By: Keita Kawahara
The United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) 2024 Food Waste Index Report found that 1.3 billion tons of food are wasted every year globally, equivalent to around 17% of all food produced for human consumption. This waste releases harmful greenhouse gases into the atmosphere (responsible for 8-10% of all greenhouse gas emissions), crowds landfills, destroys biodiversity, and costs the global economy an estimated trillion dollars every year.
To help alleviate some of the impacts of this problem, households can consider composting. Composting is the controlled decomposition of organic matter to create a nutritious substance for your soil. To put it in simpler terms, your food waste can be decomposed into soil instead of letting it go to a landfill.
To start your compost at home, you need to gather a mixture of “brown” and “green” materials. Brown materials are carbon-rich materials like dry leaves, shredded paper, cardboard, and twigs. Green materials are nitrogen-rich materials like your food scraps, as well as things like grass clippings, coffee grounds, and paper tea bags. Once you find your supply of materials, find a container to store the compost and start layering your greens and browns. As a general rule of thumb, you should have a 2:1 ratio for your browns and greens to ensure the proper environment needed to break down the material.
Once you have started your composting bin, you still will need to maintain it to make sure nothing goes wrong. This consists of continually adding more materials, turning your compost, and monitoring how wet it looks. Compost can take from 3 months to a year to fully form depending on how well it is maintained.
To know when compost is ready to be used, see if there are any visible food scraps left in the mixture. Once food scraps are no longer visible, you should leave the compost for an additional few weeks to let it finish. In the end, it should be dark, loose, and ready to incorporate into your soil!
Food waste is a major global issue that affects us all. However, by adopting a simple solution such as composting, everyday households can work to reduce the amount of food waste they create and fight the environmental impacts associated with it.
Works Cited
United Nations Environment Programme. "Food Waste Index Report 2024. Think Eat Save: Tracking Progress to Halve Global Food Waste". Knowledge Repository - UNEP. UNEP. 2024. Web. 12 Jun 2025 <https://wedocs.unep.org/20.500.11822/45230>
“Composting At Home.” Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 15 April 2025, https://www.epa.gov/recycle/composting-home#whatcom.
