There are a couple controversies in the compost community. One is old and the other new. Both are centered about what can go in the bin. These issues are so fraught that many composters avoid them altogether. I’m talking about meat and plastic.
Can Meat be Composted?
There is a rumor that meat cannot be composted. Let me clear that up. Any organic material—I’m using organic in the original sense of the word, meaning carbon-based—will eventually break down. From dust you came, and to dust you will return. This applies to all meat everywhere: cows, chickens, people, you name it. So why do many think that meat has no place in the compost bin? It’s complicated.
Meat is high in nitrogen and needs to be balanced with a hefty load of carbon (think wood chips). It takes longer to breakdown than vegetables, but break down it most certainly will. However, before it becomes dark loamy humus, meat will stink. This stink will, without a doubt, attract mammals, rats, dogs, raccoons, who will eat it and roll in it and drag it around. And if meat is carried away from the compost pile, it can spread disease. These complications are bad enough that facilities can be forgiven for banning meat from compost. But composters who have been around the block have probably noticed that many facilities are curiously silent on the mater. The lists of what can and cannot be composted often leave out a major component of the American diet. This, I suspect, is because many home composters—obsessed with reducing waste—make stock.
Meat is more compostable and less noxious when it has been boiled for a really long time. Even bones become crumbly after spending a day in the stock pot. Many composters, and I am one of them, keep a ziplock bag in the fridge for making stock. Celery that’s beginning to fade, herb stems, bits of onion and—especially—chicken carcasses go into the freezer. When my bag is full, I make a batch of stock. The nutrients and flavor (nitrogen) end up in the beans and rice and soups that I make with stock, and the bits of meat and bone that I compost are rendered manageable. After making stock, the meat and fat and bone breaks down fast.
Regularly making stock means managing your refrigerator. Meats and vegetables (and cheese rinds and herbs) are frozen before they pass their prime. Barring a disaster, I would never be in the position to compost rotten, raw meat. It would have been frozen, turned to stock, made into dog food and last, composted.
This explanation requires far too many words, and too much nuance, for a quick ‘in or out’ compost list. But yes, meat can be composted, and it’s much less troublesome if first it’s been boiled.
What’s with Compostable Plastic?
Are compostable plastics compostable? Compostable plastics breakdown correctly if disposed of properly in a maintained municipal facility. Are there any properly maintained municipal facilities in southern California? I’ve looked and looked. I don’t think so.
Compostable plastics will not breakdown in a backyard, or on a farm, or even in an enormous municipal turn-and-flip, compost operation. At present, in California, they are only compostable theoretically. They are also not recyclable.
With so many compostable plastics on the market, I hope they will be actually compostable, (and 1/2 of this post will be outdated), soon. When that day comes, please let me know! In the meantime, keep them out of the bin.
Aubrey Yarbrough is the Community Development Manager for Farmer Mark. Before moving to LA she ran her own organic farm and cooked on the garde manger station of the award winning Elements restaurant in Princeton, NJ. She has contributed poetry to New American Writing and prose to Edible Jersey.