Home compost needs a 50/50 mixture of ‘green’ (nitrogen rich) and ‘brown’ (carbon rich) materials:
Green: fruit and vegetable peelings, tea leaves and coffee grounds, old flowers and grass cuttings.
Brown: cardboard egg boxes, small amounts of scrunched up newspaper, used bedding from vegetarian pets, shredded paper and garden pruning.
Meat, fish, dairy and cooked food cannot be home composted, but they can go in your green food waste bin that the Council collects as this goes through a different process.*
The Council provides free kitchen food waste caddies to S Cambs residents to collect food waste in, before putting it in either your green bin or your own composting heap.
( *Note: Compostable or biodegradable ‘plastic’ corn starch liners, such as BioBag, cannot be accepted in green bins, even if they are EN13432 certified or display the compostable seedling logo. These do not compost quickly enough for the council’s fast composting process.)
Edited extract from the SCDC Zero Carbon Communities newsletter, issue 2.