Where Compostable Baby Wipes, Carrots and Banana Peel live. For a little bit at least.
I love mud. Grubby fingers. Mushy gunky chunks in my hands squeezing between my fingers. I love the feeling. I love how it all comes from my backyard and how I have taken care of my own waste. I love how it has become magic mud in my Backyard Baby (Compost) and not a preserved banana in landfill.
For days and days, our indoor compost container has been full. With a bit of force and luck I have been able to squeeze down a bit more. I also started making new containers to put the scraps in. But with the lovely summer scent changing into an indoor compost smell, yeah not good. No one enjoyed that. My dear friend Mrs Procrastination get gone!I knew what had to be done.
So I rounded up the household troop and I got a cheering WOOHOO about getting down and dirty with the compost. It was time. It had seriously given me chills to my spine about putting delicious perfect home-compostable goodies in our general rubbish. I feel like a horrible human being doing so and admitting this to you, but that is the truth. It’s ugly, as it sometimes is.
We got our gumboots on and out we went. Little SuperMans, Bit Bigger Batmans, Tad Bit Bigger Florals and some Big Plain Blue ones.
The level of excitement was high in the family. My husband was stoked to be able to get more grass clippings in. The promise of “mud” and worms made the kids eyes gleam. Me on the other hand was pretty excited to see the progress of all the different food scraps, but mostly the home compostable baby wipes, nappy pants together with coffee cups and lids, tooth brushes, ear picks and so on. Before starting, my words of wisdom to SuperMan and Batman — “Now, no-one puts their hands in their mouth alright guys!” (Wait for it…)
A while back we at Little Genie were fortunate to meet up with the amazing Kate Meads and listen to her workshop on WasteFree Parenting and Living. It was an evening that was interesting, educational, inspirational, awakening and a little bit scary. Landfill. Now that is a horrible and ugly truth. Landfill would in an ideal world not exist. Ideally everything we create would be able to be recycled, composted and/or reused. But unfortunately it is not quite like that. Yet!
There is NO point in sending anything that can be composted as it can’t compost in landfill anyway. For anything to compost it needs oxygen. So it will just sit there. Forever. It is all packed tightly and then sealed up so no nasty stuff leak into our grounds and into our water and so no nasty gas seeps out. Sealed up.
Out of my compost I could only find 2 Non-Compostable Baby Wipes I had put in there by mistake. All the other ones, and you know how many you use a day, gone. Not a trace of them. We use the Reusable Nappies during the day and Compostable Nappy Pants at night. The Nappy Pants takes a bit longer to compost than the Baby Wipes since they are a whole lot bigger. About half of mine I had put in had composted as much as they could have. The other half went back in again to keep the process going. All coffee cups I had put in where gone and some of the compostable lids had started crumbling.
When it comes to Baby Wipes, I actually use both the non-compostable ones together with the home-compostable. The non-compostable ones I find perfect for changing time when there are ”number twos”, as these you cannot put in your compost anyway. The compostable Baby Wipes I use everywhere else and I make sure they find their way to our Backyard Baby.
Kate Meads, advised not to change everything at once, but to start small, change one thing at a time and slowly add to the list of changes to make, as the prior ones are well established and feel easy to do. It is said to take 21 days to break a habit, so over the course of a year you should be able to change just over 17 things….
Having a compost at home, any kind, is going to be your most reliable and true friend. Some things take longer than others to compost, but overall..it doesn’t take long at all. Especially not if you think about your banana peel and Little Genie Baby wipes sitting in landfill for 1000’s of years compared to your Backyard Baby for maybe a month or two. Now that is beautiful.
Something that wasn’t so beautiful was when the owner of the Little SuperMans decided to have a little tasting quality control of the compost...
// Adventures of Fred & Bill's mama