My compost pile was a methane bomb for 3 years before a neighbor told me

I had a compost pile in my backyard in Portland for years. I thought I was doing great by throwing all my kitchen scraps in there. Last spring my neighbor who works for the city's waste department saw me dumping stuff in and asked if I was turning it. She explained that without oxygen, all that organic material just rots and releases methane instead of breaking down clean. I was making the problem worse the whole time. Has anyone else had to rethink their whole home composting setup?

2 comments

2 Comments

nancythomas13d ago

@hannahm39 even small piles make some methane but you are right it still beats sending food to a landfill.

hannahm3913d ago

Methane is less harmful than people think for small scale piles though. A properly managed cold pile still produces some methane but it's nothing compared to what happens in a landfill where they're compacting tons of material. I leave mine alone for months at a time and the worms do all the work. Your neighbor isn't wrong about turning it helping but you weren't making the problem worse on any meaningful scale.