Green Waste and Composting - Household Composting
Brochures
Home Composting Brochure
Home composting is a simple process that assists in the breakdown of organic matter – such as food scraps and garden organics into a nutrient rich soil-like material that can be used to create and maintain a healthy and sustainable garden. This brochure will help you get started in four easy steps.
Sustainable Gardening Brochure: Using Compost
A guide to using composting in your garden. Compost is an organic fertiliser resulting from the controlled breakdown of organic matter. It can be made at home in a compost bin from garden trimmings and food scraps, or bought from garden centres and landscape suppliers.
Do-It-Yourself Poster and Brochure Kits - Home Composting / Sustainable Gardens
Templates and images for schools and community groups to create fun and educational materials on composting.
Recovering Organic Waste
About 60 percent of our household waste is organic. Another major source of organic waste is food scraps from business, such as resturants and cafe's. Currently much of this waste goes to landfill.
All organic matter can be reused or reprocessed to make a variety of products and therefore should be treated as a valuable resource that should not be sent to landfill.
Recycling organic waste, both commercially and for personal use on home gardens is easy and there are a number different options available. Two of the easiest methods for home recycling are composting and worm farming. Alternatively you may like to keep chickens at home as they are an excellent means of disposal for organic waste such as food scraps and weeds.
Composting
Composting is the rotting or breaking down of organic matter into small particles of fertile soil. Composting occurs naturally wherever there is dead organic matter. The process can by sped up by mixing specific ingredients together and putting them in the right conditions. The benefits of finished compost include adding organic matter and nutrients to the soil and increasing the water holding capacity of Perth's generally poor sandy soils.
Roughly half your household garbage can be composted. Garden waste and kitchen scraps make excellent compost. Not all organic waste can be easily composted.
All organic material is largely made up of different proportions of carbon and nitrogen. To speed up composting a ratio of carbon to nitrogen is required: Approximately 25 to 30 parts by weight of carbon to each part of nitrogen. A rule of thumb is to mix four parts of soft nitrogenous green material such as grass clippings, weeds, fruit and vegetable peelings and wastes with one part of brown material such as sawdust, shredded prunings, newspaper or dry leaves.
In the right conditions a compost pile naturally develops heat while materials break down, with temperatures reaching between 40 and 60 degrees celsius. Disease-causing bacteria, parasites and weed seeds are normally destroyed at these temperatures. If the temperatures aren't high enough then the weeds and seeds may grow when the compost is put on to the garden.
For more ideas and the different ways of making compost please download the composting fact sheet.
