange) . I know of only one other method that produces oil in water emulsions without and emulsifier, but this is the complete opposite of this degassing technique. Simply put, I don't have a good explanation for what's going on. If anybody has any ideas I'd love to hear them. I'll get around to making that video at some point.. lol
that is so cool to know, thanks!!
My parent's house is in a relatively forested area, with lots of deer, raccoons and coyotes around. Any food scraps we have (animal product or not) just get thrown into the back yard for anything that wants to snack on it. We've never had problems with pests like rats or wasps.
I had no idea this was a thing... carcasses have always been composted in my household (although any bones were always used to make stock, so I guess they were pretty clean by the time they make it to the compost). Although I don't have this issue now (vegan), it's really cool to learn about.
Many municipalities in Ontario compost meat and dairy.
I have a little vertical garden and also been using meat leftovers for my garden as well, but I mix it with wood chips since the meat causes oxygen free decomposition. Since the nitrogen ratio is so high, and this could create a toxic byproduct. Just be careful y’all, those Native American horticulture courses sure can in handy 🤩✨
i worked on a farm and we absolutely composted all organic matter
when an animal died it just got chucked into the compost pile
glad you answered
Interesting. The city compost where I live in Alberta accepts meat
Yeah.
My city has a green bin program that allows all food scraps and pet waste as well as lawn and garden waste in the bin. They take it away to a special building and noone has to worry about it after that (except that we pay too much for it)
short answer: you can
source and explanation "no rules compost" on red gardener youtube channel
I composted plenty of meat on my chicken farm. In fact the only purpose of the compost pile what’s the deal with organic waste. I did have to add plenty of wood chips.
I'm surprised this isn't a more well known thing. Thank you for teaching me.
Most of the composting services in my city don't accept meat, but I found the one that does (as long as it's not "excessive amounts"), so we use that one!
We tried Bokashi and it's super slow. Got a worm farm instead and unfortunately the flies get to it first as soon as it turns rancid, then their acid kills the worms. So we just try and eat less and less meat. Since we also started segregating our waste into 5 instead of 2 streams, our kerbside waste bin could be emptied about once a month or longer - and we're still getting better at it. Takes minimal time but if everyone did it there would be phenomenal reductions in landfill
i personnaly spray my compost with vinegar each time i add stuff in it. And carton/toilette paper/cotton/Sopalin go directly on compost.
Mine composts everything organic, including fat and meat, but they can do that because they are constantly tossing the piles with fresh O2 meaning it can break it aerobically, but if yours just piles it up, yeah, meats a bad idea. Drive by that compost company in the dead of winter and you can spot it miles away from the huge cloud of steam that comes off the piles, its like a cloud settles over the place.
Plants need protein too.
Muscle Hank dumb comment considering plants are legitimately the ONLY organisms on Earth able to synthesis proteins.
Edit: (as in amino acids). Animals can only rearrange and bond together pre-existing proteins, not synthesis them from pure nitrogen, carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen, as plants do.
@@garden.of.thistles If you wouldn't be able to synthesise proteins, you wouldn't exist. Are you speaking of Amino Acids?🤔
@@garden.of.thistles ONLY organisms? Sounds like a challenge, Hank!
I spoke too soon, I should've said "Muscle Hank is the only legitimate organism on Earth". Ah, well.
I can synthesize protein like you wouldn't believe.
"2 parts brown to 1 part green keeps everything smelling fresh and clean!" This is a good ratio of compost feed stocks to prevent odors.
Would love a video on composting bio degradables and how to accelerate the process with the how and why
I put meat/kitchen scraps in my garden all the time, after I watched some videos on how to properly do it. I haven't had any negatives arise from doing so.
adding blood meal to leaves that are stubborn and hard to heat up makes nice hot compost. it is all about ratios
Just add material rich in carbon , we usually add old leaves.
And we dont add huge amounts of meat at the same time.
If you live in the SF Bay Area most cities CAN accept meat in compost. Don't assume one way or another, check with your waste provider.
Could you use meat scraps if you frequently aerated the pile? For example, with a compost tumbler?
TLDW you can in some cases but not if it’s too cold otherwise it smells very bad and the output is less useful. Mix it with sawdust or the right kind of specific bacteria to be able to compost meat
Hank, I love your shirts.
Very interesting indeed.
I've composted most of my life and never had this problem. The oxygenation problem was probably solved by my understanding you should take a shovel or pitchfork to toss/mix/turn your compost for best/fastest results. Right now I'm in a condo and use my civic composting and they take everything bacteria can eat. It's my understanding that heavy machinery is used to move the compost around.
Isn't it a big problem to put your high nitrogen stuff to landfill? Won't that exacerbate the leachate problems?
This vid was a "1st world problems" vid on how to avoid smells.
My municipality (Hamilton Ontario) uses a heat-processing process and will take literally anything organic - except pet waste.
I have a bokashi bin in the kitchen. Works great, and you dont need to go outside regularly to compost
I recommend Joe Jenkins’ The Humanure Handbook for how to compost anything organic.
I guess my city is just awesome. We can put anything in our compost. Meats, dairy, animal waste, cardboard. It all goes in.
You live in compost paradise.
Cardboard can be recycled, it's a waste to compost it.
@@piteoswaldo Paper products make for great compost and only clean cardboard can be recycled. If you put a greasy pizza box in your recycling it will end up in the landfill.
Great vid
Just bury them three feet down the ground like human dead bodies and don't try to extract them ever let them fertilise the ground where they are buried.
We did this when our elderly Chihuahua cross Tentie passed away, planted a memorial Jacaranda very close by, it is one of the most happy plants on 5 acres of sandy, dry, windy land, where even native bush needs support to survive these days 🙂
I store my meat and diary scraps in a bucket in a chest freezer, and when building a new garden bed I dump the scraps in a trench before covering with other organic matter and dirt.
So roughly the same idea.
Black Soldier Fly Larvae. The fastest way to compost ALL leftovers, including meat and dairy. BSFL are not only voracious, they are self harvesting (great for domestic fowl or pork, or insectivorous wild birds), and eliminate the larvae of houseflies, fruit flies, or any other insect foolish enough to try to share their food bin. Their bin needs to be kept ideally in the low eighties, but their rapid voracious eating (their own weight in 12 hrs under ideal conditions) will generate some heat themselves.
Its all about the ratio's (carbon to nitrogen). You can compost anything that is organic matter, bacteria doesn't judge. For animal products you'll want to go with hot composting (a method that encourages thermophilic bacteria). That involves have a compost pile that is about cubic metre in mass with a ratio of 25-30:1. Since all material going into the compost pile isn't pure nitrogen or pure carbon this can be as simple as 2-3 parts carbon rich material (a mixture of sawdust, cardboard, leaves, sticks and branches) to 1 part nitrogen rich material (a mixture of garden and food scraps including animal products). The bacteria uses the carbon (sugars) as a source of energy to break down the nitrogen (proteins). Carbon such as leaves and sticks can also provide air pockets in the pile that provides the bacteria with oxygen. www.homecompostingmadeeasy.com/carbonnitrogenratio.html
Thank you!! I’m so sick of everyone telling me that I can’t compost meat all because they’ve been told that not that they have any scientific or even common sense on the subject
Yes... I will do this to my "yard trimmings"
Go metric! You can trim off a bit more to get to a yard!
I'm generally pretty good about eating my meat before it spoils, but things like the bones, fat, and gristle, I dry those out and put them in with all my other compost stuff. My compost is vastly predominantly plant matter (used tea bags, banana peels, avocado rind+stone, Pineapple rind, orange peels, etc), and I dispose of it off-site (by which I mean I toss it into the nearest yard waste bin, which is like 4 blocks away, and whosever it is is not very good with it. They're very bad about putting it on the curb to actually get picked up and they keep throwing non bio-degradable trash and even recycling into it).
I read the title as "why cant you eat compost meat" Why I still clicked to watch, I cant explain.
I wonder about urine in compost? I routinely use my pile for pee, rather than the sewage system, for purposes of 1) reduced cost, water, and energy usage, and more importantly, 2) removing the meds I take from our waste water system, so wildlife isn't poisoned by my prescriptions. A European study indicated using human urine to irrigate worked well, but was smelly. My method includes two piles, which get turned regularly as items are added. The best compost I ever had was from my rabbit cage, where the wood chips and bunny droppings made it rich and right. It hasn't been the same since Bunnifah died.
When you urinate you easily provide too much nutrients to the plants
ruclips.net/video/sGlqnkE1Id0/видео.html
Is this more of a US problem because some regions don't have earth worms and such?
Also how does burying meat or dairy in soil compare?
I thought an old method of fertilising corn was to bury a fish near its base
I think it's an urban problem. In the country you just put anything that will rot on a pile somwhere away from your house and shovel out some nice black dirt every year or 2. And yes, burying a whole fish under each plant is possibly the best thing you can do to fertilize somthing, the results are incredible.
Earthworms: Available ***LIVE*** wherever fishing supplies are sold.
Ummm, my family has been composting meat scraps for decades, never had a problem. Of course, we always turn and mix the compost with grass clippings and distribute the meat throughout the pile. Although we aren't exactly loading pounds of dead flesh into it, maybe it could be an issue for large quantities but everything we grow from the compost is great, lots of healthy vegetables. Never noticed any serious reek or slime coming from the pile...
If you have municipal composting you should always follow the rules that they give you. In my municipality we can add all the meat, bones, and any other food scraps we like because they have a quick and closed composting system. We can add paper but not wood so no chopsticks.
fire ash and wood charcoal also works
You can, but you need a ton of inert material such as leaves and grasses etc....(probably not what the video is about)
The next time I need to compost a cow, I’ll stress about meat in the pile
If I had a Rolling Barrel composter with holes in it if I spin it and drain off the extra liquid you should be fine
i just have a big bucket with a lid where i put all organic scrap right in my room. The smell inside is earth shatteringly nauseating. But it has a lid, no smell outside. When it gets full I decant the liquid which has a very pungent vomit smell (butyric acid) right into the toilet bowl and put the solid content into plastic bags without touching it then throw it away. I wouldnt be surprised if on some island somewhere on Earth a culture lived which would consider this a highly sought delicacy. Since when you consider what smelly things people like to eat like certain cheeses etc...