As some might have heard, the YHS Eco Club is working on implementing school-wide composting via Mr. Fox. As a club, they aim to make our school and community more environmentally conscious. In order to achieve this mission, they’ve decided to utilize the money budgeted for composting to reduce the school’s waste.
This change may lead some students to wonder, what is composting? Composting is defined as “the natural process of recycling organic matter.” A general rule of thumb for composting is: if you can eat it, you can compost it. It’s truly that easy. After you’ve discarded your food scraps in the compost bin, your job is done. From there, Mr. Fox will pick up the food waste, take it to their facility, and begin the composting process. During compositing, microorganisms break down food scraps into usable soil for plants. Within a few months, the food scraps have fully transformed into soil. Such soil can be sold to local customers for all-purpose gardening. By composting, you aren’t just giving back to your community, but to the planet as a whole.
Composting helps the environment by reducing the amount of waste humans produce and adding organic matter to our soil. This will increase the biodiversity of microbes in the soil, and the nutrient content, making it easier for plants to grow successfully. Composting also helps to keep organic matter out of the landfills, and instead keeps it in the soil—where it belongs.
Why should you compost? In addition to helping your planet and the community, composting is one of the easiest ways to
reduce your impact on the environment. By composting, you essentially recycle your leftover food, giving valuable nutrients back to the soil. You also reduce the need for pesticides and synthetic fertilizers in soils, promote healthy plant growth, and increase biodiversity of soil ecosystems.
In short, composting helps your environment, your community, and yourself. It is also one of the simplest and most effective ways to reduce the amount of trash in landfills, and thus our greenhouse gas emissions. It is the Eco Club’s mission to raise awareness of composting in order to accomplish the collective environmental goals of society.
