Kitchen Composters May Miss An Opportunity
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- Опубликовано: 4 окт 2024
- I love my kitchen "composter" but calling it a composter is not only incorrect, it misses an opportunity to produce renewable natural gas! We found that the methane generation potential of these dried and ground food scraps is similar to fresh food scraps per kg of volatile solids. The benefits include a dry and stable product, free of contaminants and having 4 times the energy per kilogram compared with fresh food scraps. We can store our dried food scrips for long periods of time, transport them longer distances, and eliminate the wasteful weekly collection of my 2-4 kg of food scraps. So, please, lets not call them "composters"!
Great video 🇳🇿🌱
As always thank you for sharing your knowledge. I have a new idea for aerating my next compost pile with an aquarium pump. Instead of using a solid PVC pipe I was thinking about using a plugged flexible air hose with very small pinholes. This way I can coil the hose with the pin holes through the entire pile, maybe even in multiple patterns at different heights, while I am building up the pile. And then the air will be somewhat evenly distributed through the entire pile. Maybe the hose will get squeezed by the weight, but there is only one way to find out. So I am going to try that with my next pile. A big 👍
Sounds interesting, but remember that hot air rises, so generally we just need to provide air in the bottom, and as long as the mix is porous enough, it should breathe just fine!
Hi John Paul, and thanks for these fantastic videos! I'm also experimenting with composting the residues from these machines, because I agree with you that their product should not be called compost. I'm doing small static aerated piles.
Thanks for your comment, and I would love to hear about how your composting trials have gone! I will be posting a video on composting dried and ground food waste in the next couple weeks!
Feeding the machine residues to my worms worked well, though only in a thin layer otherwise it warmed up significantly. I’m not sure what the resulting salt content is, I’ll have to send a sample for testing sometime. I guess it depends on what went in to the machine.
As for the ASP trial, I mixed the machine residues in with too many other feedstocks to get a good sense of how it composts. I will try it sometime with just one carbon feedstock and see how it goes. I got the impression that the stuff seemed to reduce the porosity of the mix… the pile has stayed above 60C for over two months now, the first month with aeration, second month without. Unfortunately I no longer have an oxygen meter. But I could see that the feedstock material had not broken down much after the first month.
What about bokashi? It's more like pickling.
Yes, bokashi is an anaerobic process that stabilizes the food waste by lowering pH. We don't get significant weight reduction, and I am curious whether the methane potential changes.
So how do you get ground a dried compost from you kitchen scraps ?
In my case, what i found the best to do with my kitchen waste (after giving it to the chickens that gives eggs) is to lift mulch anywhere i need to feed a garden plant, dump the fresh food waste of the day under, and cover the much back. Each times, i do it somewhere different. In this way, all the potential of the foodscrap is super valuated by the microfauna that you just favorize its habitat, so they work the soil well each time.
There are appliances, sometimes called "kitchen composters" (you can google this), that produced dried and ground food scraps.