S1E48 - Paige on Composting

Episode Notes

Episode summary Margaret talks with Paige, who works in composting and humanure systems, about how to set up systems for disposing of food and human waste, different kinds of systems that can be used including worm composting, and the importance of thinking about the scale and purpose of your system.

Guest Info Paige can be found on Twitter @badcompost

Host Info Margaret Killjoy can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy.

Publisher Info This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

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Transcript

Paige on Composting

Margaret 00:15 Hello, and welcome to Live Like The World Is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host, Margaret Killjoy. Well, I'm one of the hosts, but I'm your host today. But, now there's new hosts for the show, which is very exciting to me. As much as I love listening to the sound of my own voice all the time, sometimes I like listening to other people talk. And, today we are going to be talking to Paige about composting, we're going to be talking about what to do with stuff that rots and why it's so important. And I don't know, lots of stuff around shit and things like that. I'm really excited about this kind of selfishly, because I have a lot of questions that are for my own personal use as someone who composts, and you know, has lived off grid a lot and stuff like that. So I think, I hope that you will get a lot out of it, and this podcast is a proud member of the Channel Zero network of anarchists podcasts. And here's a jingle from another show on the network.

JINGLE

Margaret 01:49 Okay, if you could introduce yourself with your name, your pronouns, and then I guess kind of why people should listen to you about compost.

Paige 01:58 Thank you so much for having me. My name is Paige. I use she/her pronouns. I guess I started composting at a pretty young age. We had a pile at my parents house growing up and then more recently, actually worked for Tucson's city composting program when it was run through their university, so was on like an industrial scale operation for a couple of months. I currently work at the food bank in their farm and garden program. And I have helped them redesign their worm composting system as well as their just general composting system as well as installed composting toilets on site. I've also worked with friends of a land project and help them set up a composting system for humanure as well as just like food waste.

Margaret 02:51 Cool. For anyone who's listening, if you can hear a squeaking in the background is because I gave my dog a toy that I thought didn't have a squeaker in it. And I was proven mistaken. So, I apologize for that. But okay, so composting, what is composting, that's where things where you just like throw an apple into the woods, and hope for the best.

Paige 03:12 So composting isn't just kind of throwing stuff and hoping for the best. It's usually just taking, like organic material. And there's different types of composting, there's different systems, but it's kind of creating in a controlled environment to process what would be waste products into something that you can use more as a soil amendment, maybe for your garden, and maybe for fruit trees. But it's just yeah, processing waste into something really valuable and useful.

Margaret 03:40 I get really excited about it. I have this kind of like scavenger mindset leftover from when I was more of like a squatter and traveler. But, I feel like food waste is like the main way I can still really feel that, like scratch that itch, you know? I mean, I guess I do it sometimes with other stuff where I try and scavenge. But like, I get really excited by the idea that you can like not have food waste be waste. And so I don't know, I'm very excited about this. Okay, so what are some of the basics of you know, okay, so, I mean, I guess the 'why' someone would compost is probably sort of implied, like not letting things go to waste. And then also like, not needing to, you know, go and purchase fertilizer and things like that for your garden. But, what are some of the basic 'Hows' like, I guess starting at a smaller scale, you know, if someone wants to set up compost at their apartment or at their house or wherever they are.

Paige 04:35 Yeah, so I think it's really going to depend on like what you have available to you. So, like a backyard system. You could do an outdoor, like hot or thermophilic pile, which I've seen systems built out of pallets where you just kind of set up like a three or four sided bin, and then you just throw your food scraps in there along with some sort of cover material which will generally be like a dry carbon based thing, maybe leaves, maybe sawdust. In my house, I use manure I like go pick it up every couple of months if you're an apartment and don't....

Margaret 05:09 Manure is the cover?

Paige 05:10 Yeah, I use like, well, so the manure that I find it's like it's manure mixed with straw. So it's like pretty dry.

Margaret 05:18 Oh, okay.

Paige 05:18 And bulky. And I think the thing that I see people doing wrong is just not having enough material to do like a hot compost pile. So, they're just kind of throwing stuff in a pile, and I live in the desert, so it just kind of dries out. I think it's probably different and more humid wet places. But yeah, to get like, kind of your traditional hot compost pile, I feel like would be kind of more on the scale of like, a pallet bin at the smallest, like three feet by three feet. Ish.

Margaret 05:48 Okay.

Paige 05:49 But, there's also you know, there's other options for like apartments and indoor use, such as like a worm bin, or there's, there's also a style of composting called Bokashi. That's actually more of like a fermentation that people do in buckets that you can also use to process your waste. I'm not as familiar with that. But, you know, not everybody has outdoor space to have a big pile that might be kind of gnarly sometimes.

Margaret 06:14 Yeah. So, you keep talking about hot composting. Is that like, in contrast to cold composting. Is there cold composting that we could be doing? Or? No?

Paige 06:22 There is. Yeah, I mean, if you if you're just adding material really slowly over time, or you don't have a lot of material, you'll probably have like kind of a colder compost and stuff won't break down as quickly. Generally, like a big hot compost pile is also going to result in like an end product like your compost will be more like bacterially dominant versus like, a long to cold compost where you're like not trying to get the temperature up, is g