The importance of composting
-Marianne de Nazareth
Today I showed the Science Journalism class a DVD on composting. These are our city slicker kids who have grown up in apartments and have no idea what composting means! We who have been lucky to have grown up in gardens and composted the garden and kitchen
waste in pits in our back yard, have always known the concept. Todays kids have to be shown PR kits which have been slickly made by companies who are in the composting business. They are wonderful educational tools as only then with actual pictures shown to
them, I have great hopes that the future generation will think of the necessity of composting wet waste rather than the chucking everything into the garbage.
I asked them if they had seen the stinking garbage lorries that come around, and the poor scavengers who have to clean out unhealthily dumped waste. They all screwed up their noses and said yes. After seeing the composting DVD they realised that wet waste
is almost 90% water and that is why the garbage lorries have a constant stream of stinking liquid pouring out from them.
If the wet waste is composted instead by each of us, there would be much less of that liquid pouring off and much less for the poor scavengers to handle.And much less of that stink around our cities.
Marianne de Nazareth writes a blog at